I was crouched on my knees in the dirt. It is past twilight and getting darker by the minute. Brian is holding up his iPhone to help give me enough light to see what I’m doing. Smoke curls past my face as I maneuver my hands. Just a few small beads and solder, just a little bit more effort and my firefly is about to shine. I twist the wires and secure the battery. One. Then two. Breathless I watch the third LED and… nothing. Something is wrong.
Brian using his iPhone to give me enough light to solder.
I am making a battery powered programmed circuit with three LEDs. They are supposed to fade on and off in an alternating pattern some green, some gold, but my gold LED has failed to light. After some expert advice from the Solarbotics guys, and more importantly, after a brighter light has been brought and turned on to light the workspace I concentrate on the logic board again. When I fit the battery onto the circuit board I don’t bother using the wires to secure it. I wait. One, then two and… there it is, the third one comes alive. I am very relieved. At this point, the crowd has gone from me and the people I arrived with to a large circle around our small makeshift electronics lab. I feel that if my light had failed to go on this time around that it might become embarrassing. I leave my station to the next person eager to set solder to iron and make their firefly.
Vicki's is yellow and mine in green.
I am irrationally attached to my firefly. Now that is is nestled in the jar with some long blades of grass and leaves I don’t want to put it down. I take it for a walk along the path, where small battery only LEDs shine from branches. These have been assembled in another area and their creators have put them out in the wild area around the 4th street bridge. The river seems like a nice place for my firefly to live, but the jar floats, so I keep it in my hands. More and more people arrive. The path gets extended longer and longer. I try to use a rock to weigh down the jar. It still floats. The crowd is getting bigger and bigger, but the path is relatively quiet. I’ve never seen a real firefly and I wonder if they make a certain kind of sound or if they are silent like these ones.
There is another area under the bridge that is almost completely dark and is filled with LEDs hanging down. Later it will become the stage for acoustic musicians to play, but by the time they start, I am already at home in bed. For now it is a dark and slightly treacherous cavern. No one takes out their phones for light in this area. Somehow is has become a sacred place.
I am still carrying my firefly and so are some of the other people who have completed the project. There are more fireflies out on the path and a few up on the bridge. There are too many people to get near the creation stations. The Protospace people start blowing up balloons. They rig them up just like the ones in UP to hold aloft a circuit board with lights hanging down. They’ve attracted their own crowd and I can’t manage to stay near the front when they now take it down to the river. I can see it through the trees though. The balloons are almost invisible and the lights are purple, then blue and purple again.
By the end of my night, I’ve found some friends for my firefly, and it sits with a nice view of the water along with two other sets of green and gold blinking lights. It was truly a Firefly Adventure Club.
Fireflies nesting near the river
This was put on by Claudia Bustos. You can read about the project at Calgary’s Illuminated Landscapes.
When did this happen? Friday August 12, 2011.
