While ornithological pathologists were to pecking away at the study of viruses connected with the avian flu from birds and entomological pathologist were pestering around with diseases spread from nasty little mosquitoes, little attention was paid to the real threat to humanity. But perhaps if they had a closer inspection of the insect called Photuris lucicrescens, then they could have saved us all. And why would they? It was after all a common insect that man had lived with for centuries without any incident or warning of such a threat could be possible.
Artists and poets had been using their beautiful nature on their respective canvases for as long as art has been produced. Little children, on hot summer evenings, would spend hours of their formative years catching them in little manufactured homes of made of jelly jars, punching holes into the lid for breathing beforehand, just to watch them glow their little abdomens off for hours until they finally died. There was no harm in them it seemed. And there wasn’t. But that was then and this is now, as they, who ever they are, supposedly say.
That’s right, and for those of you who haven’t figured it out yet, this is for you. The carriers of man’s demise were nothing more than the common firefly (a.k.a. the “lightening bug” as they are known around here). But that still does not explain the reason our top scientists were not able to see it, to prevent it. Earlier I posed a simple question to this, ‘Why would they?’ And the answer is quite simple. Because the firefly is not a sexy enough bug to study. No, not sexy as in procreative attraction, but sexy as in glamorous and appealing in the means of grant money. To be blunt, there was no real future in the study of the creature. Not when too many people died of heart disease, cancer, influenza, and etcetera.
It is the politics of scientific research. Like politicians who raise money for their political campaigns have to follow what their constituencies want of them, scientists too have their own constituencies. The media spread hysteric stories of flu-like viruses spreading to humans, wiping out billions, from other likely transmitting carriers such as mosquitoes and whatnot. And since one of the greatest pandemics in our history happened less than a century ago, this of the Spanish flu (which killed more people in one year than the black plague did in four across Europe), it is a threat that strikes fear in our populous. This fear demands acting upon and the politicians of government and other wealthy benefactors grant the means for scientists to look into these specific ailments as others are swept to the side.
But who could know? Certainly not any respective person, who was once ten years old, could ever think such nonsense. It is just one of those things that seem to just happen. Like the crude saying goes, “shit happens.” No one could have foreseen the outcome of man’s extinction caused by something as insignificant as a lightening bug. Well, that is save one. One man tried to warn the world, but like any other raving person, he was shoved to the side, discarded like the foil wrap in a cigarette package out the window of a speeding automobile. And Gerald Boivin, resident entomologist and certifiable wack-job, of the small town of Highland, New Mexico could have (and would have to if allowed) saved us all. For instead of “shit happens,” as the saying goes, Gerry (as he liked to be called) would fashion the saying in a different light. He would always be telling his students of Highland High, “Evolution happens…” And that is just what did happen.
You see, the small town of Highland is cropped somewhere in between Roswell and Carrizozo, New Mexico, and it happens to be somewhat close to many places where eerie and perhaps random events have occurred numerously over the past sixty years. And if someone who was smart enough (like Gerry is) sat down and plotted all of these events down chronologically and geographically (like Gerry eventually did), they would find a bulls eye pattern leading to the start of it all. Gerry believed that many of the events surrounding this area were all tied somehow into an event that occurred in 1945. Some were silly and often harmless, like the crash that supposedly happed two years later in Roswell, but it was what happened here with the lightning bugs that we are concerned with (or should be). It is here where Gerald believed our beloved nighttime insect evolved into the terrifying mass murderer it is today. This story is not about Gerry or his discovery. Perhaps we shall get to him a little bit later. We should instead focus a little further back in time and introduce two souls who would eventually meet in these ruinous times and possibly save humanity, or not. For after all, this is their story.