A beam of white light cuts the winter’s heavy air, dividing the coast live oak forest into the comprehensible and the unknown. I click off my torch and let the darkness envelop me, prompting my senses to quickly create theories with the shadows. Click. Click. My ultraviolet (UV) torch fires up and suddenly a new world emerges—familiar shapes but in incongruent colors. 

A species of flat-backed millipede, which I couldn’t see under white light, walks by fluorescent blue. Its rhythmic army of feet ripples beneath Himalayan blackberry leaves saturated in the red fluorescence UV light elicits from their chlorophyll. A euphoria emerges from this sort of pseudo-synesthesia and leads to more questions than I have answers for, but one thing is for sure: under UV light, a hidden Bay Area landscape comes alive, especially in the winter months. 

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Born in Klamath Falls Oregon and raised in Calaveras County of California, Damon Tighe attended Saint Mary’s college of Moraga California where he worked on local newspapers while earning a Biology/Chemistry degree. He taught High School in Portland, Oregon and moved back to the Bay Area to work on the Human Genome Project at the National Lab’s Joint Genome Institute. He spent a bit of time pursing a MFA in Natural History and Science Filmmaking in Montana, but returned to the Oakland to work on biofuels and single cell genomics.

He currently manages an apartment complex in downtown Oakland, works for Bio-Rad laboratories designing curriculum and training educators from Colorado to the coast in biotechnology, and is well versed in local fungi, plants and slowly but surely critters of Lake Merritt.