Unsteady fliers

I have been writing 600 blog posts about Turkey Vultures. I'm already on blog post number two or three, I don't know. I'm not sure. There's so many it's hard to keep track. But no matter how many it is, when one writes so much about Turkey Vultures one starts to learn things about Turkey Vultures.

I learned that Turkey Vultures are unsteady fliers. I learned it during research.

Isn't that great: 

Unsteady fliers. 

It means when Turkey Vultures float about and glide in all the beautiful and invisible air they are like graceful drunks, slightly inebriated on their diet of fizzing dead meat. Their wings dip and totter unsteadily while their line of flight remains smooth and pretty. Once you hear about it it is unmissable. They glide magically and smooth, but they rock unevenly, light in the wind. They always get there perfectly. It's how they do it. Watching Turkey Vultures all my life the unsteady flying was unmissable in its way all along, but it had no word before. There was no way to see it on its own. "Unsteady flier" lets it stand out for the taking. If you want it.

I want it.

I told my wife about Unsteady Fliers. Because it's interesting. And a day or two later we were walking out in the Minnesota River Valley. The valley was still flooded from the snows and rains of the earlier Spring. We walked back up to the top of the valley. We looked up in the sky to see a couple of Turkey Vultures, riding their invisible tornadoes, as they do.

"Unsteady fliers." We said.

Unsteady fliers. Just like all of us.

Mea culpa

The other day I was rather sharp when it came to a certain Minnesota dentist lion killer. I intimated quite strongly that he kept a pit of man eating sharks on his private island stronghold where he hunted shipwrecked human prey in a sporting, but still cruel and insane, manner. I also suggested this hunter might be found to have some billing irregularities when is came to his unusually lucrative dental practice.

But I wanted to say here that Who Am I To Judge? Who am I to judge this big game trophy hunter? Who am I to say it is so evil to bag a lion or an elk or polar bear? Who am I, sitting up here in my remote and dreamy vacation home, over the very shore of Lake Superior, to be so critical of a hunter who is ever following the thrill and danger and triumph and challenge of bringing down a ferocious beast?

I am no one to judge this dentist, no one at all. For I am a hunter too.

I am a fly hunter.

I am a hunter of flies, a hunter of the defenseless fly. And, sadly, I too understand and cannot resist the thrill of the hunt.



Like any youth I grew up making the idle, irritated swats at any number of flies. But I remember no particular accuracy or avidity in this endeavor. There was no noticeable proclivity or indication of my future. It was not an avocation that developed gradually or with any warning. It happened all at once, with a house.

In my early twenties I moved to a house in a small town in Sonoma County called Penngrove. It was a charming, albeit rundown, house, on the edge of the lovely wine country countryside. Like an astonishing number of places I have moved into, this one in Penngrove had been driven to the edge of decrepitude by its previous tenant. I have, in the past, moved into a former heroin den in Oakland, and my current house itself, now immaculate and adorable some $40,000 and 40,000 man (and woman!) hours later, had, when we moved in, gaping holes in the walls and the imprimatur of the previous long term tenant's hardcore poverty "never call the landlord" aesthetic. The last tenant of the house of my wife and I was actually so much like the last tenant in the Penngrove house that they are nearly identical in my mind. The main difference with the Penngrove tenant (we'll call him Jerome) was that he hadn't lived there as long and so had done less sustained, erosive damage than the last tenant (we'll call him Jerome) of our own house.

The Penngrove house was filthy when I moved in with my friend Patty, and, temporarily, her former boyfriend Seth. Jerome appeared to live on cheap steaks he broiled directly in the oven's broiling pan (that he never cleaned), and he dealt with the vast clouds of greasy smoke this produced by throwing open all the screenless windows in the house. As to how he dealt with the terrible, vast swarms of flies this ushered into the house, he didn't.

And thus the Penngrove house was when Seth, Patty, and I arrived late in the summer of 1988. We crossed over with Jerome, who was having himself a farewell steak. The house was smoky, filthy, and swirling with flies.

We cleaned. We built our own screens for all the windows. But the flies were a more persistent problem. They moved. They did not leave when one told them to. And they were fast, wary, and elusive. Nothing we did was very effective in ridding ourselves of them, and ever they emerged from hidden sources.

Until we hit upon the vacuum cleaner. There was an old, upright vacuum in the house. I don't know if the bottom part was gone or broken or we simply removed it, but the upright vacuum terminated in a simple tube. The tube produced a mediocre, at best, level of suction. One could not simply point the vacuum at a fly and suck it up, one had to stalk the fly, slowly. One had to get within a foot or so of the fly without startling it, and then swiftly thrust. The vacuum, thus handled, sucked up the fly into its innards and produced in its wielder a tiny burst of triumph.

Through days of careful hunting, and with improving technique, we slowly cleared our house of flies.

And a fly hunter was born.

Let us move forward in time some quarter of a century. My wife and I rent this beautiful vacation home on the shore of Lake Superior. It is ours for a week at a time. It feels a little like heaven here. And yet it also makes me think of that Penngrove house. Maybe because they're both in such uniquely pretty places. Maybe because they're the only rural houses I've ever lived in. Or maybe because they both somehow manage to produce, from out of nowhere, a slow stream of flies.

The first summer we were here I was hounded by a fly and hounded it back. I stalked and attacked it for 24 hours, until, in something akin to a miracle, I caught the fly in my bare hand and removed it to the outdoors (account here). This was clearly not a sufficient solution for the number of flies showing up in this house. I needed a clever and powerful device in the nature of Penngrove's sawed-off vacuum.

We went to a hardware store and I put my most creative, problem solving frame of mind into play. They were selling some cheap, small, very long handed plastic spatulas. These spatulas were flimsy and whippy and just the thing. I took one of these home and called it a "fly spatula". I used it to swat flies. 

This fly spatula was brilliant. I keep it nearby always. And when, as one does every hour or two, a fly shows up, I patiently track it. Then with one sharp swat I splatter the fly into whatever surface it has alighted upon. Then I clean it up with a half wet kleenex.

I am a fly hunter.

Do I enjoy all this fly hunting?

Well, yeah, sort of.

And if it were to turn out that I killed a fly that was beloved in the nearby town of Grand Marais? If they had a mascot fly that tourists came from far away to see and to buy stuffed versions of and postcards and wind up toys? If I killed that fly? If I became a notorious mascot fly killer reviled throughout all the Northlands, what defense could I mount? What could I possibly say? 

Nothing. There is nothing I could say. I would be guilty. I am a fly hunter.

So maybe I should try and go easy on that dentist lion hunter, even if he is probably a cannibal or something. I have my own crimes to speak to. I have blood on my own hands to account for, even if that blood appears to come in the color of green, and is produced in tiny, tiny, tiny amounts.

They're not all about flies

I am willing to accept defeat at some things, but I was not inclined to take my ill fated and pestilential inflatable canoe excursion onto Lake Superior as a defeat. Against an array of minor but solid enough obstacles my wife and I did manged to take my boat out onto the waters of Lake Superior and paddle it around for a bit. That the experience was a blur of biting flies, miserable sweatiness, and foot cramps did not make the trip into a failure. A thick portion of triumph was written into the endeavor by the mere act of setting onto the water and floating. That it was not fun, or serene, or comfortable just meant that I was well done with all that success when we hurriedly abandoned my boat, barely above the shore, and beat a hasty retreat into the sweetness of our rental lake home.

My mission was accomplished. I was finished, and happy to be so.

So it came as a surprise to me to find myself restlessly looking down on the lake from the great bank of windows in our cabin's long main room. The lake looked unrealy calm. The sun was out and alone in the sky, but not feeling the least bit fierce. Everything looked not grand or glorious or wild or compelling. It all looked very, very...pleasant.

And I thought "My boat is just sitting down there, all ready, and right near the shore. I can roll up the pant legs of my jeans. I can take off my shoes and socks down on the rocks."

So in just two minutes I found myself floating alone on the great lake. I am horribly tempted to say that the water was like glass, but it wasn't quite. It was wet for one, and slow, small swells would roll through it, too wide and gentle to feel, but barely visible. The water was peculiarly easy to paddle on, its lack of waves and winds and currents seemed to give every stroke a kind of magical perfection.

There were no flies. It was not hot or cold, a gently haze seemed to soften everything. It was quiet. My green glass view of a rocky bottom was perfectly clear until, traveling out, at some precise depth, through some trick of the light, I could not see into the water at all.

It gave me one of the strangest, floating, dazzling feelings in my stomach that I have ever had in any sort of wild place ever. Looking back to the shore was interesting; my house, the other houses, the engagingly rough shore, and the shape of the land, but it was the looking out and away that put strange music into quiet reality. That placid water, endless before me, flatter than any land could ever be, featureless, infinite, and with me alone. I was paddling into something so peculiarly close to nothing, immense, full of water and air and nothing more. I paddled into that nothing, and as I did I caught sight of some tiny bit of debris, drifted or blown far out from land. It was the smallest speck, only made visible by the unfaltering, uninterrupted cleanness of Lake Superior's surface. Drawn, human, to imperfection, I paddled towards it.

I think I expected somehow a chip of bark, some tiny jot of forest debris, but that is not what I found. There, however far from a distant shore, alone, utterly, was a fly, sleeping on the surface of the water.

I did not disturb it, and I paddled slowly towards home.

Lord of the flies

For all my talk of mooses on my journey to the north shore of Lake Superior they are hardly the signature animal of my trip. Yes, one is adorning the mug from which I am currently drinking coffee, and it's quite possible that within a mere 50 miles of me, at this very moment, there is a moose ambling along in some soft, marshy ground. But that is hardly the same as having to say to my wife "I'm not sure if we can get down to the lake shore just now. The trail is all clogged up with moose."

No, for sheer presence and demanded consideration on these trips, it is the lowly fly that repeatedly seizes the crown of the animals. It is a certain kind of a crown, and ever so tiny, but whatever that crown is, it definitely belongs to the fly. When we first walked into our lake house here a neat dozen flies swirled and basked in the luxury of our kitchen. When we went boating on Lake Superior we were the tasty snack that great extended families of flies had been excitedly waiting for all summer, and as often as not in the morning it is a single fly that, dancing on us, buzzing us, and crawling on us, insists that we greet the day. "C'mon," The fly seems to say "It's morning! Life is short! Rise and shine! Try and kill me!"

"All right all right." I say sleepily as I make a clumsy, annoyed swat that merely whacks myself in the head.

And yet for all this the flies are not too bad this time of year here. I sit now writing before the windows completely undisturbed. I doubt there is a single fly active in our entire house. I could likely go out onto the blissful balcony and be bothered not at all. There is something here called cluster fly season that sounds like a piece from The Amityville Horror, flies swarming on the windows and gathered together in unrelenting masses. But that season is a month or more away. There is also black fly season which involves razor mouthed biters. That one ended some time in June though.

Last year I wrote the story (here) of my 16 hour pitched battle at this house with a single fly. I recounted how it tormented me, and of my futile attempts to destroy it. The odyssey culminated in my surprisingly catching the fly in my bare fist, on my 795th try, taking it outside, releasing it, and sharing a peaceful moment of transcendent Zen bliss with that fly out on our balcony above the lake.

This year I brought a fly swatter.

Fly and me

The lake house my wife and I are at is perfect. This may not be the nicest thing to tell you. It lacks grit and reality for any reader and changes even the least boastful of all writers (which I already severely lack any claim to) into a bit of a braggart. But I cannot tell you this tale without starting here. It is perfect here. And perfection, personal and eternal though it may be, also somehow only exists in bookends, in the niggling bits of imperfection that obsessively sketch its borders. This is about a small imperfection looming large and the restoration of harmony.

We are much in and out here, onto the balcony, testing the air, down to our great lake, in and out through sturdy wood doors made, like our walls here, mostly of glass. Outside there are sometimes many bugs, and I have perhaps enough mosquito bites to satisfy those readers bored with my claims of perfection. Sometimes we are chased inside or just choose to come inside and someone slips in with us. A moth is not so great a problem, and I have caught one in a glass and taken it out. A mosquito or two is a misery, but it is not hard to get lucky with a stray swat, and, if not, ten minutes of concerted hunting will always do the trick. A fly though, a fast, uncanny, smart fly can be a small torture of surprising persistence and near unsolvability. Last night such a fly slipped into our house.

This fly was a genius and a miracle of speed, a master of irritation. It began its visits at dawn, buzzing loudly about our heads, landing on our skin, circling, racing, always patternless and endlessly interested in our company. For reasons of its own it would disappear until the exact point where my spirit would start to calm, and then it would return. All through the morning hours I'd engage in long, futile hunting expeditions with a rolled up magazine. I'd wait for it, through long tracking operations, to land some place whackable, and I'd whack. There'd usually be a slight injury to my hand, a loud noise, and a curious sense of missed opportunity, curious because one wonders what opportunity I was missing when I was not getting within the realm of distant hope of even coming near this fly.

I wanted to kill this fly very much.

I was not going to kill this fly.

The morning advanced and the fly only grew faster and louder and smarter.

I so wanted to kill this fly.

I won't draw this all out with all the long tales of all the ridiculous things whacked and flung with all the comedy of something so utterly without effect. But it was all there. Know that it was there.

I was in the kitchen. The fly landed on the counter. My thousandth chance. I swept my hand across the counter, an odd attempt even more futile than most, and the strangest thing happened. I caught the fly. I caught the fly!

I took the fly outside. I threw it out of my hand onto the wide wooden plank of the balcony railing. The fly, unphased, looked up at the sun and clouds and felt the wind.

"It's nice to be outside." It seemed to say.

I breathed in the perfect air that smells of pines and almost of the sea. I was calm for the first time in five hours.

"Yes it is." I seemed to say. "Yes it is."