A topiary of living fairy lights

Synchronicity in nature

My laptop wallpaper is a spectacular picture of thousands of fireflies lighting up a tree. I found it online and saved it in my computer. Perhaps as a reminder, though I don’t need one. I saw a similar sight in 1993, and I have never forgotten it.

I saw it one cool October night on the way home after a grueling climb, while riding a jeepney, which had picked us up at the foot of Mt. Halcon in Oriental Mindoro, Philippines. We were a small team of five University of the Philippines Mountaineers (UPM) – Norman, Ninoy, Bunny and Franz, and me. Halcon is lushly beautiful, with a knife-ridge peak commanding a spectacular 360-degree view on a clear day. It is also notoriously difficult to climb — moody, dense with jungle, swollen in river, and intolerant of weakness or inexperience. It had rained almost all throughout our four days in the mountain, with much of the trail flooded up to our knees (we found out later that the town had remained dry and sunny.) My soles were raw from rubbing against mywet socks and I had thirty-three bites of limatik (a worm-like blood leech) all over my body. One had burrowed all the way into my ear canal where I could hear its sucking sounds until I couldn’t hear anything anymore — it had finally grown engorged with my blood and blocked all noise. I couldn’t complain though, the boys had the nasty creatures lodged in their private parts; one enterprising limatik had even attached itself to Norman’s eyeball. It’s hard to avoid limatik on a wet mountain because they skulk on bushes and latch onto skin as one brushes against leaves. They’re also able to catapult themselves onto a host like rubber bands.

http://www.upmountaineers.org.ph/

I was just a UPM applicant then, just about ready to throw myself down the mountain from exhaustion. I had no business and no skills attempting such a difficult climb, and by the second day hardly anyone was speaking to me.

So it was a silent ride in the jeepney, the enveloping blackness of the night broken only by the weak beam of our jeepney’s headlights. Until I saw the tree. I almost missed it, looking as I was the other way. But I turned and there it was, an entire tree alit with thousands upon thousands of fireflies.

No one spoke then, nor has any one of us ever spoken about it since. No doubt it was an unspeakably beautiful sight. The ride remained silent until we got to our inn. For this reason I had until recently imagined that, well, I had imagined the entire thing. Only years later, when I read about a phenomenon called the synchronous flashing of fireflies, did I realize it had been real. Apparently male fireflies flash in unison so females will detect them more easily. It’s a common night-time sight along Malaysia’s riverbanks, where it’s said fireflies “flash on and off together with such precision that they’ve become an advertised tourist attraction.” (Davis, 2003). Synchronicity in nature.

Common it may be in some parts of Asia, to me it was nothing short of a miracle, albeit a natural one. I had never seen anything like it before. In the dark I fixed my eyes on the tree as we drove further away. I knew I was in for a horrible post-climb session when we got home (where I would definitely get the reaming of my life.) At first I was too tired to care. As my tree grew smaller in the distance, my spirit lifted and I was too happy to care.

SYNC:The Emerging Science of Spontaneous Order by Steven Strogatz, reviewed by Philip J. Davis, 2003.http://www.maa.org/reviews/sync.html