Albrecht Dürer’s 1495 engraving of a mayfly (so I forgot to take a picture of a mayfly). Sourced from Wikipedia.
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.
This three part article is the first piece in the Great Lakes Series, which consists of reports from the sailboat The Odysseyon a leg of its voyage—namely from Lake Michigan to Montreal. 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: I AM BECOME DEATH; DESTROYER OF FLIES
This machine kills flies. Photo by me.
So it turns out there’s a lot of flies out there on Lake Michigan.
On land I’ve tried my best to be something of a gentle soul towards all of the Earth’s creatures (excepting those I dislike) and will do my best to avoid killing ants, centipedes, spiders, and other various insects that might eat some of Earth’s more irritating creatures, i.e. mosquitoes. A moth once awarded me a blue ribbon, similar to that awarded to Pabst, emblazoned with the words “Friend to all the Insects.” This wasn’t true but I appreciated the sentiment. Even flies, one of the more irritating species of insect, I tended to spare
On the lake such a thing became a tragic impossibility. The flies had to die and die they did. I don’t know how many flies have now died by my hand. 50? 100? 1000? Probably not 1000, that would be a lot of flies, but certainly more flies than I ever wanted to kill.
My first experience with a lake fly was on the night before we set out whilst I lay in bed in my quarters on the Odyssey. The little creature had gotten itself into my room and was strutting about as I slept, rudely landing on my head on several occasions, and generally making a pest of itself. I rectified this not by killing the thing, for it seemed a petty thing to do at the time rather than the necessity that it would soon be, but by covering my head with a blanket. This solved the problem for the night. But there would be more flies to come.
