No Showers. No Cooking. It's All About the Trout When the Mayflies Hatch

TEXT AND PHOTOS BY DAVE KARCZYNSKI

Traverse, Northern Michigan’s Magazine | JUN '20 39

AFTER SEVERAL YEARS OF WAITING, IT WAS FINALLY HAPPENING: HEX SEASON WAS HERE.

To the midwestern trout angler, the mayfly known as Hexagenia limbata is the universe’s one clear compensation for our region’s missing mountains, our absent ocean, the danger of moving through life knowing that, one day, you may be called upon to drive through Indiana. To miss Hex limbata, the great redeemer, five years in a row points to an existential crisis that asks, “What, oh angler, are you doing with your life?”

The problem lay in the fact that every year, I seemed to get a juicy writing assignment that coincided with Hex time. There was the June I spent surrounded by thousands of puckering grayling in a Polish mountain valley smeared with wildflowers. The June I spent in Alaska swinging through tiny remote tributaries looking for early run king salmon. The June I spent hammered by black flies while hammering landlocked Atlantic salmon in Labrador. But no matter how good the day had been, when I went to bed each night in one of these distant rivers, I was haunted by what I was missing out on back home in Michigan: Gigantic, demon-eyed trout with spots as big as your fist, and moonlit mudflats that went from calm to boiling in the blink of an eye. “Next year, I fish Hex,” I would whisper to myself in the darkness after the camp generator was killed, or the northern lights glittered forth above a horizon of spruce. But then winter would come again and some exotic opportunity would drift into view, and like a spring brook trout, I’d rise to it. And then, last year, I snapped. “No more,” I thought. And just to show the universe how serious I was, I bought a trout camp.

Read more in the June, 2020 issue of Traverse, Northern Michigan’s Magazine | Scroll down to purchase

Dave Karczynski teaches writing and photography at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.