How to See In the Dark
A story in collaboration with Olivia Bee
In early spring of 2024, my best friend, the photographer Olivia Bee and I began to plan a trip to Southern Appalachia to witness the synchronous fireflies phenomenon: a mating ritual of a certain species of firefly which happens for about two fickle weeks in late spring, offering a chance to see millions of them light up the forest, all at once.
To justify the trip to ourselves, we decided to make a piece about the experience together and pitch it to a magazine. That, of course, required us to figure out what the story angle would be, beyond “this sounds so sick, let’s go” (though I am 100% always down to do stories with that premise; please commission me). We hemmed, we hawed, and then we suddenly got big news: Olivia was pregnant with her first child. The story instantly became obvious, that this notion of new life added layers of significance to our adventure, as this trip would be both the first, and the last, of its kind for us.
So, this collaboration of my writing and Olivia’s photographs was originally commissioned by Outside Magazine as a feature timed for Mother’s Day. Unfortunately, there were layoffs at Outside and soon after, our piece was killed (here’s some context about changes at the magazine in the New Yorker, if you’re curious about some media inside baseball). Frankly, this wasn’t the first time something like this has happened in my writing career, and it never sucks less to lose a paycheck and a chance to work on something you’re proud of with a talented editorial team. We were obviously super disappointed, and after some attempts to shop it around to other pubs, we just decided it was important to us to put it out there, so here we are.
The one year anniversary of Hurricane Helene just passed, which is also around the time I wrote this piece last year. Olivia and I were reflecting on how deeply the hurricane affected almost all of these areas that we explored. We thought this might be a thoughtful moment from which we can honor this part of the country by sending out this love letter to it. These are places, Western North Carolina included, that really impressed upon each of our creative psyches in different ways, and we’re grateful we got to enjoy some miracles there together.
Here’s hoping for more.
-DTR
Either way, thank you for reading!
How to See In the Dark:
Two best friends seek out the synchronous fireflies in Southern Appalachia.
For about two weeks in late spring, depending on weather and soil moisture conditions, across an evasive series of maybe, maybe-not breeding grounds across the Great Smoky Mountains, a yearly ritual of light takes place. Masses of fireflies flock together in thickets of creek-bound forest all across pockets of Tennessee and North Carolina, and they communicate with one another through a series of organized blinks, like a Morse code of light: short bright dots, then one long dark stretch. Again, and again, for minutes, even hours. This is how the species makes new life.
It requires luck to witness this: a little bit, at the jump, just to learn their locations, and a lot more once you get there, to even see them show up at all. They’re incredibly elusive. My best friend Olivia and I tend to chase things like this—light, luck— especially in environments of weird risk and uncertain reward. So this, to us, seemed an obvious adventure.
To help you picture this, there’s a crucial distinction, in terms of the whole phenomena aspect of this event, that these fireflies aren’t like what you’ve seen in the backyards of the Midwest of summer’s memory, lazy blinking beetles slow enough for capture from kid hands to mason jars. This particular species, Photinus carolinus, are native to Southern Appalachia, and while they are one of nineteen total firefly species in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, they are one of only a handful of firefly species on the entire planet that blink in a synchronized pattern to mate.
When we heard about this natural phenomenon, we knew we had to take a trip to see it. So we started to research where, and how, to witness the fireflies. We didn’t really know what, exactly, we were going to do about it with photos and writing. You certainly aren’t guaranteed the spectacle, and we risked not seeing anything worth writing home about.
Then, once Olivia found out she was pregnant, right around her thirtieth birthday in the middle of us planning our trip, we suddenly realized exactly what this adventure would be about. It was our last trip as just us.
So we started researching the fireflies with renewed urgency. We learned about their lifespan: that they spend nearly two years as larvae, grubbing on the forest floor. Then, in late May or early June, their two glorious weeks to shine arrive, where they dazzle and light up the forest, finding their mates through this flickering spectacle. Then, once they breed, they lay their eggs…and immediately just die.
We noticed that what produced at once a miracle of bioluminescence also produced a horrible site of metaphor for my best friend, an artist, pregnant for the first time, who is somewhat legendary for her brand of independence and, dare I say, luminosity. But we both know, from varying degrees of experience, that you can’t take nature personally, no matter how much you identify with it. Just like Olivia wanted to go see the fireflies, for the challenge of creatively tackling a contradiction—how to get a magazine-worthy film photo of something minuscule and magical in the pitch black forest—I wasn’t intimidated by some overly on-the-nose metaphor about brilliance and reproduction. If we were going to make meaning from this, it was gonna be on our terms. If it was the last thing we did. I didn’t know, maybe it would be.
We weren’t going into the forest at night to point towards the obvious. We were there to do what we always do together: to feel something wild, to chase the unexpected, to strain our eyes to witness the spectacle of the brightest flickers of something simply happening. For this one trip in the spring, the one we knew would be the last of its kind for us, the end of a certain way of living in a kind of synchronicity, we set out to find something mysterious, elusive, but real: a million tiny lights in the dark, of life begetting more life.
And then just see what happens, I guess.
Before I talk about fireflies and my best friend, I have to talk about time, weather, and the road. The way I see it, all these forces have something to do with one another. When I was a teenager, a few years before I met Olivia, I held a theory: that our generation would be the last to enjoy the great American road trip. I was struggling to reckon climate futility with my own big aspirations of adventure, and everything I was learning made it seem as if natural disasters, extreme weather, and infrastructure brittleness would soon render this part of our shared national identity, this mythological activity of self-definition, obsolete.
The undertone of my first milestones of pre-adult agency–getting a driver’s license, thinking of college, developing into a real city kid—held this underlying notion that the clock had just begun ticking. Maybe even melting.
I wasn’t exactly a pessimist; I was just extremely cheerful about the liberties of adult life, and was high-hoped and party-prone. This new set of inconceivable what-ifs had just met their match in my wild imagination—the same one that would soon lead me to a career in, well, the storytelling arts. The wise thing to do, I always felt, would be to cram it all in, as optimally as possible, before time ran out. Whatever that meant; but I knew that would know it when I saw it. That put me on a mission to look for it.
Meeting Olivia, when she was 18 and I was nearly 20, was a catalyst, and perhaps a confirmation. She, too, was a maximalist, but from a totally different orientation. I told her about this theory, before I ever owned a car, or had ever gone on a road trip by myself; she probably just nodded or shrugged. Olivia is an artist, one who was soon to be known for, well, taking many great American road trips, and no future-fretting was about to influence that.
Over the next several years of us visiting each other, me in her patchwork pink Brooklyn loft, and she sharing my bed in my cramped San Francisco apartment, I discovered that Olivia had plenty of her own existential anxieties, but somehow felt less beholden to the particular brand of what-if-ism to which I was disposed.
I was drawn to extrapolating a sense of expansiveness from the local life around me; she chased a sense of largeness through constant movement and challenge. While I partied and burrowed into all the social nooks and crannies of various West Coast cities where I lived in my youth, she traveled the world for work, starting young and always in demand, and in her downtime took unplugged, spontaneous road trips, sleeping in her two wheel-drive 1980 Mercedes station wagon, offroading through terrain I was pretty sure a two wheel-drive 1980 Mercedes station wagon really shouldn’t go (but, again, what did I know—I had yet to own a car).
So when we moved into the same house in Los Angeles, she was 23 and I was 25, I started coming with her on some of these trips to the mountains, to hot springs, to primarily unpaved destinations. By then, we’d had plenty of all-nighter city adventures together, so we knew each other could hang. I was a dayhiker, and we were the only serious hikers we knew down here at first, pushing ourselves til our legs shook. Still, I’d never camped before, until we backpacked into a hot spring through slot canyons in Arizona we decided to drive to morning-of. I’d never slept in a tent before that wasn’t at a music festival; she left our tent in the middle of the night, to sleep on the bank of the Colorado River. She often would head off on her own, to camp alone—something I didn’t know was an option—and then taught me how to by, well, writing me a how-to guide. By then, I had bought my first car (a used Prius, which took the edge off of some of that formative petroleum paranoia, but I certainly wasn’t gonna take that thing off the road). The next year I was camping in the Prius, sleeping with the back seats down parked above the Pacific, quivering with anxiety and committed to this new bravery.
Over time spent living together, our friendship advanced into a deeper pattern; that we weren’t just kindred spirits, or buddies who bonded each time we visited each other, but partners of a kind, yet to be defined by either of us. At our house, I watched her set an example of what it looked like to live as an artist, how to structure your days around intuition. This way of living together felt like a significant change to me, as I took my own risks to live that self-determined life of whim-as-sustenance, rather than escape.
I noticed over the years that Olivia always seemed to ride on good luck, and she was lucky because she is smart. And my strategy was to always be smarter than bad luck. This was a complimentary combination, for two people on a trip that I never wanted to end.
Later that year, she hopped in her station wagon, said she was going on a road trip, which wasn’t unusual; except for when she came back, she told me she had taken Highway 395 past the Eastern Sierras, and met some cowboys who were branding cows off the side of the road in the high desert of Eastern Oregon. Fascinated, she took pictures of the process, talked to the rancher and she was going to work there next winter. Oh yeah, by the way—she also bought a house, and she was leaving LA.
I was devastated, and had trouble speaking to her for several months, and she understood why. We ran out of time way before I was ready. Before I knew her, Olivia had found success early, kind of as a prodigy; in life, she was able to move fast, freely, and deliberately because of it. She also could be some ways I didn’t realize could exist at once, in one person: young and impulsive, and playing the long game. It’s like she lived by the feeling of a time limit, too, but it came from a different source of concern. In some ways, she was one of the only people I knew who could afford to live this way, but I knew she couldn’t afford not to, either.
She was already moving along, her curiosity large-scale and diffuse, where mine formed around detail, like crystal. It was the collapse of a road we were on together, and, of course, the beginning of other ones. Change was her default mode. I realized that maybe the reason our trips were so important to me, was that travel is a change that you choose together, that you actually have some control over. It’s both temporary, and transformative. To take a trip with Olivia was to be able to contain us, even as she kept changing her life, and by proxy, mine, too.
Within weeks of Olivia moving into her Oregon mountain home, she met her partner, and he moved in soon after. Four years after that, they moved to a larger farm, got serious about their agriculture business, and got engaged. I had the happy duty of planning the bachelorette trip—parties, details, my favorite—and, of course, we chose the most complex, highest-octane option on the slate of possibilities. We roadtripped across Tennessee, to Dollywood, in a clowncar of goofy, good-spirited girls spanning three generations, thrifting, soul food-searching, and puking out the window along the way (sorry, Megan).
As we drove out of the theme-parkified side of the Smokies, I told Olivia about this natural wonder that I’d heard about on the other side of the mountain, in the Great Smoky Mountain National Park. A contrast from the city-scale dollar store that is Pigeon Forge, but also apparently overwhelming and dazzling in a way that was much more up our alley. I didn’t know much about it, except that a friend had told me about a natural event in which a million fireflies all blink in unison at once, for a very short window of time.
She lit up and gasped and frantically checked the dates for that year. This is the kind of thing we would find a way, budget and logistics be damned, to extend our trip for. Olivia’s known for her love of images of post-dusk blue and women blurrily frolicking through fields. It’s kind of her thing. As it were, we were a month too early that year; so we pledged to go the following. It was urgent to Olivia to see these fireflies.
Olivia got married that fall, and she was pregnant by next spring. When I went up to the farm to celebrate her 30th birthday alongside her husband and her closest local friend, Emily, it was still a secret to most, and she kept it well. My secret, that I was hardly keeping, was that I wasn’t ready. I wanted a few more years, the very thing that it feels like I never quite get with her. Even though now there were now pigs, and chickens, and property, and a husband, and the dictation of farm seasons to contend with, nothing felt as final, as changemaking, as motherhood.
We had just begun to brainstorm our trip to see the fireflies, where she would take pictures, and I would write a story. We’d been brainstorming about how to even pitch it, what my story would even be about. I was stumped. Then, the promise of the baby, much like promises and babies tend to do, made things obvious: that this was about to be about the last road trip before things really changed forever.
So, sitting on her back porch on a sunny spring day just after her birthday, we started to plan. I began research on firefly behavior, and Olivia searched the map for wide open fields.
There is only one particular area in the Great Smoky National Park where you can witness the synchronous fireflies, officially. It’s the Elkmont Campground, close to Gatlinburg, and it’s such a popular event that there is a lottery to be able to attend for the two-plus week period that the fireflies are most likely to mate. We set alarms on our calendars, and each signed up for the lottery the second it went live on the NPS website.
We got an email a few weeks later, after our plane tickets were reserved: we did not win the Elkmont firefly viewing lottery.
We saw this as less of a setback as it was permission. Losing the lottery, were suddenly justified in our shared favorite pastime when it comes to adventuring, which is doing it the hard way. We plowed forward with our research, bypassing other perfectly hospitable private viewing grounds we found online, where vacation rental homes and entrepreneurial landowners marketed viewing BYOB (binoculars) events. We built a messy list of places off the beaten path—multi-mile night hikes, spotty rumors of other parts of the park where they’d been seen previous years, places where the synchronous species may not reach, though we might be able to see another North Carolinian cult favorite: the blue ghost firefly.
We also learned something critical, and that’s about the habitat and breeding activity of these fireflies. The females stay close to the ground, and the males hover 3-7 feet above, flying around to match with a mate in the understory. Beyond the likelihood of firefly activity, a major promise of Elkmont, a large reason behind the park-organized viewings are as such to mitigate any damage to the firefly’s mating process, to be able to safely view at a distance. I thought about the recent superblooms of orange poppies in California, people laying down on hillsides and flattening the life out of the very marvel they came to witness. We made having a small footprint a priority of our adventure, even as we were thrilled by the prospect of getting out of the car and walking towards the light.
We started out in Townsend, Tennessee on the “Peaceful Side of the Smokies.” On our first dusky evening, over soggy burgers at a creekside bar and grill, Olivia and I made a jump decision to cross the border into Western North Carolina’s wilderness. The sun was headed all the way down, so we made our decision quickly: let’s just go. We had picked up a hint about a meadow, a few miles deep into a forest we didn’t know, where, for a very small window of the night, in a very short window of the year, we could go watch the forest sparkle. Hopefully. We had a GPS pin, an elusive Reddit tipoff dated this year, and not much else to rely on but luck.
After nearly two hours of hairpin turns over fifty miles of mountain roads—not the best conditions for Olivia’s first trimester nausea, but worth it for a sudden brake-slam wild hog sighting—we arrived at the misty trailhead parking lot of a wilderness we’d never been to before, in the pitch black, with strict instructions to not use any light except red, as any other light color disrupts the fireflies’ flashing patterns and throws them off. Using a flashlight would be the visual version of trampling on their habitat.
As our eyes adjusted to the darkness, we started to realize what we lacked. One was any knowledge or vision of where the trailhead was, or where the trail, if we were lucky to find it, might lead us. We sort of understood this whole premise was ridiculous, in a way, but at the parking lot it sunk in. Olivia was trying to take pictures of pinprick-small light sources, from 30, 40, 50 feet away, in the dead of night, on expensive film, and then I, at some point in the near future, was supposed to describe what that looked like in aggregate, with words. We each gave ourselves what now seemed like very stupid jobs with a very low possibility of success. Which is what some people tend to think, in general, as they watch other fools choose to do something the hard way. But I will say, those aren’t the kind of people who set out to see a miracle of nature in the middle of the night, or see the adventure in the failing so long as you are with your match. So we decided to give it a go, and just wander around in the dark until something, anything, started to make sense.
As finally found some semblance of a trail, we began our focused walk, with stretches of our blind silence were punctuated by our occasional refrain, our mumbled call and response: “goooooood luck, bitch.” We came across a footbridge, where a few others were gathered in the night, gazing down at the creek below and waiting for something to happen along the banks. We had noticed some twinkles around us, but none suggesting the pattern we were seeking; but at least some generic firefly activity was promising. Another photographer noticed Olivia’s tripod, and told us to hike “up to the meadow,” as if we knew where that was, but he offered this tip with a heavy air of caveat. He was friendly, but cognizant of his photographic competition and of making promises the fireflies might not be able to keep. We didn’t know whether the meadow was half a mile or ten miles up, and went for it anyway.
Olivia was powering ahead, but I wanted to walk more slowly in the dark. This was no place for sprained ankles, especially with a pregnant lady. Goooooood luck, bitch. This was also a place of strange bugs, new flora, things I hadn’t seen before but looked so alien under the soft weak throw of red light from our headlamps wavering in front of us. There were little white bell-shaped flowers like dangling thimbles on bushes, and bugs the size of big toes with more legs than I’m accustomed to seeing on bugs. I noticed the ground in the Southern Appalachian mountains squished differently underfoot than the solid damp tramp of the Pacific Northwest trails we’d spent so much time on together, and almost begged us to move more slowly. It pulled us into its own gravity.
It was a couple of quaggy mystery miles until we came to what was, we thought, the meadow, to hope for the best. We put our bags down, set up Olivia’s tripod, loaded the film, turned off our red headlamps, ate a few peanut butter cups, and waited. We stood still on the path, not entering off-trail to go into the meadow where we’d risk trampling on the habitat.
There’s something about just waiting around to be awed in dark silence. Like being in a theater, before the show starts – it’s not anonymous, or alone. It’s intimate and sensory. It’s just like doing psychedelics with somebody; you’re just sittin’ around, staring into nothing, waiting for something to transform you. Or at least, entertain. I instantly mourned the loss of spontaneously doing mushrooms or getting a little drunk with Olivia. Just another one of my little self-centered, juvenile losses her pregnancy was forcing upon me! Like, wow, she should really start to have better boundaries around the codependent relationship she has with her fetus…it’s affecting her social life, and that’s not okay.
All of a sudden, in our quiet, we saw some little blinks, like the first puffs of a new falling snow. It felt as if an event was beginning to occur. It was like the forest was holding up an index finger, petitioning us to wait and see. In the night, we strained to look, but soon it was moot—the visual effort wasn’t about scanning for what was within the darkness; it was about waiting to witness flickers of its disruption. The blinking picked up in pace and magnitude, revealing in bleats and strobes the edges of the meadow we were in, like a bright dotted outline of what was previously just a black suggestion of space. Big blotches of twinkles emerged over several minutes, like rainclouds of light moving in. At first the glinting looked so random, but soon, a visible pattern began to emerge. Blink blink blink, in one frantic, moving-around upper layer, and one steady, linear lower one in the underbrush. Followed, always, by six seconds of darkness. Then, again, the twinkling flurried up just a few feet away, and again, six seconds of visual silence. Then the loudness again, and the silence. They made no noise, but it felt like the bombast of an orchestra. Olivia frantically, blindly, snapped twenty second exposures, even as the blobs of light shifted all around us like waves crashing at slightly different points each time on the shore. By the time she set up her camera to capture one flurry of light, it had already moved feet away.
I held my phone, brightness down, to my chest, as to not leak any screen light out, trying to capture something I knew I would struggle to describe later, at home, by myself, at my computer, in this document. I was so hopeful to record this, to go home and send it to friends about this miraculous visual flooding our eyes in six second chapters.
Late that night, when we got back into cell service, Olivia breathlessly described the sight to her husband over speakerphone, and she sent him the video before we watched it back ourselves, just excited for him to see.
He responded, “It’s literally just a video of black. You guys sound like you are so high.”
I thought he was messing with us. But when we got back to our cabin, she played the video back for us; it was, indeed, 4 minutes of a black screen, with nothing visible happening, punctuated by our voices going, “dude, DUDE, DUDE. This is CRAZY. Do you SEE that. BROOOOOOOO. This is so SIIIICK. AHHHHHHH! Oh my god DUUUUUUDE.”
Haha, I thought. Sober pregnant lady still got it.
Night two was for Tennessee. We spent the late afternoon driving around the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, towards an area called Cade’s Cove. It’s a pastoral, softly rolling valley of tall grasses and wildflowers, laced with brooks that attracted early homesteaders, as we learned from the plaques on an interpretative trail that seemed maintained specifically for field trips.
Driving through the park, Olivia was comically frustrated that there was traffic. This was a single lane, one-way road inside of the country’s most popular national park during spring break week. If there was a special factory where I could build something just to piss Olivia off, it would be a scene not unlike this. She tried to reach over to honk the car horn, and I was the one driving. I suggested the possibility that maybe everyone was looking at something amazing up there, and we’d just have to wait to see what they all were seeing, even if it slowed down our journey. And then, right on time, when we turned the bend we saw a black bear, eating flora, nonplussed, in the middle of a sun-dappled field not twenty feet away. She leapt out of the car, leaving me in the idling driver’s seat as she grabbed her camera and crouched yards away from the bear, a meek wire fence separating the pregnant lady from the omnivore. A man in top to bottom Mossy Oak whizzing past traffic on an E-bike hollered out in a side-eyed Southern drawl, “sheee’s braaaave.” She was that, and also now the one holding up traffic. She took pictures until there were several car lengths ahead of me to catch up to, and she hopped back in. It was remarkable, exhilarating, even, to see a bear up-close, but an even more awe-inspiring spectacle was waiting for us just up around the next bend. As we turned past a scenic pullover, a preteen boy stood in the turnout, wearing an oversize black t-shirt that read “I <3 HOT MOMS,” and when he looked at Olivia, he waved.
We had high hopes for this area. I’d read Cade’s Cove was a fortuitous spot for fireflies, based on these conditions: there was a river surrounded by meadows, making for a healthy swath of wide clearings bordered by tall trees. We’d read such a layout was ideal for these fireflies, who like tall grasses adjacent to water. It also tracked with the fact that we saw fireflies gathering in a meadow the night before, rather than the dense forest we hiked through. We were starting to understand their ritual a bit, each time we set out to witness it; where it would happen, when they would emerge, when it would fade out. The show didn’t go past 10pm the night before, and we reckoned that if we didn’t see a good dose by late dusk, that zone was probably a dud for the day.
We brought dinner with us, and tailgated to-go salads in the parking lot. As dusk settled in, Olivia’s director mode rose to the surface. She got fidgety, and her voice pitched up with anticipation. We changed into dresses we bought at a vintage store in Knoxville in the backseat of our rental SUV. As we prepared, some cars did slow drivebys, scanning from their windshield for fireflies about forty minutes to sundown, but no one else parked and joined us in waiting for the dark. By primetime, we had the cove to ourselves.
As the horizon went dim, little glimmers started to emerge, at a wild range of distances from us, dotting the big sweep of tall grass. All of the blinks looked to be the same size, no matter if they were coming from up the hill over there, or right in front of our hands. As if the scale of the light was disproportionate to the body from which it was coming from; near or far, each bug’s glow looked equal across distance. Olivia was running around with wild excitement, trying to capture it on film, unsettled about where best to park her camera. The blinks were so dynamic, they were too fast to track. Every six seconds, they were somewhere else.
Since we noticed a higher concentration towards the top of a hill, sloping above the meadow, we started to chase the twinkling patches up the gravel road—but this part is hard to explain. It all soon became an optical illusion, a full body one, where you couldn’t tell if the blink was high up because it was far away up on that slope, or if it was just above you. As the dark fully sunk in, the fireflies came out in a sudden force, just as they were cast into brighter contrast. How many could we say emerged; what even does a million look like? If I had to guess, this. It challenged your depth perception, or perhaps it just rendered it useless. They swept through like a wave, until the entire valley, the size of several ballfields, was full of sparkling pins of light, pulsing together. It happened first in irregular patches, then in coordinated rolls across the hills. It looked like when the sun hits the sea, skimming flat, flittering glimmers across the top of the choppy surface. But all around you, from the soil to the sky, in three-dimensional darkness.
With this mass display, we noticed something fundamental about the fireflies patterns, what makes them synchronous, so to speak. The synchronicity itself does not come from the pattern of their light; it comes from the darkness between the blinking sequences. The sea of blinks are random and glittering all around you, and then suddenly, it goes black for six seconds in breathtaking, mindboggling unison. It looks like the night took an exhale. It’s the darkness that is synchronized, not the light patterns.
It was beyond the visual; it was a physical sensation. It quieted down slowly, after an hour and some change, and we left the park, having a hard time imagining witnessing anything else that would top this.
It was only fair that after that, the next couple of nights were a bust. One afternoon we spent exhausted from our night drives, napping the day away by the bank of a river, to be woken up by the chaos of young boys running in mindless, shrieking circles around us, as if we were boulders on the bank. We stayed til dusk, waiting for fireflies, since it was the closest public area to Elkmont that didn’t require a hike in. It seemed like a shoo-in sighting spot. While saw a few, but I pointed out to Olivia they were just the regular kind, not synchronous. I didn’t realize, until that moment, that she may have never seen any kind of firefly before. I was born in the Midwest, and took the childhood summer staple of backyard Mason jar bug-catching missions for granted. So instead of jetting off for an alternate spot, we stayed there, appreciating the scant, default variety. I caught them in my hand, like a childhood reflex awakening, as we played a game of trying to time their blink to when I would release them, so Olivia could get the shot of the light hovering above my grip.
With a few nights of firefly spotting under our belt, my forming observation was that if the fireflies were going to come out, they would come out by dusk. If it was almost fully night, and we hadn’t seen any synchronicity, it was time to call it. Olivia agreed; it was harder to take pictures in the full black, anyway. We’d already had such an incredible sighting at Cade’s Cove, it was hard for me to imagine it getting any better than that.
She, who prioritizes getting the shot at almost any cost, seemed a bit resigned. Me, on the other hand, who prioritizes a social moment above many other things, felt a little giddy. Maybe we could take a night off, and hang out. We were both excited to go to Asheville, North Carolina, where we’d rented a place for a few days; we had some friends from there, and some others in town that week, by kismet, recording their album at a local studio. We were excited to spend our day doing our other favorite shared activity, futzing around, which is neck-in-neck with doing it the hard way in our favorite hobbies bracket.
We had a string of perfect daytime adventures in Asheville: ranking our favorite $7 coffees around town, thrifting in a region without West Coast inflation, composing picnics from various co-ops that we’d bring into the forest that night for another firefly seeking expedition. Everything we stumbled upon felt meaningful and exciting and suspiciously sweet there. We started to suspect a city-wide seduction conspiracy meant to derail our lives. The density of delight was becoming a liability to our commitments back at home.
Once we stopped joking about our feelings and actually faced them, Olivia sighed, “if I didn’t have a farm and a baby on the way…” in that tone that suggested a compulsory, just curious! Zillow search was just a breath away. But the more I got to know of the place, and the more people I met from it, what Olivia told me next started to feel true, that “this is a place of possibility for you.” This came from the mouth of the person who is the embodiment of possibility in my life, as this was becoming a place I was feeling resistant to leaving, or at least, saw myself returning to. For what reason, I couldn’t imagine, but I just sort of felt like if I looked hard enough, I could find one.
We had one night left. I’d been invited by some friends out to a show that seemed like the place to be, and I had a long list of restaurants I wanted to try, wanting to toast us to a fun project, pulled off. I craved a grand finale to our trip. I felt our spectacle boxes had been sufficiently checked.
I said to Olivia over coffee that based on our observations, the fireflies likely weren’t coming this far east at this time of year, that we’d already hit the most likely spots in Tennessee. But we did find one more recent tip online timestamped to that very morning, and Olivia insisted it was worth following. I agreed to go along with Olivia’s hunch that we should try to find fireflies just one more night, on the condition that if it didn’t look promising by dusk, we could come back to town and make a night of it. Compromise.
So we set off in the late afternoon, off the interstate and onto an hour of slow, climbing miles on a single-lane backroad. The further in we went, the less probable a quick way back into town for a night out looked. I tried to subdue my own disappointment, but as we picnicked co-op hummus and crackers yet another night by a river over my wish to try this restaurant I’ve read about in magazines for years, I was bummed and cranky, as Olivia bounded up a hill to take pictures by herself. Once it started to get dark, it was showtime, and we had a decision to make about where to decamp for the best sighting possibility. There was an upper meadow, more wide open and similar in topography to Cade’s Cove, where we’d had so much success; and the lower one, bordered by a creek and dense with trees with an old white traveling preacher’s chapel in the middle of it. After some debate over which one might be most likely for a firefly show, and decided on the upper meadow.
We waited for last light, and then the next twenty minutes—an eternity in firefly time—and we only spotted a dozen, at best. The chance of seeing a light show tonight was fading before our eyes along with the last dregs of sunset. With this, my hope swelled again; this was our sign that we were meant to hang out back in town. We put on a good show of effort to the universe, but no need; tonight was already fated for my preference. I started to text some friends to ask what’s the move, but saw I had no service.
Then, just moments after my whole inner monologue about destiny being on my side, Olivia suddenly declared that we should quickly go check out the other meadow with the chapel. It was on our way out of the park, so it wasn’t a detour to give firefly sightings one last chance, but I imagined this would be a quick errand to humor Olivia and her stubborn ways before we went back into town and fulfilled our destiny of having fun with our new friends. As we drove past, I felt relief to see nothing but darkness out in that meadow. It felt even more pointless to get out of the car, because all we saw from the window was a whole lot of black. But Olivia insisted we park and walk in further to the lower meadow, closer to the creek. I obliged, though it was way past dusk and I didn’t see anything. Our chances were growing slim; I said as much, and we were now just wasting time.
Until, embedded within the tree grove—the opposite of what we’d expected to see from our amateur research—there was a flurry of energetic blinks. And some more blinks, more and more, until it wasn’t just an event; within minutes, it was Christmas, and New Years, and the Fourth of July. It was a whole calendar year of fireworks in one night’s eyeful. A full light show, not in a wide open meadow, or over the water, but along the edge, in the thicket of trees, where we least suspected to look for it. Or at least, where I least suspected.
Earlier in the week, at Cades Cove, it was all happening in an expanse, in front of you. It was like being in IMAX. This, by comparison, was 360, like VR, with a little white chapel in the middle of it all. We weren’t watching a wave in this field in front of us; we were inside the wave, fully enmeshed. It wasn’t breathtaking; it was being a part of the breath. How quickly it subsumed us, too: from where we were already standing, we realized that we were inside of what was happening; to move forward, or to back out, would be disruptive to what was happening all around. So we just sat down and stayed still as the fireflies pulsed around us, like were stuck inside another living body.
After a while, Olivia did what she always does when surrounded by nature that captivates her: she took all her clothes off. Her pregnancy newly visible, she posed amongst the fireflies, trying to capture the phenomenon around her and the metaphors that her presence encoded. We each picked our spots in the meadow, stayed there a while, and let the light happen to us. Then something happened on its own, due to an internal clock or an insect-world scoreboard or a simple secret of the natural night which we will never know, and the light, and our time spent watching it, was suddenly done. The blinking bleated softly away into dark silence. We packed up our storytelling tools and left the meadow. The spectacle was over, as new life began in the understory, with or without us.
On our last morning, we woke up crusty, ragged, and crushed about going home. There was a moment of…should we change our flight? One more day? This would be a no brainer for a classic Olivia and Dylan trip. We were always pulling the one more day card; never a tough sell for two maximalists. We spent the morning thinking about it, and she said she’d see how she felt after lunch. Then she remembered she had an upcoming ultrasound appointment she couldn’t reschedule, and we would have to keep our original plans. This new sense of limit landed quietly in the room.
After we went home, in the months since, we kept talking, admiring, thinking about Western North Carolina. How different the mountains were than where we grew up, but how water manifested in such a different way there than in the Pacific Northwest, how the safeties and risks felt different in those forests, how the topography rolled rather than spiked.
It became this shorthand of ease for us, during the next few challenging months of our peculiar personal years. A bright spot in our timeline we wanted to turn back towards, as difficulties in our lives piled on since the time we were last together on an adventure. Crises kept arriving in our lives, and the pattern that emerged between us was defined by a dim contraction of possibility. This new sense of limitation was no longer landing so quietly.
Olivia kept joking that she wished she was back in Asheville, as if this side of life couldn’t find her there; but then she really started encouraging me to go back, just to see what we might have left behind. I was already considering it. Our dynamic flipped, and she was the one rooted, as I became the one considering a radical whim, in pursuit of a hunch.
In late fall, I got an invite to go and housesit for a friend back there. I was wrapping up my big work project for the year; we joked about how it was my babymoon before my project launched. So I flew into North Carolina and I got to do all the things I didn’t get to do with Olivia and her persistence on going to the forest every night: I got to spend some quality time with the friends who were recording that week in the spring that we barely got to see. I got to go to those restaurants on my list, and see some shows, and hang out at bars, and meet new friends. I rented a car, and road tripped past other parts of the mountains we didn’t get to: Boone, Hot Springs, Marshall.
On the last night of my ten day trip, I decided to try to write a bit about the fireflies again. I almost never write at night, but I had canceled my dinner plans because a big rainstorm was coming in. I felt like playing it safe by staying home. I texted Olivia how it felt method, being back in North Carolina, writing at night about what we had seen in the dark out here, four months earlier in a different season of life. I felt something in my psyche reconnect, writing through this memory in the region of its origin; and then separate again, cruelly, as I went upstairs to go to bed around midnight, hearing the floorboards creak beneath my two feet. I went to sleep crying with this feeling of change float into my consciousness, not knowing what it was about, reckoning I would consider it more deeply in the morning, and what it might have to do with my life.
Around 7am Eastern, I heard the whistle of 90MPH winds crack a sixty foot tree in the backyard, falling on the garage, missing my bedroom by about twenty feet. As I ran down to the basement, I saw out of the staircase window a car-sized branch crack off a tree and crush the Subaru in driveway next door. On its way down, it clipped a corner of this house’s roof and took the powerlines down with it, laying their frayed ends to rest a foot or two from the antique metal front door knob I would have to touch to leave the house.
Around around 8am, I texted Olivia that this storm was pretty serious, and to my surprise, she was awake at 5am Pacific; she was sleeping poorly in her third trimester. She was the only one in my text roster up so early, so in those last few hours of cell service that I didn’t know would be my last for days, I asked her for all the critical information that I no longer internet data to search for: safety rules about downed powerlines, updates on road closures, and the storm forecast, to let me know when it was safe to come out of the basement.
When the storm was through a couple of hours later, I was safe, but cut off from cell service, water, power, and was trapped on all sides by downed trees. I soon got the bigger picture: the city’s water infrastructure imploded, roads were destroyed, interstates were closed, and for two days the entire messaging was that there were no safe paths out of town. I had been anticipating a day like this in my mind for a long time. I thought about my theory of last road trips, until I had to stop thinking about it. Instead, I focused on evacuating, which I did safely, three days later.
The whole second half of that year, the months after fireflies trip—basically, Olivia’s whole pregnancy—tough stuff kept rolling in for each of us, and none of it was stuff we could luck our way out of. Our shared shorthand mantra of relief shifted from “I wish we were back in Asheville” to “I wish we could catch a break,” as even our metaphor for safety and ease got obliterated. It was just that kind of year.
Much of what was happening to us was just life, but some of it was life-or-death. Her healthy husband woke up in the middle of the night in her second trimester thinking he was dying of a heart attack, and was hospitalized for four days with an infection, and gratefully he was okay. I evacuated from the second deadliest hurricane in the country, and gratefully, I was okay, too, though I came home haunted in my sleep for months, reading reports of people stuck in those mountains that we were just learning to love, turned to deathtraps as helicopters tried to save them. Not everyone was okay. A month later, just days before Olivia’s due date in early December, her friend Emily, with whom we celebrated Olivia’s 30th birthday, died in a hiking accident, the tragic details traumatizing to hear secondhand; they tried to save her in a helicopter, too. It was on that same afternoon, in the very same forest where a river took Emily’s life, where Olivia and her husband had been cutting down their Christmas tree, to put it up ahead of their December baby’s birthday. About tragedy, people say life goes on. It also doesn’t, and that might turn a person’s imagination towards looking for a pattern. When we went out to see the fireflies earlier that year, the whole premise was about witnessing a natural phenomenon in which life created itself through a distinct pattern of darkness and light. The fireflies mated and died in a spectacle that was defined by a measurable pattern of dark moments. I felt, by this point in the year, that we were hurting ourselves with the effort of trying to find that kind of pattern anywhere else.
Olivia and I had left Eastern Tennessee and Western North Carolina together that spring with a wish to return next year, to share with her daughter the synchronous fireflies. Not that she would be old enough to fully perceive it, but more about what it would mean for us to bring her along. The closer we got to her due date, the more I started to think about making traditions together like that; more novel additions, new little trips to take. A change that would finally signal more life, not less. But by the end of that year, several roads Olivia and I took that spring, in the South, were obliterated by a hurricane the following fall. We all know that hurricane was a new kind of storm; those things never hit the mountains. There are areas of parks and wilderness that I wrote about in this piece that are, at the time of writing, destroyed in the form that we met them. Returning is possible, and we will sometime; but it means something else that we have yet to know.
It’s easy to think about the overwhelming fragility of the fireflies, their slow fly speed and ground-level rituals: even the impact of our feet was invasive to spectacle, no matter how careful we were. They’re threatened, too, from the changing climate, just like the rest of us. Warming winters inhibit their larval stages, and inconsistent rain in the spring can disrupt their mating process. Habitat loss, insecticides, and other compounding probabilities could spell species collapse eventually. These are just the times we share with the fireflies.
Yet our trip to witness them required us to zoom in to time, to be there for a brief and critical moment of this delicate species’s lifecycle. In that looking, it surprised to notice that the darkness made the synchronous firefly’s pattern; not their light. It was the void between the blinks that created the cadence of the phenomenon, that paced it out into something legible to our eyes as an event. To our eyes, the flurry of their lights were random, diffuse, and hard to chase, but the darkness was defined and reliable. You could count on its emergence every six seconds, as darkness drew the shape of the moment. Nothing we read ahead of time about the phenomenon prepared us for that reality; nothing described how important the breaks of darkness were to this entire ritual of life-making. What made the entire thing a spectacle was that we, the humans watching it, noticed the pattern of the darkness between, and what a miracle it makes out of this chaos of light and life straining to happen.
That’s a certain type of looking; perhaps even decision making. Its that instinct as artists, or maybe just as best friends, that Olivia and I decided is worth orienting our entire lives around. I worried a lot about our patterns, of our lives and new ones, of the fragility of our habitats and threats of collapsing change. To counter worry, which is usually to face reality, I supposed that so long as there is me, and there is my best friend, our partnership isn’t so much based on road trips, or even going places, but more based on something like this: looking for patterns of darkness and light, and choosing to see them with awe. Which, so I hear, is what a baby does best, especially in high contrast. In fact, I don’t think she can even really help it. To her, that just comes naturally, as if she was born for this.
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Olivia Bee is a photographer and director. When she is not traveling the globe for her work, she stewards sixty acres of farmland with her husband and their ten month old daughter in the Umpqua Valley of Western Oregon. Her work was shown at Aperture Foundation as well as a solo show at Agnes b in New York City and at group shows and art fairs with Danziger Gallery, at the D Museum in Seoul, and at Van Cleef & Arpels in Kyoto and Paris. She was highlighted in the directories of PDN 30 Under 30, and Forbes 30 Under 30.
Dylan Tupper Rupert is a writer, producer, and podcaster based in Los Angeles. She is the host of Music Person, a music interview podcast on the Talkhouse Network. Dylan previously co-created and hosted KCRW’s critically acclaimed season of Lost Notes, called “Groupies: Women of the Sunset Strip from the Pill to Punk,” and used to produce Bandsplain. Her writing has appeared in Rolling Stone, NPR, Wildsam, MTV News, and more. For fun, she produces mini-music festivals in beautiful places such as Orcas Island, WA and Ojai, CA, called Dylanfest.
This is such an exquisite piece of writing. The way you explore the tangle of love and admiration and pain in your friendship is very special. Thank you for sharing this experience with the world
we all need a resolute friend to push us to try one more field 🎇
ps i <3 hot moms