Attribution: Davide125, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
By Bill Stokes
Kickass, the doorstop dog, reports that the keeper’s shaky equilibrium, as Phyllis knows, is so easily tipped off kilter that he should probably be encased in a plastic bubble. This morning it was a bit of gray cottonwood fluff floating by the window, and the keeper was immediately lost for a good part of the day as he recalled how the early June tree fluff signals the time of the mayfly hatch on trout streams.
It is a hatch that occurs just as it is getting too dark to fish and it extends—sometimes, into the midnight hours. Mayflies are large, lacy-winged, regal looking insects that rise to the surface from the mud on the stream bottom and then float with the current like a royal bug navy to turn a darkening stream valley into an absolute magic kingdom.
It is a dinner call for the biggest, most cautious trout, and they slurp down the mayflies like hungry pigs.
To stand alone waist-deep in the middle of it is a rare and wonderful experience, and the keeper has many treasured and much varied memories of countless solitary occasions with mayflies and dark nights and trout and owls and deer and whip-or-wills when he felt as much a part of a glorious natural community as it is possible for a human to feel.
Those were the days (nights), my friend, we thought they’d never end…..
