I've only seen fireflies at Disneyland. Fake ones -- light bulbs strategically placed in "Pirates of the Caribbean"/Blue Bayou restaurant and "The Little Mermaid: Ariel's Undersea Adventure."
My sister's bucket list included seeing a real firefly, so when reports came in saying lightning bugs were spotted in Spanish Fork, she wanted to go.
On Thursday, June 7, we got in her car and headed south. The television report she saw didn't include an address -- just said the bugs were in a hayfield -- so when we got to Spanish Fork we stopped and asked at a gas station. The folks who worked there hadn't heard anything about the sightings, but the female employee quickly got on her smartphone to try to find the location.
No luck, so we went to another gas station. The young man behind the counter hadn't heard anything about fireflies, but gave us his best guess. We were just starting the car to follow his suggestion, when a man in a cowboy hat pulled up. He had a belt buckle and mustache to match the hat, and I thought, "That man looks like he knows where to find some good hayfields."
He didn't know where the fireflies were, but his wife got on her smartphone and found photos from the news reports. She recognized a woman in the pictures and gave her a call. No answer. She continued calling everyone she could think of, but no one knew where to find the lightning bugs.
The cowboy, named Brett, took a look at the photos. He knew a few fields that looked similar to the ones in the pictures.
"We'll find them," he said.
He graciously offered to lead us from field to field, looking for fireflies. It was no trouble, he said -- he had a full tank of gas, no place he had to be, and now he kind of wanted to see the fireflies, too.
After about an hour, we were feeling pretty bad about taking so much of the couple's time and gas. We were just in the process of letting him off the hook when his wife got a call with the location of the bugs.
We were soon standing in a corral, next to an electric fence, watching as little points of light appeared and disappeared in the tall grass. It was beautiful.
But for me, even more beautiful than the small lights in the dark field were the amazing people willing to do whatever it took to help a stranger fulfill a dream.