July 17, 2008

By the shores of Gitche Gumee Angelpond

Growing up on a farm one mile east of Uniondale provided rural delights and a decade of progressive isolation. I don’t consider that a negative toward childhood growth.

The farm provided forty-two acres of play ground filled with natural education and bushels of creative opportunity. A love of growing plants and small wild animals was sparked from that time and place. Moving small plants from one place to another was a challenge enjoyed early in life.

Nature was an informal query. From bugs to bloom. Answers were few and only found through trial and error. Mostly, there were no answers. It didn’t seem to matter.

I think it was Farling’s Finer Foods grocery which eventually provided us an encyclopedia. Each weekly volume required an appropriate food dollar purchase. Not a problem with a family of seven. What makes a lightning bug light up? Where do they come from? Why do they blink? All are questions yet to be resolved.

What should one Google on the Internet? Lightning bug or firefly? Who was it that called them “glow worms?” “Lightnin’ bugs ain’t worms,” my child mind was sure.

This year’s eventual Google try taught that they are really called Lampyridae. It was considered as Indiana’s State Insect once but the legislature failed putting the measure to a vote. Was that because they couldn’t calculate a way to tax them?

Of course H. W. Longfellow had another name for a firefly. Wah-wah-taysee. Well, actually it was the name used by the Grandson of the Moon, son of Nokomis, or Hiawatha. He called its light a candle twinkle. He called it a “white-fire insect.” A “little, dancing, white-fire creature.”

On that Uniondale farm my brothers and I caught the bugs at twilight and housed them in a Mason jar. Or was it a Ball canning jar? We tried to make it a lantern.

My Google firefly knowledge of a 96% lighting efficiency for the insect was unknown in the Uniondale area. Back then! That’s much better than those “new” lamp bulbs the light bulb industry is forcing upon us. I think I’ll buy a case of Ball jars, fill them with Angelkeep fireflies, and duct tape them under the lamp shades. Will that work?

I love our Angelkeep lightning bugs. Having caught one, I almost threw it on the cement to drag my shoe sole over and watch the streak of crushed firefly glow its last. That was done on the farm fifty years ago. An old memory. But I didn’t do it now. One just can’t be that cruel as an old man.

I prefer to see them sparkle like fireworks. Watch them dance across Angelpond just like Hiawatha’s white-fire creatures. Watch them twinkle like candle flame among the candling pine trees. Pretend they’re heaven’s stars fallen and floating just above Angelkeep’s grass.

I also prefer to forget the Googled information about a chemical reaction. To forget facts like a 510 to 670 nanometer “cold light” wavelength. And they’ve no ultraviolet or infrared rays. Who really cares at Angelkeep or Uniondale?

Really I’d like to wipe from memory the female photuris fireflies. She’ll mimic male flashes, luring them to a supposed mating rendezvous and then…oh, my…eat him. She won the nickname “Femme Fatale” for that trick.

A juvenile-fantasy-like mind considers Angelkeep lightning bugs just magical. Like flickering sparks trailing off God’s creation-sparkler-wand as He waves it silently over Angelkeep dusk.

If Hoosiers can have “In God We Trust” on their license plate then isn’t it time we have that vote and make Hiawatha’s Wah-wah-taysee (white-fire) the official Indiana insect?

Mr. Daugherty is a Wells County resident who, along with his wife Gwen, enjoy their back yard and have named it “Angelkeep.”

by ALAN DAUGHERTY

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