The bibliography of the firefly is a tender and electric dress, a small flame sputtering in the ditches etched out along the highway. I used to see them as we drove home from family vacations, with a poverty of laughter, back to rural Western New York. Everyone ready to sleep in their own bed and be still. The elytra covering the hind wings of the firefly lift like leather, more supple than any other beetle’s. In flight, this insect is a kind of light laugh, the kid that only appears in summer with the stink of meats sizzling somewhere down the street. Or perhaps only around the time when Popsicle juice dusts and crusts the neighborhood children, and their mouths hinge open with the excitement of a ball game or tag.
On our family vacations, my father loved driving through the night to get to our destination to avoid the summer glare and heat. My sister and I, still in our pajamas, slept separated by a giant ice chest between us, each of us wrapped in blankets in the backseat. I’d fall in and out of sleep made all the more delicious by hearing the pleasant murmurings of my parents in the front. Sometimes I tried to listen, but looking out the car window, I’d always get distracted by the tiny, erratic flashes of light blurring past us as we sped by.
For a couple of weeks every June, in the Great Smoky Mountains, the only species of synchronous firefly in North America converges for a flashy display. Years ago, my family happened to stop by this area during one of our epic road trips, but my father knew to park our car away from the side of an impossibly verdant hill that plunged into a wide valley full of trillium, pin cherry, and hobblebush. He knew to cover our one flashlight with a red bag, so as not to disturb the fireflies, and only to point it at the ground as he led his wife and semi-aloof teenage daughters through the navy blue space just moments after twilight. I confess: at first I wanted to be back in the cool, air-conditioned hotel room—anywhere but on an isolated gravel path with the odd bullfrog clamor interrupting the dark.
My mother’s temper was always fraught and frazzled by vacation’s end, but I know each day off from work and spent with her family meant something sweet and rare. How I crave those slow vacation days and even slower vacation nights—her taking her time to select our frilled nightclothes, laugh about the day’s sightseeing and various cheap trinkets I bought. She’d pull a coverlet to my chin. Only on those trips would I know such tenderness, the quiet reassurances and mutterings only a mother can give a daughter, while she stroked my bangs to the side of my face. No rush in the mornings to get my sister and me shuffled onto a school bus and herself off to work. When my mother is no longer with me, I know I will cling to those summer nights we all raced—and yet didn’t race—home. I will try to throw myself back to that Oldsmobile—like the lacewings that argue nightly with my porch light bulb—to what was my small family then, not even big enough to call a swarm: one sister, two parents. That’s it.
I grew up near a college where zoology professors tried to trick Indigo Buntings into following a false star in a poorly lit classroom. Most of them didn’t fall for the ruse, and when released, found their way home by following the North Star. The buntings know it by heart, learn to look for it in their first summer of life, storing this knowledge and putting it away to use years later when they first learn to migrate. How they must have spent hours gazing at the North Star during those nestling nights, peeking out from under their mother. What holds them steady still shines so bright.
But where the buntings remain steadfast, fireflies are more easily deceived. Fireflies lose their light rhythm for a few minutes after only a single car’s headlights pass. Sometimes it takes hours for them to recalibrate their blinking patterns. What gets lost, then, in the radio silence? What connections are translated wrong or missed entirely? Porch lights, trucks, buildings, and the harsh glow of streetlamps all complicate matters and discourage fireflies from sending out their love-light signals—meaning fewer firefly larvae are born next year and even fewer the next.
Scientists can’t agree on how or why these fireflies achieve synchronicity. Perhaps it is a competition between males—all want to be the first to send their signals across the valleys and manna grass. Or maybe if they all flash at once, the females can better compare whose glow is brightest, and start the dance sooner. Whatever the reason—and in spite of, or, rather, because of, all the guided tours that now pop up in the Smokies—fireflies don’t glow in sync all night long anymore; the patterns sometimes occur in short flashes, but then abruptly end with haunting periods of darkness. Everyone knows the fireflies are still out there, but they fly or rest on grass blade in visual silence. Perhaps a visitor forgot to dim their flashlight, or left their car lights on for too long, and this is their beetle protest.
Firefly eggs and larvae are bioluminescent, and the larvae themselves hunt for prey. They can detect a slime trail from a slug or snail and follow it, glowing all the way, to the juicy, unsuspecting source. Whole groups of larvae have been known to track relatively large prey, such as an earthworm—like a macabre, candle-lit chase right out of an old B movie—at the edge of a soupy pond, all pulsing light as they devour the still-wriggling worm. Some firefly larvae live completely underwater, their tiny lights fevering just under the surface as they capture and devour aquatic snails.
For a beetle, fireflies live long and full lives—around two years—though most of it is spent underground, gloriously eating and sleeping to their heart’s content. When we see these little beacons finally flashing their lights, they usually have only one or two weeks left to live. Learning this as a child—I could often be found walking slowly around untrimmed lawns, stalling and not quite ready to go inside for dinner—made me melancholy, even in the face of their brilliance. I couldn’t believe something so full of light would be gone so soon.
I know I will search for fireflies all the rest of my days, even though they dwindle a little more each year. I can’t help it. They blink on and off, a lime glow to the summer night air, as if to say: I am still here, you are still here, I am still here, you are still here, I am, you are…over and over again—perhaps I could will it to be true. I could keep those summer nights with my family inside an empty jam jar, with holes poked in the lid so they could breathe, a twig and a few strands of grass tucked inside. I’d let the glow be a cooling nightlight for those unimaginable nights in the distance when I know I’ll miss my mother the most.
Aimee Nezhukumatahil is the author of World of Wonders (essays), Barnes and Noble’s Book of the Year, and four books of poetry, most recently, Oceanic. Awards for her writing include Guggenheim and NEA fellowships. She is the poetry editor of The Sierra Club’s SIERRA magazine and teaches in the MFA program at the University of Mississippi.
Photo by Flash Dantz from Pexels