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river rat: Like when they were young.
"A dollar each is what they're worth. One dollar if they're alive, nothing if they're dead."
That's what Clete's brother told us one day at the hardware store. Clete had an older brother named Dave just like me and Curt had one. Both Daves grew up on the river doing pretty much the same things we did only they did them first.
When Clete's brother Dave told us how much hellgrammites were worth to local fisherman and to the guides that took weekend fishermen out hunting for lunkers we got to thinking. The three of us, we sat down in the dirt by the loading dock on the river side of the hardware store to calculate exactly what that would mean if each guy wanted to pocket twenty dollars before tomorrow afternoon when the carnival had its opening night. What that meant was at least two hellgrammites each per hour for eight to ten hours starting early tomorrow morning. Even though I'd never seen one alive and didn't know a thing about how to catch them I said, "No sweat."
I was familiar with rubber lures depicting their larval stage, but I doubt I ever saw the real deal until that day after we figured how much money we could make in a week if we just applied ourselves. Rubbery and jiggling, a jumble of little legs and segmented from head to toe they looked alien even among purple rubber worms that glowed in the dark, and menacing hanging next to a display card full of red devil spoons with triple barbed hooks and brass spinners. Why, we could quit school and harvest hellgrammites full time, one of us said out loud in the same voice a Vegas gambler uses after his first payout.
"The tough bodied, black larvae were the best thing a man could put on a hook if that man wanted to catch bass," dad said like a schoolteacher. "They'll stay on a hook and keep on wrigglin' and scrigglin' all day long if you're smart about it." I liked that he talked to us like we were little kids even though I was "nine and seven eigths" at the time.
Dad told us about the multi-legged critters long ago when we asked him what in the world those black thingamajiggies were hanging on the tackle rack at the hardware store. He said he'd show me a live one some day and then told me that I'd seen 'em in their adult stage, of that there was no doubt.
"Those are the big flying bugs that dive bomb us at night on the river shore in late August." He was sure I'd seen them and he was right. Who could forget?
"You mean to tell me those things come from little, bitty squirmy bugs?" I couldn't believe the sparrow sized flying menaces we called flying hellgrammites were transformed from an armored critter that could barely move and preferred to live under a rock in the bottom of a fast moving stream rather than fly through the night hunting for, for... Good Lord! What poor creature was it that flying hellgrammites lived to eat?
Our brother Dave took us fishing in the channels hundreds of times late at night. The last trip before we started finding and catching the dollar-a-bug bait, Curt, Dave and I found a good spot below a broad rock that looked like the grill of the DeSoto in the framed photo on the mantle. The picture was of dad and his teenage pals down by the river standing in front of someone's pride and joy. If I turned my head sideways the boulder looked like that same car nosing its way out of a garage only the garage is the river and the car never gets any further than past the chrome of the headlights and turn signals. Curt heaved the grappling hook anchor up above where the brown car's hood ornament would've been as Dave eased the boat to a stop at the chain's limit leveraging the boat pole against the rocky bottom to slow us down. The chain paying out over the edge of the bow of the aluminum john boat was slow motion machine gun fire from the bottom of a tunnel. If I were a fish that would've been the signal to run, but I'm not a fish and fish don't in fact run, they dart.
The lone tree on the hill behind town did its job filtering the setting sun as we baited our lines and adjusted our seat cushions. A beer cracked itself open in Dave's hands, he showed off opening a bottle top with one hand, holding the bottle with the bottom of his palm and pinky while deftly twisting the MGD cap off with his thumb and forefinger. A golden black flicker spiraled past me, the water swallowing the crimped aluminum cap the way the night was gobbling the last rays of light. The moon would be up in two hours. My hands already smelled like fish guts.
I caught a twenty inch catfish on my first cast. Softshelled crayfish with their carapaces crushed made them "self chumming" and more efficient that anything other than rotten worms. They stayed on the hook longer, too. The same crab on my hook caught two more cats later in the evening. If you crushed the shell just right they'd hold on the barb of a hook and still leak out the magic fish gut smelling inner juices that attracted catfish and any other nocturnal feeders. Bass fed by sight, catfish by scent. That's why bass will go after some gaudy trinket that looks like it could've been bought late night on QVC to hang around a woman's neck. Bass have bad taste in jewelry, and food come to think of it, if they'll eat a hellgrammite.
To fish at night most folks use a small Coleman lantern set up in the bottom of the boat. A little light made it easier to bait a hook, replace a leader, crack open a beer when it got pitch black out on the river. Dave took a heavier hand with night lighting. Long ago he welded a rig for the bow and stern of his johnboats that would let him hang as many as four kerosene lanterns at each end of the boat, swaying suspended, five feet out from the edge of the boat's transom and bow, two to three feet above the water. At night his boats floated on two giant cushions of light emanating from each end with passengers appearing marooned on an island in the middle that read far darker than one would expect.
When gigging for fish or frogs Dave's light rigs brought to mind the saying "shooting fish in a barrel" and were every bit as illegal as the ease of gigging light-paralyzed fish or frogs made a conscientious sportsman recognize. I don't know why Dave insisted on cranking the full lights up when we were just going to fish sitting still below a monument to the automotive industry swaying back and forth gently on the water's current. A dim light to bait and work our rigs was all that we required. That much light made me feel self conscious. It made me feel like I was on stage even though anyone on the river would have to pass within ten feet to tell who was who.
Bugs were attracted to the light. Big bugs. Grasshoppers and locusts not aware of their own rhythms found those lights and dove towards their source without regard to anything in their way. Flying hellgrammites found the lights too. They batted their ten inch gossamer wings together, a double set of wings, rattling against the aluminum foil shields wrapping one side of each lantern. One of them landed on my arm and clamped its long pincers into my shirt sleeve. It fell against the crotch of my elbow and felt hot like a black snake's skin warmed in the summer sun. The bug tried to take off with its pincers still attached to the frayed sleeve of my favorite National Lampoon Black Sox baseball jersey. It tugged hard before letting go and flying back to the light and I thought maybe only twenty or thirty of them pulling their efforts in a coordinated fashion might just be able to lift me off the ground.
Clete showed us where to find the larval versions and I was amazed to find out where they thrived. He waded out into the swift rapids fifty feet from our anchored boat sitting in a grass patch in that crisp early morning light. Foggy mist rolled on the water like yellow smoke in the sunlight. We got up extra early for a summer's day to make the cash that would certainly pay for our mastery of tossing balls at stacks of milk bottles and allow us to sneak a peak into the tent where the weird naked dancers shook their fat asses and the guard liked to drink too much. We poled almost to the other side of the river, not far from the tracks that chugged past Millersburg to lift up rocks and harvest the dollar bills stuck to their undersides with sticky black feet.
"Lift the flat rocks up slowly so each one makes a dam as you do it," he said tilting his head to the side, leading by example. "Slowly," he repeated calmly, a better teacher than most. "Otherwise the current will wash 'em away."
Rushing water made a smooth ripple, then cascade, and then gave way to the stone as its flat edge broke the surface. He stood it up on end and pointed to the slowly gyrating lavae.
"There," he said with enthusiasm on his smile, in his eyes, that I recognized from when we were really young and he showed me how to shoot a bb gun. "Pick 'em up right behind the pincers so the ass pincers can't get at you." There is a larger segment right behind the pincers that looks smooth as an onyx jewel stone. The segmented, multi-legged creepy crawly looked just like the ones hanging in the hardware store only this one moved on its own and tried like hell to wriggle around and pinch Clete's palm. This one's skin wasn't the shiny rubber surface of the fakes. It looked more like blackened pewter. It looked wrong.
He put his arm and hand behind his hip, around his back where Curt had already opened a bait bucket tethered to his own hip and now angled it to catch the black, multi-legged, pissed off animal. Clete dropped his catch into the bucket's black mouth and grabbed another one as I grabbed my first one missing the broad segment behind the pincers by a thumb's width. I picked the undulating bug up anyhow and felt the burn of the tail pincers lancing into the soft side of my middle finger then felt the weight of the rest of the three inch long bug hanging from the wound. It hurt but not enough to keep me from giving Clete and Curt the finger with the bug holding on upside down just above the tiny drop of blood oozing out from where it got me. They laughed and then went silent. I forgot and let the head go loose on me. It swung around and did what it had been doing as a species for a million years, it defended itself. First with its tail pincers and then just after I raised my middle finger, the main pincers of its head sunk their half inch long barbs into my knuckle. Curt and Clete watched as if I was getting my finger cut clean off.
In the adult stage Corydalus, or Dobson Fly or Flying Hellgrammite, the pincers grow to over two inches, sometimes three inches in length. Some mystery hormone causes them to grow into long, arcing, bony mandibles that look a lot like ice tongs. The muscles controlling the pincers thankfully do not keep pace with the overdeveloped tongs, rendering the long levers ineffectual as pincers in the winged adult stage. In the larval stage the short pincers and muscles that move them can cut through skin and callouses just as the one attached to my middle finger was doing to the edge of that digit's joint as I stood giving Clete and Curt the bloody finger.
I screamed. I screamed and slung my hand to my side splitting off the main body from the head segment, the pincers still attached to my skin and the stumpy black body oozing green into my wound. This cruel, cruel bug and I shared fluids.
I fell down backwards into the rapids flat on the water like a soggy mattress falling off a truck. I back flopped. Water filled my open, crying mouth and sucked into my nose as Clete and Curt's laughter turned to a quick panic. Clete dropped the rock he was harvesting and Curt flipped over the bait bucket spilling our carnival money as both of them dove for an ankle with the blessed reflexes and speed of teenage boys pulling me up from the swirling water before I had the chance to drown myself and take my bloody digit with me.
A half hour's work swam away to the safety of other rocks. I coughed for an hour aspirating river water wondering if any of the curling critters were in my clothes. Every itch or wrinkle sent a fresh panic through me. I took off my clothes in the middle of the river and nothing but imagination was wrong with my skin. Welts had risen where fear drove me to scratch and claw at bugs that weren't there.
The sun went down six hours later, long after we had recovered and together, with great effort on my part, collected over a hundred hellgrammites. Not a single one of my share of the catch was given an opportunity to meld its juices with mine.
While we spent every last cent of our bug money winning stuffed animals and choking down sno cones sprinkled with pixie stix, the flying hellgrammites took to the air mating in a way I imagine bugs in hell might. Pincers groping, wishing the way all older humans do that they had the strength to gouge and tear without tiring, like when they were young.
