Fireflies

The first time I saw fireflies a.k.a. lightning bugs.

No. 32: Fireflies

Tomorrow I drive from Chicago to Oakland on the roads of middle America. I’ve driven the route once before going the other way, from the west coast to the midwest. The landscapes outside the car window changed and the colors with them. Kaleidoscopic spectrums of the city turned to dark green mountain ranges turned to white salt flats turned to red canyons turned to bright green farmland turned to trees with half-dome shapes and then Grace’s parents’ house.

On that first trek, I saw fireflies for the first time. We were driving through rural Nebraska searching for our stopping point, a stuccoed cream and white two-story hotel. Hovering above the tall grass on the margins of the road, I saw flecks of light making quick, curving lines before vanishing into the black air like small shooting stars, there and gone again — thousands of them.

I drove steadily without knowing how, without paying attention to the road, looking only at the “lightning bugs” and wondering why they do that, fire fly, on and off and on and off. What was it for?

I hope I never find out, because if there is a why, some survival or mating purpose behind their light, I can’t go on believing they flicker for nothing — that they light up just because, the way pods of dolphins ride waves just because. For a wild thing to do something beautiful just because it’s beautiful complicates the meaning of wild, and I like that.

To the beetles and ants and spiders in the undergrowth, the roadside fantasia must have seemed like a nearer night sky where all the stars had gone berserk. That’s what it seemed to me when I heard a muffled thud and saw that one of the fireflies had flown into our car’s path, its tiny death marked by a glowing splatter on the front windshield that kept glowing until we reached the hotel. If its “fire” glowed so long on the windshield, couldn’t fireflies stay illuminated if they wanted to, instead of turning on and off? Did they flash by choice?

Fireflies are mysterious that way.

On tomorrow's drive, I’ll move away from the fireflies instead of closer to them, towards my crowded state, very likely engulfed in flames. The closest thing to fireflies in California are the red dots of burning cigarettes moving predictably up and down from the mouths and hips of smokers. Those, and shooting stars, still stars, and the lamps of far-off streetlights.

But in Grace, the magic of a place where tiny flying bugs light up the night finds a home in the golden state, in my apartment, in every word she says, in every thing she does, in every place she goes. 

She’s fireflies to me. ♦