Just Blink...

[J A Ginsburg]

(art source: Purdue University)

Standing outside in the dark, surrounded by the silent dance of fireflies, I am put in my place. More than the songs of birds, the whirr of cicadas, the buzz of bees or the castanet clicks of bats, the ballet of fireflies makes me realize how little I understand of what goes on.

Fireflies give the air a sense of dimension and make the invisible palpable. Twenty, thirty, forty feet high they dance and drift, glow and shine. I feel like a voyeur --I am a voyeur -- able only to observe but never be part of the gathering. I could be miles beneath the sea, or somewhere out in space. My daytime familiar has become a mysterious inky landscape ruled by aliens.

Or maybe faeries. Sure, by day they are beetles, smartly dressed in business suits of tan and black with a stylish dash of red. But by night, there is magic in the air. They transform into pure beguiling light. They blink and fade with a flirty urgency. And even though I am not anything near close to the intended object of desire, I swoon.

Time Travel
I am not the only one.

Nearly 50 years ago, nature writer Edwin Way Teale and his wife Nellie drove 19,000 miles across the U.S., chasing summer. His book, Journey into Summer, was part of series tracking the seasons.

It was a different era of travel. In 1960, gas ran 30 cents per gallon, so even with a car averaging 15 mpg, total fuel costs were less than $400 (let's leave calculating for inflation out of the lovely memory for now). The Interstate system was still mostly on the drawing board. The first American spy satellite was launched that August. GPS in cars wasn't even a glimmer in an engineer's eye, nevermind Google maps. Travel had more unknowns and more possibilities. It was AAA "Trip-Tiks," two-lane highways, flat tires, small towns, windows-rolled-down, bad AM radio reception, no cell phones, steaming radiators, leaking oil, friends-along-the-way, home-made diner pie, weather, at least 100 million fewer cars and trucks on the road, fewer roads and, at the end of the day, the hope for a motel with a lit neon "vacancy" sign.

In early July, Edwin and Nellie were working their way along the Kankakee river from Indiana into Illinois, cutting south of Chicago:

"...Somewhere along our way, on some nameless country road, we passed a hayfield at sunset. The windrows curved away like brown rollers in a surf of sun-dried grass, each shot through with shadings of tan and gold and yellow-green. Redwings road on the crests of these windrow-waves while grackles, hunting crickets and grasshoppers, investigated caverns in the hay. The air, resting at the end of the day, lay calm, redolant with the early-summer perfume of drying grass. About us, all across the countryside, the whistle of the meadowlark, the jingle of the bobolink, the last song of the day for robin and vesper sparrow, carried far through the quiet air.

Later we came by this field again. The cerise glow had faded from the sky and the deep purple of twilight was merging with the velvet blackness of night. Birds had fallen silent. The rolling waves of the windrows now stretched away unseen. The beauty of the day was gone. But the beauty of the night had replaced it. For, from end to end, the field was spangled with winking, dancing lights. They rose and fell. They flashed on and off. They waxed and waned in brilliance. At this same moment, over hundreds of square miles around us, this eerie beauty of the fairy-dance of the Wah-Wah-Taysee, Hiawatha's little firefly, was part of the summer night.

For a long time after we left this field behind, we followed firefly roads. We made turns, passed dark barns, went by lonely farmhouses where moths fluttered at the lighted window screens. Around us always, wherever we went, streamed the sparks of living fire. We saw them twinkling over the roadside vegetation, above the fields of grain, in the blackness of maple shade, amid the mistily white, faintly seen flower masses of elderberry bushes. They passed us in a constant meteor shower. Ahead of us the twin beams of the car revealed the swarming forms, their lights extinguished by the glare.

Time after time we stopped, switched off our headlights and sat silent, entranced by the scene around us. One whole tree was decorated from top to bottom, filled with firefly lanterns, its dark silhouette sparkling with a hundred moving lights. Beyond, across a lowland stretch, a row of long dead willows, lifted their twisted limbs against the shimmer of the fireflies. So we wandered -- half-lost and forgetful of time. For hours we followed little roads, roads without a name, roads we would never find again, but roads we would never forget...."

Later in their travels they met a truck driver who told them of driving that very night along the Indiana shore of Lake Michigan through a "blaze of fireflies." Imagine: for as far as you could see in all directions, a world pulsing with passionate purpose.

The show in my city-lit version of "dark" isn't quite so dramatic -- more "disco ball" sparkle than ethereal dazzle. But while I have never seen anything quite as Teale describes, I have seen something close. It was long ago, on visit to some friends who had left Chicago for 40 acres -- half of it forest -- in the rolling hills of Brown County, Indiana. We were sitting outside, talking into the night after an all too abundant dinner when I began to notice dozens, then hundreds of glows and twinkles. At first , they were just in distance, over by a small apple orchard. We were soon surrounded. It was if the very stars above had come down to earth that night. (My friend Sallyann's book about her family's search for a simpler life, Bean Blossom Dreams, has just come out in a new edition. I make a cameo appearance, doing a city slicker's best herding chickens.)

The Chemistry of Alchemy
So how do fireflies do it?

The textbook answer: Inside a special abdominal section with a translucent skin "window," the bugs produce a substance called luciferin (more of a nod there to hell than heaven) which, when mixed with an enzyme called luciferase, produces cold light. That last part is important. If the beetles -- they are technically not flies at all -- were to generate hot light, one bright burst and that would be the end of that. No next generation, which is actually the point of all the glitter and flash. (By contrast, between 70% and 90% of the energy that goes into lighting an incandescent bulb dissipates as heat -- which is why, as any girl of a certain age knows, compact fluorescents are useless in Easy Bake Ovens).

The light patterns -- the number, duration and tempo of the blinks and pulses -- are controlled by managing oxygen levels (at least that's one theory.) However it works, groups of male fireflies have been known to flash in sync to a female's shimmery wave. Apparently, you can get this happen by pulsing a flashlight, though that seems a bit unsporting.

Both males and females light up, but boys tend to be the real sparklers. With over 2,000 species, most in the tropics, light patterns are critical for identifying an appropriate mate. Even that's not a guarantee. Although most adult fireflies live on nectar, a few have been known to hunt other fireflies. A mated female will mimic the flash pattern of different species to attract and devour any lovesick suitors that stop by. ("S.O.S.," it turns out, is one of the light patterns...)

Not all glowing insect larvae grow up to be fireflies, but most fireflies start glowing right from the get go. At this pre-romance stage of life, it is a way to warn would-be predators about some foul-tasting chemicals.

Firefly light, technically called bioluminescence, not only is far more efficient than anything humans have come up with, but also more efficient than other creatures' bioluminescence. Many bacteria, animals and even fungi -- foxfire -- can create and control their own light.

source: TED / David Gallo lecture

But firefly light is the bioluminescent choice for markers that allow researchers to track the expression of specific genes, detect the presence of particular bacteria and even tag cancer cells.

Which is amazing and wonderful. Yet somehow not in the same league of "wonderful" as the lights of a mid-summer's night.

"...And so we came out of the wondrous night to the only lodgings we could find, a hot and almost airless room beside the north-and-south artery of truck traffic, U.S. 41. There we lay awake far into the night while the volleying cavalcade roared and thundered outside. But we were content, remembering the fireflies. As I lay there the words of the old Ojibway chant kept running through my mind: 'Fluttering white insects! Wavering small-fire beasts! Wave little stars about my bed! Weave little stars into my sleep!' And when at last we drowsed I have little doubt that memory wove through our slumber, too, images of these little stars, the multitudinous fireflies we had seen." (Edwin Way Teale)

Sunset is 8:30 sharp. I can't wait.