What the Light of the Firefly Shows

Summer nights on the Eastern Shore are orgies of sex and death. Everyone can see that just by stepping outside.

Consider, for a voyeuristic thrill, Mrs. Byrne's field. What goes on there on the far side of my barn would make anybody but a naturalist blush. In daytime all that's apparent are tall grasses and darting bluebirds, goldfinches, swallows and redwing blackbirds. Ah, but the nights. Then come the seductive, and the lethal, lights.

Fireflies.

Twinkling like low stars, a galaxy of them only knee to shoulder high is strewn across the meadow. One night after dinner I wander out my kitchen door with my girlfriend and a best friend, and we can't help voicing awe: "My God," "Look at that," "Ohh."

The silent twinkles give a sense of peace. Hah! From what I have read, every light means a female feels sexy, or she's hungry enough to kill. Only the female firefly has one of those bouncy blinker bottoms, and every variety of firefly has its own sequence of blinking. What each means to the male of that society is, "Hey, handsome, come on over, get lucky." Yet there can be, as so often with candlelight promises, a catch. Some firefly females imitate the sexy winking of another variety, and when the male shows up for a romp in the grass she devours him.

The way I look at it, it's a metaphor for how some things really are hereabouts. Maryland eastward of the Chesapeake Bay is pretty in an unassuming sort of way, like a song in a shower, sweet, soft, flat and generally wet. Yet what you think you see isn't always what you get, and what you do get is maybe what you don't think you deserve.

I live here now because I grew weary of a city that was just as tired of me. I came for the fireflies, I guess, and I came for the fishing. I may have come too late.

One notice of it comes with a morning newspaper, a story quoting the Maryland Department of Natural Resources as reporting every fish tested in 14 tidal tributaries of the Chesapeake contained at least one of six different toxic chemicals. It says women and children should not eat a single serving of white perch from the Back, Bohemia, Elk, Sassafras, Magothy and Gunpowder rivers.

And: "All healthy men should limit their consumption of white perch to only one eight-ounce meal per month from the Bush, Chester, Gunpowder, Magothy and South rivers."

The Chester, that's my river. A tidal tributary of it is in sight from my back door. It's full of perch and I've caught a few. But "healthy men" shouldn't eat them much? What about one of a delicate constitution? Somebody who can be sickened by reading material? The story goes on to say many rockfish in the bay are infected with mycobacteriosis, described as "a slow wasting disease like tuberculosis in humans."

And me with bay-caught rockfish in my freezer. Why am I surprised, like a bug-brained firefly? For the year I've lived here signals of things gone wrong have been as clear as blinking lights. Drive any roadway in springtime and see the strange fruit of intensive agriculture throughout the Mid-Atlantic. No, the eye won't pick up the pesticides and fertilizers washing off the land and putting six kinds of toxins in the flesh of fish. Visible, though, to any who bothers to look, all across fields stretching to faraway tree lines, are bloomings of pink and blue and white: plastic bags. How can there be so many polycarbonate pimples on the land's face? But it gets no reaction from the tillers of the fields. When the tractors come, in field after field for week after week, plastic bags are plowed into the ground.

That's what I see blowing in the wind from the window of my moving pickup truck. There is closer evidence. Ever since I expanded to the last hole in my belt, I've been taking long walks. Some things I've observed along an eight-mile loop around my place are what make these parts magical in the minds of visitors: bald eagles above in lazing gyres; ospreys flapping overhead with fish in their talons; pairs of tundra swans necking in coves; bands of deer, as many as nine at a time, seeing me and bounding over the road ahead and into woods; foxes and raccoons trotting through the soybeans; wild turkeys so at ease here on Piney Neck one lets me approach within 20 feet before taking flight.

Other sights underfoot: beer cans, soda cans, crumpled cigarette packs, plastic sacks, Q-tips, condoms, tissue paper, paper bags, glass bottles, aluminum foil, newsprint, dead balloons, one sneaker, then another.

So much refuse on the shoulder of the road and in the ditches -- and there can't be two dozen people living inside a mile radius of my house. I clench teeth thinking of who drives these lanes and casually drops trash. Slob. And those who own the lands and do nothing about it. Fools. I walk on this way for weeks before it comes: slob, fool, me.

The garbage isn't on my land, but it's on my walk. I'm the one who actually comes closest to it, the one most offended. The solution, it turns out, is as handy as a white kitchen bag with 13-gallon capacity. The next morning I stick one in a pocket. It takes three days and three full bags to clear the roadway. In a month it's time to take along another bag: the apparent rate of slobbery in Kent County.

Some things I collect are icons of irony: newer beer cans stamped with American flags or "USA." Somehow since destruction of the World Trade Center -- I'm supposing -- love of beer equates with love of country. It's an interesting picture: the proud patriot flinging his empties on his country's hallowed ground. America -- love it and litter it. But I'm not picking up a can because I'm a better person than whoever put it there. Call it atonement, for all the times I used to flick cigarette butts out my car windows. Call it aspiration. I can't do anything, except complain, about the toxins in my fish -- like the mercury that the Chester River Association has found in every one it's tested, coming from the coal-fired power plant that's 20 miles upwind. Maybe I can, though, do a little something about the mess before my eyes.

Living in a place so lovely in most ways and at the same time so much trashed might drive anybody toward two of the higher occupations of humankind, garbage collector and philosopher. I step out on my morning walks, and I consider the star-spangled beer cans at foot, and I can pick them up if I don't like walking on them. I step outside at night to take in the fireflies, to ponder their promiscuous and cannibalistic winkings, and I come to another fatalistic conclusion.

Nature really isn't civilized. And neither, entirely, is civilization.