here's a column I wrote two years ago, but what I talk about is happening again right now. The first part is outdated, of course, but hang in till you get to the real topic:
also available online:
http://www.cumberlink.com/articles/2004/08/07/editorial/rich_lewis/lewis05.txtCicadas a bust, check out fireflies
By Rich Lewis, July 1, 2004
All the bug talk this summer was about the return of the cicadas, although, like the return of Halley's Comet in 1986, it turned out to be pretty much of a bust around here.
I didn't see a single one of the whirring critters in my part of Dickinson Township and I heard few reports of serious swarms elsewhere in the local area.
However, I did encounter them on a trip in early June to my in-laws' house in Maryland. Millions of the red-eyed insects were hanging from the trees in their neighborhood, while the crunchy brown shells of millions more carpeted the streets and lawns. The noise was relentless and deafening from sunup to sundown.
It was interesting, but hardly spectacular - and experiencing it once every 17 years seems like quite enough.
On the other hand, a truly spectacular bug show reliably takes place every summer, right here in our own back yards - and if the cicada was worth weeks of headlines and barrels of ink, then pyractomena borealis is worth at least one little column.
So here is my tribute to fireflies.
I stepped out on the porch Monday night at deep dusk and couldn't believe my eyes. The fireflies had been around for about a month, and I had been enjoying them immensely. But Monday was like the grand finale of a major fireworks display. In every yard, up and down the block, all the airspace between the ground and the tops of the trees was filled with twinkling green lights. Dense clouds of fireflies were winking on and off in mysterious patterns.
It reminded me of a giant Christmas display - except it went on endlessly in all directions and was far more intricate and delicate than any string of electric lights could ever be.
I don't know what brought so many of them out at once. Maybe it was the hard rain just before dark. But it was almost overwhelmingly beautiful.
If this sort of thing only happened once every 17 years, believe me, people would be writing and talking about it for months in advance. Whole neighborhoods would gather outside at sunset anxiously awaiting the arrival of the "flying lights." Parents would tell their children to pay attention because they wouldn't be seeing this amazing event again for a long, long time.
But fireflies, which are really beetles, show up every summer and so most people just take them for granted.
I actually remember the first time I ever saw a firely because I was 17 years old. I grew up in Massachusetts, and though fireflies live there, I had never seen one, probably because I lived in a city and fireflies avoid areas with lots of artificial light.
Then, in the summer of 1967, I went off to a summer program at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. One night, while walking in the fields behind the dorms, I saw a flash of green light a few feet off the ground. Then another, and another.
I was so excited you'd think I had seen little green men emerging from flying saucers.
I started to run over to some people walking nearby to report this amazing phenomenon. Then I suddenly realized: "These are fireflies," which I had read about in children's stories and science books.
I remember quickly checking my excitement, thinking that everybody in the world must have seen fireflies before, and that I would seem pretty silly acting like it was a big deal.
But it was a big deal to me - and a moment I will never forget.
Somehow, that feeling comes back every summer when I see the first firefly blink across a field. I still want to run and find somebody and say, "Look! They're here!"
This year I even spent a few hours outside trying to take pictures of fireflies flying with their lights on. Of course, it was almost completely dark - so I had to put my digital camera on the setting that keeps the shutter open long enough to gather enough light to create an image. If a firefly blinked on and then moved, I got streaks of green light across the picture.
Some of the pictures were cool - one firefly executed a little "Nike" check mark in mid-air.
But I soon realized that I was trying to capture something that can't be captured. The beauty of fireflies is in their spontaneity, their unpredictability - the flow of lights across space. Fireflies can't be trapped - in a jar, or in a photograph - without being robbed of their essence. Once you stop a firefly, it's just a bug.
That old phrase "stop and smell the flowers" is a way of saying that we should slow down sometimes and appreciate the wonders around us.
Well, in that exact same sense my advice is to stop and see the fireflies.
Rich Lewis' e-mail address is:
rlcolumn@comcast.net
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