Unless you have the good fortune to be directly on the water, there is very little to be said for an East Coast summer. Heat steams up from the pavement and presses down from the air on all sides. Sweat pools in the creases of your eyelids and trickles down the side of your nose — not the clean sweat produced by the sun and as quickly dried by it, but an ambient condensation whose provenance is never clear and which never goes away. The thick, verdant undergrowth, so beautiful in the breezes of spring and so different from the open Western forests, reveals itself as a dripping welter of breeding mosquitoes, invisible gnats, and lurking ticks. Its quiet profusion of life becomes ominous. We have travelled back to the primaeval swamps, the crawling greenhouse of ferns from back when the Appalachians were tall.
“It’s not the heat, it’s the humidity” is like “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness”: a now-cliche whose universal acceptance somehow undersells its profound truth.
And yet, despite conditions that drive people to either burrow into an artificial indoor cocoon for three months or accept a damp, torpid half-life for the same, I have nothing but good memories of childhood summers. It is a puzzle.
You might think the solution to this puzzle is “not having to work,” or “having few concrete conditions of happiness more complex than an ice cream sandwich” or “spending all day underneath the nozzle of a hose.” But I think it was the fireflies.
The fireflies! The lightning bugs! Even the names are magical, suggestive of a world where even the humblest living organisms possess mysterious affinities with and powers over the elements. The fireflies come out as the sun goes in and the heat softens by a barely perceptible but blessed margin. The shadows lengthen, and the air is filled with points of moving green-gold light. In the early twilight they glow and fade slowly, almost lazily. As true night falls, they twinkle and shine, still moving in dreamy, trailing arcs and spirals. They appear, disappear, reappear in the darkness, like a porpoise in the surf, never where your eye tracked them a moment ago.
The fireflies, who love wet meadows and humid marshes, crown and transform the horrible, glistening, East Coast summer. When they appear, with thunder rolling and heat lightening streaking the sky, something falls into place. The hostile and alien primaeval swamp becomes an otherworld, rich and subaqueous green, dim in shadow and unearthly dancing lights. In 1918, George W. Cronyn translated an Objiwe firefly fly song:
Flitting white-fire insects!
Wandering small-fire beasts!
Wave little stars about my bed!
Weave little stars into my sleep!
Come, little dancing white-fire bug!
Come, little dancing white-fire beast!
Light me with your white-flame magic,
Your little star-torch.
The bioluminescent glow we see from June through July is a mating signal. Males flash out their lights in a distinct pattern, looking for females of their own species (usually lying low in the grass) to give the 10-4. This all seems superior to our own culture. Surely the world would be a better place if instead of scrolling on Hinge we betook ourselves to abandoned lighthouses, flashing out our readiness to give and receive love to ships and passersby in Morse or the IALA Maritime Buoyage System. One if by land, two if by sea, three if my own heart’s darling you’ll be.
Courting male fireflies give nuptial gifts to females, as is right and proper. According to the Schlitz Audubon Nature Center: “Studies at Tufts University have found that there are more than 200 proteins within this gift, including enzymes to help females lay eggs, proteins to enhance male sperm, and the substance lucibufagin, which is a bitter tasting toxin that helps protect eggs and adults from predation, along with other proteins. Overall, the gift strengthens reproductive success and helps produce the healthiest eggs”
To be a giver of valuable and valued gifts seems as important to these lucibufagous insects as it is to human males. “We found that firefly nuptial gifts are complex, elegant structures manufactured by a bevy of male glands,” reports Nooria Al-Wathiqui, one of the Tufts study’s authors. “In fact, if you look inside a male firefly, you’ll find them jam-packed with gift-making machinery.” Many such cases, and many the troubles ensuing from jams in the gears.
The poisonous lucibufigans, the toxic masculinities, conveyed in the nuptial gift are so useful a defense mechanism against predators that they have given rise to a genus of femme fatales, the Photurinae. Photuris females will mimic the counter-signals of Photinus females in order to lure Photinus males, devour them alive, and absorb their protective toxins. Like Samson, like many a gangster facing down Barabara Stanwyck, Photinus learns the limits of his strength too late.
Photuris Pennsylvanicus is the state insect of Pennsylvania, which, along with the existence of Taylor Swift, is yet more evidence that Pennsylvania dames will do what it takes to win. It is not, however, the firefly that I remember catching in my childhood, preferring as it does to dwell in tidal marshes rather than the suburban lawns of the Lehigh Valley. The firefly we chased was Photinus Pylaris, a friendly-looking beetle with red markings and whirring wings that create a pleasant, dry, ticklish sensation when enclosed in the hollow of your hand. During the first half of every summer, for what felt like the entire night but was probably a tolerant sixty-five minutes after dinner, we chased Pylaris through the darkness on winged feet. The dark was beautiful and held no terrors. The air smelled like the wet grass underfoot. The fireflies we put into jars or held in our hands, as keen as any hunter but less moderate, and more greedy; we were driven not by hunger but lured by beauty, and the mere thrill of possession was our object.
This is all part and parcel of what an Instacart ad and online influencers have taken to calling a 90s summer, although as I recall these summers lasted well into the 2000s. As with all nostalgia, a 90s summer is most graspable by its physical paraphernalia: ice pops and ring pops, water guns, Sunny D, the ridiculous toys of Chinese manufacture and irradiated breakfast cereals advertised between Saturday morning cartoons. Nineties nostalgia, like 50s nostalgia, may reflect a lost ability, mourned without being regretted, to confide ourselves uncritically to a mainstream consumer culture. Back when microplastics were barely a glimmer in God’s eye, junk was allowed to be junk; no one was sweating about whether boxed mac and cheese was Annie’s Organic.
Dig a little deeper into the mood represented by all the neon plastic, and you’ll find freedom and aimlessness: summer boredom that engendered a mandate to get out of the house and stop bugging me or I’ll set you scrubbing toilets so help me God; summer sociality that bloomed in the separate and unsupervised world of children, the cousins running in packs. Most of all, it stands for an exquisite languorous intensity of physical experience created by the inescapable oppressiveness of physical conditions. The world contracted to a rough patch of shaded maple bark or a cool square of garage concrete against your cheek, a blessed arc of rainbow droplets spraying from the hose, a yard full of fireflies.
What killed the 90s summer? Possibly nothing. Possibly nostalgia just needs an oppositional stance towards an objective external threat in order to keep the bittersweet pang at manageable levels. But there certainly have been changes in the intervening years. Youth sports have become more organized, more intense, and more specialized and elite at earlier and earlier levels; consequently, they have also ratched up their time demands. Time not filled by organized activities can be whiled away on phones. And the adoption of home air conditioning, which in 1989 stood at 68%, hit almost 90% by 2005. It would not surprise me if the fewer children I see roaming were a representative sample; if the 90s summer really were dead after all.
What strikes me about laments for the ’90s summer is that no one really chose this. No one wanted a summer spent indoors in separate rooms – they just wanted the ability to escape the heat once in a while, a way to check their email away from the computer, a little less friction in the grind of working and minding and cleaning and schooling. Certainly no one chose a world in which unaccompanied children are vulnerable to the twitching CPS speed dial fingers of the most neurotic neighbor you haven’t yet met. And yet here we are.
It makes me paranoid, this feeling that all the small good things in life may fall victim, not to malice or gross negligence or proscription or any kind of deliberate campaign, but an imperceptible slippage: minor indulgences, reasonable efficiencies, modest ambitions, understandable avoidance. Every summer I become paranoid that the fireflies themselves will slip away from us in the same way, and we will lose the impossible beauty haunting undistinguished suburbs because we could not be bothered to turn off our front door lights or adapt our ideals of optimal lawn care.
But as it turns out, not everything is bad all of the time, everywhere. The fireflies, I read, are doing well. Summer is still summer: miserable, thank God. They’ll never completely take summer’s misery away from us. It is miserable until it isn’t, until the humidity breaks into thunder and finds you just as you were, after all those years: sitting on a porch swing, cousins all around, dripping with life’s sweetness, watching the fireflies come out.
Clare Coffey is a writer from Pennsylvania. Her work appears in The New Atlantis, The Bulwark, Plough, and elsewhere.