Expecto Patronum!

Two nights ago we lost power. While some others were annoyed about it, I was relieved to be free from the constant buzz of technology and glare of fluorescent lighting. Normally in Kino, the electricity is pretty good and outages last only a few minutes, but on this night, the power stayed out most of the evening. You could finally get a really nice look at all the stars (the Milky Way shines brilliantly here), but most importantly, it allowed us to see something amazing in the water. 

I remember going on a field trip in the 5^th grade to the National Seashore. We were on a night time nature walk and the leader gave us wintergreen lifesavers. If you chomp on those candies at night (for some chemical reason that goes over my head) they will produce a spark. This was used to get us excited for what were going to see on the beach, bioluminescence. Bioluminescence is a light producing chemical recreation that is created by some species of land and sea creatures. In the ocean it is most commonly caused by a type of plankton called Dinoflagellates, who actually use it as a defense mechanism.

As a group of us headed to the beach for a late night swim, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. The people already in the water were glowing from these “twinkles” of bioluminescence. But unlike in my childhood in which I saw just a few “sparks” on the beach, every time you moved in the water here you were trailed by hundreds of tiny twinkles. All of us played in the ocean calling out to each other, “Hey, watch me!” just like we where children again, struggling to get our parent’s attention jumping into a swimming pool. One of the girls remarked that it felt like being a Disney Princess, I thought it felt like I was a fairy, and the boys were playing Harry Potter and casting spells at one another. Expecto Patronum! I hope I never “grow up”.