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Authors: Joseph Heywood
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New Yearâs Eve afternoon I was back in the secure environs of the Collection Room.
I breathed in the musty air and found it mildly calming. I spent most of the day checking the identities of grasshoppers (Acrididae, Tettigoniidae, et cetera) and took a lot of time looking at them and thinking about what Doc Nash had said about them as trout bait. They start to show up in late June and tend to be dark and small, and by summerâs end they tend to be light in color and large. Nash loved hoppers and called them âcaviar for trout.â He reminded me to always make sure a hopper fly had some red in it, and sure enough I found that all the naturals had some red. It was fascinating to see the reality of insects beginning to merge with my knowledge of artificial flies. And to begin to recognize cycles: Fish grow over the course of the season, and so do the crustaceans, minnows, and insects they eat.
About ninety minutes before I had to report to work I found a box with six unlabeled, very large artificial flies. The box was on the floor in the corner along the west wall, buried under a pile of cardboard boxes filled with specimen boxes and capture jars. I saw the corner of the box because it threw a knife-shaped shadow onto the floor, seemingly out of darkness. Naturally, I had to find out what it was. The bugs were white and a little yellowed with age but way too big for Ephoron leukon. There were no labels. Between my Sundays in the library back home as a kid and my time with Nash I had a pretty good sense of what was what. I searched all around for labels but all I found, scored into the bottom of the case with a woodburner, were the initials mjk .
I opened the box and studied the six flies; they were very different from each other and all of them old. A couple of them were attached to flimsy-looking green hooks. After a few minutes, I realized the hooks had to be made of brass. Somewhere I had read that brass hooks were used around the turn of the century, which convinced me these flies were ancient. One of them still had a couple of inches of gut attached to it as well, and gut bodies had gone outâwhen, the 1930s? Not academic specimens, but a box of fishing flies. Not much value scientifically, perhaps, but theyâd have worth to a tackle collector or museum. What were they doing here? I imagined one of the bug docs had been in a hurry one day and left them in the room, and I laughed when I thought how pissed he wouldâve been when he got to the river and had no flies. I toyed with the notion of liberating the flies, but decided that this would violate Doc Nashâs trust. What I did was bury the box in the clutter. As far as I knew, nobody but me went into the Collection Room, but I had a hunch about the gargantuan white flies and I wanted them safe until I could talk to Nash. I hid them in such a way that nobody was going to accidentally find them: I placed the box inside a box inside a box and then stacked other debris on top.
I spent a lot of time thinking about them after they were hidden. What weight of line and leader would be needed to cast such things? More important, what size of fish would rise to them? Maybe the flies were an elaborate joke from a former time. Or not a joke at all. I had never seen a fly in nature even a third the size of these. Even the huge and nocturnal Hexagenia limbata, what Michiganders called a âfishflyâ or âMichigan Caddis,â were dwarfed by the mysterious white flies. Nash and his wife were in Florida for the holidays; I couldnât wait for him to get back to campus. Surely he would know what they were.
There were days in the years ahead when I would wish I had never found the damn things.
I was in a pretty fair mood when I got to work. As soon as I punched the clock I went looking for Spruce, but she wasnât in the jewelry section. It was a night when we were shortstaffed in anticipation of low
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â¢â¢â¢
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New Yearâs Eve afternoon I was back in the secure environs of the Collection Room.
I breathed in the musty air and found it mildly calming. I spent most of the day checking the identities of grasshoppers (Acrididae, Tettigoniidae, et cetera) and took a lot of time looking at them and thinking about what Doc Nash had said about them as trout bait. They start to show up in late June and tend to be dark and small, and by summerâs end they tend to be light in color and large. Nash loved hoppers and called them âcaviar for trout.â He reminded me to always make sure a hopper fly had some red in it, and sure enough I found that all the naturals had some red. It was fascinating to see the reality of insects beginning to merge with my knowledge of artificial flies. And to begin to recognize cycles: Fish grow over the course of the season, and so do the crustaceans, minnows, and insects they eat.
About ninety minutes before I had to report to work I found a box with six unlabeled, very large artificial flies. The box was on the floor in the corner along the west wall, buried under a pile of cardboard boxes filled with specimen boxes and capture jars. I saw the corner of the box because it threw a knife-shaped shadow onto the floor, seemingly out of darkness. Naturally, I had to find out what it was. The bugs were white and a little yellowed with age but way too big for Ephoron leukon. There were no labels. Between my Sundays in the library back home as a kid and my time with Nash I had a pretty good sense of what was what. I searched all around for labels but all I found, scored into the bottom of the case with a woodburner, were the initials mjk .
I opened the box and studied the six flies; they were very different from each other and all of them old. A couple of them were attached to flimsy-looking green hooks. After a few minutes, I realized the hooks had to be made of brass. Somewhere I had read that brass hooks were used around the turn of the century, which convinced me these flies were ancient. One of them still had a couple of inches of gut attached to it as well, and gut bodies had gone outâwhen, the 1930s? Not academic specimens, but a box of fishing flies. Not much value scientifically, perhaps, but theyâd have worth to a tackle collector or museum. What were they doing here? I imagined one of the bug docs had been in a hurry one day and left them in the room, and I laughed when I thought how pissed he wouldâve been when he got to the river and had no flies. I toyed with the notion of liberating the flies, but decided that this would violate Doc Nashâs trust. What I did was bury the box in the clutter. As far as I knew, nobody but me went into the Collection Room, but I had a hunch about the gargantuan white flies and I wanted them safe until I could talk to Nash. I hid them in such a way that nobody was going to accidentally find them: I placed the box inside a box inside a box and then stacked other debris on top.
I spent a lot of time thinking about them after they were hidden. What weight of line and leader would be needed to cast such things? More important, what size of fish would rise to them? Maybe the flies were an elaborate joke from a former time. Or not a joke at all. I had never seen a fly in nature even a third the size of these. Even the huge and nocturnal Hexagenia limbata, what Michiganders called a âfishflyâ or âMichigan Caddis,â were dwarfed by the mysterious white flies. Nash and his wife were in Florida for the holidays; I couldnât wait for him to get back to campus. Surely he would know what they were.
There were days in the years ahead when I would wish I had never found the damn things.
I was in a pretty fair mood when I got to work. As soon as I punched the clock I went looking for Spruce, but she wasnât in the jewelry section. It was a night when we were shortstaffed in anticipation of low
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