Things that go blink in the night

Thinking about walking around in the dark reminded me of other dark related incidents in my, now dim, past. Our Scout troop would camp at various locations around the state, most of which, at the time, were moderately inaccessible. We camped for almost a week in a campground back into the canyon above where West Clear Creek now crosses Highway 260, which at the time was mostly a dirt road.

One night on this West Clear Creek camp, we were out running around in the dark making noise and probably playing capture the flag, when we saw a light a short distance away. Suddenly, we all stopped and stared at this rather unusual event. We ran towards the light to see if we could find the source and soon discovered that it was in a large bush. We shined our flashlights into the bush and the light disappeared. After a rather long discussion, we chocked the whole thing up to some hitherto unexplained natural phenomena, when the light appeared again a little ways off. At this point we had to decide whether to start being afraid or what. But the light disappeared and we finally all went to bed in our sleeping bags.

Many years later, for a short time, I lived along the Ohio River in Kentucky. This was my first introduction, as an adult, to the middle part of the United States. One of the things I saw for the first time were fireflies. It immediately occured to me that what had so mystified a bunch of Scouts from Arizona was nothing more than a lone firefly. I now know that fireflies are very uncommon, but not unknown, in Arizona. But it doesn't take that much to freak out a bunch of Scouts in the middle of the night.