Dry Fly Entomology by Frederic M. Halford, published in London in 1897, was the inspiration for Mayflies of the Driftless Region. Halford, the Victorian innovator and popularizer of modern fly-fishing, scientifically described and surveyed the principal British mayflies of his time, but he did not claim his work as a comprehensive entomological treatise. Instead, Dry Fly Entomology was aimed at providing anglers with a basic, working understanding of the nature of aquatic insects. Mayflies of the Driftless Region can make no such claim; it is not a field guide. Instead, it is a study of mayflies by an artist.

I began this project with little practical knowledge of mayfly entomology. It was not the information in Halford’s Dry Fly Entomology that caught my attention, but rather the detailed wood engravings that illustrated it. While Mayflies of the Driftless Region may provide useful information for fishermen and women of similar naïveté, the essence of the book is art. I have created 13 depictions of mayflies, color wood engravings with each hue printed from a separate block of end-grain maple. These images are the result of careful microscopic study of specimens collected from streams near my home in rural Wisconsin.

Entomologist Clarke Garry, professor of biology at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls, has written text to accompany each of the images. Professor Garry documents the series of taxonomic steps involved in the formal scientific identification of each of the specimens. In the context of a scientific journal, these identifications would likely be dry and difficult reading for most of us. However, in the pages of a finely printed book, the poetic nature of the language can be appreciated. Sometimes Dr. Garry would encounter a problem in taking a specimen to species, and, being a scientist, speculation was not an option. I urged him to make notes as to why a particular species determination proved elusive. For the final two specimens in the book, taxonomy is absent: the text is all notes. His final note: "Taxonomy is an extremely dynamic discipline. I thought you might be interested in knowing that Ephemeerella inermis has, as of Jacobus and McCafferty (2003), been revised to Ephemerella excrucians."

Science is fluid, like everything else. The scientist, and the artist, do basically the same thing: we observe the world around us, and record our observations as best we can.

 

 

The Echo of Questions

A finely printed book about mayflies is a delight.

by Bill Logan

If we hold a river dear, it is because of stretches that define what is dear to us, where everything settles into certain truths and unanswerable questions. Water is cool. Sometimes afternoons are warm, with mayflies lifting off in the face of suicidal odds.

Mayflies break my heart. And claim it. Each survives for a year where we would drown in moments, only to transform itself against the light into a fluttering spark that a bird almost surely finds. Or maybe it manages to do no more than rest in the current, as my heart beats, before disappearing within a ring. And I cast my fly just above the ring and wait and hold my breath as I hope that it too will disappear, not thinking about anything but the feeding fish.

Sometimes though, in spare moments, mayflies are within reach. None of us can resist them. If I can catch one, I try to hold it in my open palm and pray it remains. If it does, I think all of the thoughts I’ve been saving up. I marvel. A mayflyís delicacy is perplexing. A single pinch, even gentle and inadvertent, damages it. I look between its wings and in all of the places mystery might hide but in the end find nothing that tells me how fragility survives. These little beings reach puberty in hours, become adults overnight and even if they stay clear of birds and fish are dead sooner than I can reach home after a weekend’s fishing. It’s strange how I wait so much of each year just to greet small quickened life and that the measure of my long life is so closely matched to the rhythm of their short ones.

I’m not alone. Donít you hold mayflies? As the rest of creation passes by, whether with the current or urged on by gentle breezes amidst flickering shadows, there in the grass by the quiet edge of a river, time stops. We stand on old stones worn smooth, look at a small insect and wonder, “How did you make it this far and what will happen to you next?”

There is no way to answer the first part of that question. Whether by fate or fortune or some grand design glimpsed but not fully understood, what we find ourselves with instead of an answer is the desire to keep asking the question. And we want to always come back to where we ask it.

As for what happens next? If you’re Gaylord Schanilec, there is an elegant, difficult answer.

Asked to describe himself, Schanilec says he’s a bookie and leaves it at that. Okaaaay, right away we have a dry sense of humor that leaves us a bit puzzled. Keep talking with Gaylord and you catch glimpses of all sorts of things. He uses language like a poet but he can be spare with words. Some things you are left guessing about but others we can be sure of. His is a kind soul. He’s passionate too and determined, as we’re about to see. My sense of it is that he’s very, very sure of himself. He would have to be, for he makes his living in the wrong century and manages it quite well.

How about this for a story: our friend the bookie becomes interested in the mayflies he finds on his local Wisconsin streams. He knows little about them, probably less than most of us. With innocence and casual fascination then, he first notices them around the edges of his fishing and is glad to see them. Each spring the mayflies come back and without thinking about it, heís reassured that everything is still as it should to be. But Gaylord comes to realize he doesn’t want to leave it at that. Mayflies have become old friends. He’s moved by them and curious.

Some people are thinkers. Some are makers. When Gaylord is moved, he thinks with his hands. He says he’s a bookie and by that he means he’s a bookmaker. He makes books. He engraves the wooden blocks that print each color in every illustration. Text is assembled one letter at a time. Each letter is made of lead. He has to put page after page of them together and lock them all down just so in his printing press. They must ink well and print flawlessly. And what kind of paper should he use and how should a book be bound? How large should an edition be? How can he afford it? How small the editions must be if he has to do all of the work! How can he afford it?

Right now as I tell you about this, I’m tapping along as fast as my fingers can fly. Words are miraculously appearing in the typeface of my choice on a screen before me. Soon, I’ll punch a button and what I’ve written will in moments be in the hands of an editor I’ve never met. Months from now there will be a magazine in my mailbox. In it I will see this article and I’ll be tickled but do you know what? In a very short time the magazine will be in a stack on the floor by an overloaded bookcase. I’ll be writing something else I don’t even know about yet. And tick, tick, tick will go the plastic clock on my wall.

Now let’s try things a different way: Gaylord decided to make a book about little mayflies and it took him four years. Mayflies of the Driftless Region is filled with echoes. “How did you make it this far,” we ask insects that can’t answer. Sometimes, rather than flitting off, a mayfly turns in our leveled palm to gaze at us through perplexing eyes.

“How did he do this,” we wonder, as we gaze at Gaylord’s book and hear the whisper of our other question. When I heard that whisper, I knew his book was perfect. Each time I look through it I feel as if Iím holding mayflies. I too am moved. There are questions that aren’t answered.

Think about that for a moment. Have you even once wanted a book to keep secrets?

You hold this one ever so carefully and cautiously open it under good light. I don’t know why you feel the need to be so cautious. It’s well bound, strong and impeccably tasteful. No pinch will damage wings but still you hold your breath as the covers part like wings and you look between them. Tease pages open and there are lists. You find lines in them like, “2. Apex of each penis lobe not reflexed.”

What are we reading?

Sticking to the facts so rarely answers questions completely, but I’ll start with them. An artist with the mind of a poet who thinks with his hands spent season after season sending mayflies to a University professor. He hoped that he might receive in return the names of the insects he was devoting years to. Back from Dr. Clarke Garry came the taxonomic details, which identified each. They’re the book’s text. Almost its only text. It’s odd, to say the least.

But then something unexpected happens.

Beside the text are the illustrations. You lean in and then lean in still further. You can’t help it. You’ve never seen anything like this. Time really stops and it’s so quiet that you can hear the river that fills your mind’s eye. As the pages turn, you forget where you are as each mayfly is born.

“33. Not west or southeast, hind wing present.” So reads another line in a list in which I begin to hear beguiling poetry. On the opposite page, if you look ever so closely, the hind wing is present and achingly sweet. I don’t understand what I’m reading, or maybe I almost do. Maybe I’m confused.

Did I tell you this book is perfect? It’s a delight and a puzzle I find delight in. I can’t help myself. I keep returning to read a bit and look a bit and lean in once more. And every year I look for the mayflies and every year they return. I don’t understand them very well either. This is the same rhythm isn’t it? It feels just the same. I’m so glad I have puzzles.

I’m glad too that Gaylord Schanilec marks his own time and leaves a record of it in each block he carves. He pieces words together letter by letter and prints them. Then he cleans everything up and puts all the letters away. A page, once assembled, vanishes, as do all mayflies. But some things are certain. So long as we treasure them, mayflies will return each year, despite the odds. And Gaylord will keep making books. Once in a rare while, after so much effort, he finishes one. And then he starts all over again.

- Bill Logan

Fly Tyer magazine (United States), Summer 2006
FlyFisher magazine (Japan), May, 2006
Fly Fishing and Fly Tying (United Kingdom), November, 2006