The Lake Where You Live

I came down to the pier on a recent mid-June evening to enjoy one of the year’s latest sunsets. I brought my fly rod, hoping to do more than just practice casting, ideally to find some surface-feeding panfish that I might entice to take an imitation insect fashioned out of plastic foam.

Gray clouds covered most of the sky, leaving just a few gaps above the treeline to the west. The water lay flat calm. Over, among and beyond the bulrushes, left and right of the pier, dragonflies patrolled, their shapes reflected below. 

There were maybe half a dozen, demonstrating a kind of flight humans haven’t found a machine to mimic. Helicopters can hover but can’t dart about at random, this way, that way, changing altitude in a flash. Drones, with skilled hands on the controls, can maneuver in all directions, but not with the dragons’ speed and agility.

Anyway, the dragonflies had to be there for more than an entertaining aerial dance. In their erratic paths above the water they must have been pursuing food, possibly tiny midge flies that emerge from the lake on some evenings, though if they were there my aging eyes couldn’t detect them.

Standing at the end of the pier I stripped fluorescent-green fly line from the reel and started casting, a little farther each time, but taking care not to let my back-cast land the panfish bug in a branch of the trees behind me. 

Through practice I’ve learned to cast so that the leader rolls out smoothly and lays the bug down gently on the surface. Apparently, though, no bluegills or crappies were around to appreciate my technique. I’d let the bug sit for a few seconds. Give it a twitch. No response. Pause. Twitch. Nothing.

To the west the sinking bright-red sun found a keyhole-like slit in the clouds; a narrow vertical streak of light like neon appeared on the water and lingered for maybe half a minute. Then the clouds hid the sun again.

Around that time, just beyond the rushes, circular ripples began appearing, as if from tiny raindrops, though no rain fell. These likely were midges, up from the bottom sediment, reaching the surface and breaking into flight.

In the fading light I still couldn’t see them emerging from 20 or 30 feet out on the water, but clearly the dragons could. Their flight intensified; they dipped and darted in a way that to me appeared more random, but in reality was more purposeful.

I imagined them focusing their outsized compound eyes on the prey, using their legs like a basket to catch the midges on the wing, then feeding them into their crushing jaws. 

With a hatch underway I resumed casting, but once more to no avail. Panfish aren’t as fussy as trout, but any in the vicinity surely could tell the difference between a pinhead-sized midge and an artificial insect two-thirds of an inch long. 

I stayed a while and watched the dragons’ feeding orgy while the sun tried feebly to color the clouds that hid it from view. 

Ted Rulseh is a writer, author and lake advocate who lives on Birch Lake in Oneida County. His new book, “Ripple Effects,” has been released by UW Press. You can learn about it by visiting his website at https://thelakeguy.net.