This “two part” article is the second piece in the Great Lakes Series. Click here to read the introductory piece and click here for a link to my Uncle Kurt’s official blog to follow the trip in real time.

Part I: Mayflies

The mayfly is a curious little bug. I was introduced to them years ago, when I was twelve or something, at a summer camp in northern Wisconsin. They’re completely harmless and, generally, just about as stupid. At the summer camp they came in droves. Thousands appeared overnight and blanketed the ground, the walls, the doors, and everything in sight. Their survival instincts, to say the least, are lacking. Most bugs, regular flies for example, notice when someone is coming their way and will move to prevent their own death. Your average mayfly is not so clever—it has found its spot, as it were, and having found it will remain there even under penalty of death.

I hadn’t seen another mayfly until this trip. They’re not common in Illinois, at least not near Chicago. But in the last few weeks I have seen quite a few and what I found was that there are some differences, here and there, between the mayflies of each of the Great Lakes and their surrounding environs.

A quick look at the Wikipedia article pertaining to mayflies will show that they have a rather esteemed history. The ancients were fascinated by them, with the famed Roman author Pliny the Elder commenting, “The River Bug on the Black Sea at midsummer brings down some thin membranes that look like berries out of which burst a four-legged caterpillar in the manner of the creature mentioned above, but it does not live beyond one day, owing to which it is called the hemerobius.”

We too could call it the hemerobius. But we do not. It is not a very good name.

As far as this trip goes, our first encounter with the mayflies was in Boyne City, MI. These were just as I remembered—though perhaps fewer in number. They’d flop around, having flown in from the harbor in the dark of night, and find a nook somewhere in the shade to spend the rest of their extraordinarily short lives. Whether mayflies were living or not was hard to tell. Some dangled off park benches by their tails and others dangled from spider webs. Both looked mostly the same. They also blanketed the boat and to remove them one would have to pick them up by their wings or their tail and toss them over the edge, which they wouldn’t protest. Indeed, more than one of these mayflies was presumed dead before it was picked up.

But, as if following video game logic, the mayflies became slightly more clever with each lake that we passed. The mayflies of Boyne City and Lake Charlevoix, when picked up, would just look stupidly into your eyes. Their legs would flop down and, when thrown off the boat, would make no effort to fly away but would instead land in the water and let the current have its way with them. Moving through a small part of Lake Huron, near Mackinac Island, and into the North Channel they became a bit more lively though no less stupid. One of these landed on my jacket and when I went to pick him up by his wings he’d dodge my fingers only to move an inch upwards, closer to my jacket collar, and sit there. I’d go after him again and he’d do the same. He was just about on my collar, and looking straight at my face as mayflies are wont to do, when I picked him up and let him gently into the lake—though, unlike his brethren in Michigan, he had the good sense to fly away.

The mayflies were a less common sight the further south we went. In Canada they were fairly common; they were more are as we clipped south down the middle of Lake Huron. It was in Lake St. Clair that I met perhaps the most intelligent of the mayflies. This was a large one, maybe and inch and a half from front to back, and beige in color. It sat on the deck with a mayflies typical lack of energy. But when I went to pick him up he fluttered off the boat all on his own.

Mayflies are friendly bugs that neither bite nor sting. There are, at least personally, only two circumstances in which they become intolerable: 1) when there are thousands of them it becomes almost impossible to avoid stepping on a few and leaving a nasty little splotches on the ground, and 2) when they are dead. A dead mayfly is worse than a living one for in this unfortunate state their soft tissue quickly decays and leaves behind an extremely fragile exoskeleton. To pick up a dead mayfly is to pick one apart—pieces of its legs and abdomen will remain in place—and when they carpet something, for example a sail cover, and then die from old age (they have short lifespans, these mayflies), the result is a carpet of dead bugs which must be swept off wholesale.

But, despite their somewhat classless habit of dying in large numbers on top of various things I need to touch or carry with some frequency, I developed a bit of a fondness for the mayflies. They’re goofy little things which are seemingly incapable fear. Some of them, after being picked up by the tail, would flip and land on the top of my finger and walk around, curious-like, without a shred of animosity.

This was much unlike the giant swarm of gnats which attached itself to our ship after a night spent roped to a floating ball near the island party town of Put-In Bay.

Part II: The Gnats of Put-In Bay

There’s a lot of them, they like boats, and they suck ass.