by Shawn Roberts
There are some things you don’t realize you’ve stopped seeing until you see them again. For me, this summer, it was lightning bugs.
I hadn’t thought much about their absence. I certainly hadn’t marked the last time I’d seen one. There was no particular summer when I looked around and thought Where did all the lightning bugs go? They were simply one of those things that had quietly disappeared from my life somewhere along the way. Then, this summer, I started seeing them again.
There is a path from my house down to the beach, and on warm nights I’ve found myself walking it after dark. Somewhere along that path, little flashes of light begin appearing in the grass and brush. One here. Another farther ahead. Then another. Some nights there seem to be dozens of them, blinking silently on either side of the trail. The first time I really noticed them, I stopped walking. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen so many.
Lightning bugs belong to a different part of my memory. They belong to childhood summers, when darkness wasn’t something that signaled the end of the day, but the beginning of another adventure. They belong to running barefoot through yards, trying to catch a tiny blinking light between your hands. They belong to mason jars with holes punched in the lids and the completely unreasonable childhood belief that you might somehow keep a little piece of summer glowing beside your bed.
Back then, lightning bugs weren’t extraordinary. They were just there.
Maybe that’s one of the strange things about growing older. We don’t always lose the things that once amazed us. Sometimes we simply stop noticing when they disappear. But keep walking down that Nantucket path in August and the lightning bugs are only the beginning.
Eventually the brush opens, the path turns to sand, and the ocean appears in front of you. At night it can look almost completely black, distinguished from the horizon more by sound than sight. And on certain nights around this time of year, something remarkable happens when you step into it.
The water lights up.
Bioluminescent plankton can turn an ordinary nighttime swim into something that doesn’t seem entirely real. A foot dragged through the shallows leaves tiny sparks behind it. Sweep your hand through the water and points of blue-white light suddenly appear around your fingers. A breaking wave can flash along the shoreline and disappear almost as quickly as it arrived. You can explain what is happening scientifically. Microscopic organisms are responding to movement in the water with a chemical reaction that produces light. There are perfectly reasonable words for all of it. None of those words adequately describe what it feels like to stand in a dark ocean and watch the water sparkle around your feet.
There is something wonderfully humbling about discovering that an entire light show has been happening at a scale too small for us to see until millions of tiny organisms decide, for an instant, to announce themselves. And then you look up.
August nights on Nantucket can offer a sky that is increasingly difficult to find elsewhere. Get away from the lights of town, give your eyes a few minutes to adjust, and what initially looks like darkness slowly begins filling in. First come the brightest stars. Then the smaller ones. Then more behind those. Right now, Venus is remarkably bright in the evening sky. The Milky Way can stretch overhead like a faint brushstroke, something you might initially mistake for a thin cloud until you realize what you’re actually looking at.
It is our galaxy.
That sentence is almost absurd when you really think about it. We spend our days looking down. At phones, schedules, plans, the road in front of us, whatever problem happens to be demanding our attention next. And then, occasionally, you look up and are reminded that you’re standing on a tiny island in the Atlantic Ocean, on a planet spinning through a galaxy containing hundreds of billions of stars. Suddenly whatever email you forgot to answer feels slightly less urgent.
What has struck me most this summer is how much of this requires darkness. We spend an incredible amount of effort trying to eliminate darkness from our lives. We illuminate our houses, our driveways, our landscapes, our streets. We carry glowing screens in our pockets everywhere we go. Even when the sun disappears, we’ve become very good at making sure true darkness rarely arrives. But a lightning bug isn’t particularly impressive beneath a floodlight. Bioluminescence disappears beneath artificial light. And the Milky Way has been washed out of the sky for millions of people who live beneath the glow of cities.
Some things can only reveal themselves when it gets dark enough.
Perhaps that’s why walking to the beach at night has felt different to me this summer. During the day, Nantucket rarely asks you to search for its beauty. It practically assaults you with it: blue water, hydrangeas, boats in the harbor, weathered shingles, beach grass moving in the wind. There is a reason people travel thousands of miles to spend a few days here. At night, the island asks a little more of you. You have to slow down. You have to let your eyes adjust. You have to pay attention.
And if you do, the world begins illuminating itself.
A tiny insect flashes beside the path. Microscopic organisms sparkle in the ocean. Venus hangs brilliantly above the horizon. The Milky Way stretches across the darkness overhead. Earth, ocean, sky. Light everywhere, but almost none of it coming from us.
There is something comforting about that. We live in a time when it can feel as though everything extraordinary needs to be manufactured, purchased, photographed, posted or planned. We travel looking for experiences. We buy tickets to see spectacles. We spend money creating beautiful spaces and then spend even more money lighting them. Meanwhile, on an August night on Nantucket, one of the greatest shows imaginable is happening quietly and for free.
You just have to walk outside.
Maybe that’s what the lightning bugs reminded me of. I don’t think wonder disappears when we grow up. I don’t think the world becomes less magical simply because we learn how some of the magic works. I think we get distracted. We stop wandering around after dark. We stop looking closely at the grass beside the path. We stop dragging our hands through the water just to see what happens. We stop lying back and staring at the sky long enough for our eyes to discover everything that’s hiding there.
We stop looking.
And then every once in a while, something small brings it all back. A flash in the grass. A sparkle in the water. A bright point in the sky.
On the walk home, the path is exactly as it was when you left. The same beach grass brushes against your legs. The same darkness surrounds you. The lightning bugs are still blinking somewhere ahead. Nothing has gotten brighter.
Your eyes have simply adjusted.
And maybe that’s the lesson hidden in these August nights. Sometimes the world doesn’t need more light. Sometimes we just need enough darkness to see what was glowing all along.
