Flight and Dark
There are some perks to being a part of the National Park System workforce. Namely, your supervisor tells you of a secret spot where you can see synchronous fireflies without the crowds of the official viewing locations. Exhausted but excited, I headed out around 8.30pm to the location she told me about. On the way there the sun was setting and the sky was smoking:
At 9.30pm on the dot I saw the first flash. Within minutes the hillside was aglow. Remember Disney’s Robin Hood where Robin takes Maid Marian to the forest and they’re surrounded by fire flies?
(Sexual awakening, anyone?) It was that magical. When I stared at them for too long I lost spacial orientation. I could have been upside down, inside out, and anywhere in the multiverse. And then the skies cleared. And suddenly I realized that it was PITCH BLACK at eye level. I couldn’t see my car, I couldn’t see the tree trunks or the path, all I could see was the twinkling of the stars through the canopy and the glow of the fireflies lighting up the hills in synchronous waves from one side of the woods to the other:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=23&v=u04ctZZAnnE
Now, being only three days off crutches this should have been terrifying but after living in cities all my life I felt instantly feral and alive. I was suddenly aware that human beings are predatory. My body was taut and the darkness was for me alone, a gift to help me slink about and hunt my prey. My animal brain had two choices: 1) Get down on all fours and stalk through the woods, or 2) Sing.
Those of you who went through grad school with me for the last two years know that using my voice, especially to sing, has been, at times, a catastophe. Choral singing, no problem. Solo voice work, 86% chance I will burst into tears. It’s as if someone shook up a soda can and stabbed it with a pair of scissors only instead of a can it’s my throat and instead of scissors I just open my mouth. One moment I am perfectly contained, the next I am a tiny, teary volcano and woe to anything within a 150 ft radius for the next two hours. All this is to say that the choice between stalking through the woods and singing was not as easy as it sounds.
In school we made our own musicals and one of the things we explored was the moment before someone busts into song. What is it that makes people sing? At what point is spoken word no longer sufficient to express a feeling? At what point do you have no choice but to sing? The answer is this. This moment. Not only did I burst into a song that I made up as I went along, I made up a dance to go with it. It just made sense. They were asking me to dance with them.
I relate to these fireflies. They, too, are silent creatures who communicate with body language, happy to be in a big group for a while but really just looking for one other creature to hang out with. I was told in my final evaluation this year that I shine incredibly bright- sometimes. Other times I disappear. So it is with the fireflies; when they’re on, they’re ON and when they’re off they blend seamlessly into the night. They are beautiful in their own right but as an ensemble they create something that draws crowds from all over the world. They are the masters of flocking, my APT friends.
No one knows why they synch up the way they do but the working hypothesis is that it is a mating ritual. So here I am, 6 hours into my stay at the park, providing the soundtrack to a firefly orgy. The females hang out on the ground and when they see a display they like they flash twice in response to the male’s 5–9 flashes. I gingerly moved through the forest, sometimes becoming startled by the sudden movements of the fireflies passing inches from my body like silent little light bombs.
After temporarily losing my social mind and putting on a show with the fireflies I headed back to my new home, where I couldn’t figure out how to work the blinds but who’s afraid of a little natural light after a night like this?
