The other day Dan and I celebrated our anniversary. By celebrate I mean we had a conversation that went like this:
Me: Is our marriage strong?
Dan: Yes.
Me: I mean, can it survive anything?
Dan: Yes.
Me: Are you sure?
Dan (after a thoughtful pause): Um, pretty sure.
Me: I’ve never listened to Buffy St. Marie.
Negotiating that marital bombshell kept us up past our usual bedtime and, given that it was now 8:45 p.m. and getting dark, we decided to go visit the Firefly Sanctuary. I had heard of the Firefly Sanctuary from all the signs posted around it and from the occasional write-up in the News Review. But I hadn’t been particularly interested – there are, after all, fireflies in my backyard – until Amy Hansen texted me and asked, “Have you seen the magic yet?”
I had not seen the magic yet. And now, hopped up on ice cream and day-old birthday cake, Dan and I invited the kids to join us on a walk to check out the sanctuary. The kids linked hands and skipped down the street singing, “We’ve had sugar” at the top of their lungs, while Dan and I trailed along. We started looking at our camera to figure out how to take night pictures, something we probably should have done before we left on our excursion.
The Firefly Sanctuary is on the walking trail behind Northway and can be accessed a couple of different ways. Visitors can park at the St. Hugh Catholic Church, cross at the marked crosswalk, and continue straight up the path to the sanctuary; walk down a small cement walkway off Northway; or catch a trail from alongside Laurel Hill Road and walk through the culvert that passes underneath Hillside Road. The sanctuary is between the culvert and the playground farther down the pathway, but it will make itself known to you should you get there about 9:20 p.m., and we strongly advise that you do.
Fireflies, how exciting can they be? Let me put it to you like this. Back in the 1980s, before the days of the internet, growing up in a house with only two TV channels, CBC and a very snowy, imagination-required CTV, there was just about no greater outing than going to The Enchanted Forest (enchantedforestbc.com). I went twice, once with my family and once on a school field trip. I will never forget running along little wooden walkways and pausing to peer at gnome houses and random doors inside trees. Any forest is alive with possibility, but The Enchanted Forest was especially so for a small girl from a very small town who hoped for a kind of freedom in the woods, a world of escape. Even after all these years I remember The Enchanted Forest and how I wished I could disappear into it.
So when at the Firefly Sanctuary, both of us at a loss, trying to take in and find words for something beyond our capacity of description, Dan finally said, “It’s … it’s like it is enchanted.” I thought immediately of The Enchanted Forest and all the hopes and dreams of 7-year-old Kyla. I answered Dan as honestly as I could. “Yeah,” I said, “except better.”
What could be better than enchanted? I do not know. I don’t have words for the magic of the Firefly Sanctuary behind Northway. The innumerable fireflies flashing on and off do not look like Christmas lights twinkling in the night – there are more fireflies, more lights, more beacons of hopeful mystery than I have ever before seen, no matter the richness of a mid-December night. The kids lay on the pathway and looked up at bats swooping overhead. We were surrounded by the yellow-green flashes of fireflies on all sides. We wanted to stay there, to drink it in. We tried and failed to take pictures. We tried and failed to find the words.
Perhaps it is best left as Amy Hansen put it to me. “Have you seen the magic yet?”
