A Gathering

I walked the 50 yards or so from the Yellow River campground to the upper section of Little Paint creek. The grasses along the narrow path were waist-high. As I passed, a cloud of tiny white butterflies rose around me and seemed to follow, a halo around my head, as if I were in a Garcia Marquez novel. It took a while before I realized that the butterflies were thick in the grass, not following me, but rather just rising as I passed, then dropping back down, replaced as I went on by others, a magical illusion of motion.

I was fishing under the dam on the White River. I looked down and saw fish, brown trout, large brown trout, circling around my feet. They were feeding on the insect larvae I was kicking up in the stream. I moved 20 feet closer to the shore to cast where they were, but they followed me, followed my boots and the kicking up of insects.

I was hiking the hills along the Root River. It was spring, and there were still dry oak leaves along the trail. Up along a ridge I began hearing something rustling on both sides of the trail. At first I thought squirrels. But I couldn’t see any. Maybe a smaller rodent? Or frogs or lizards? But I soon saw the hundreds of small grasshoppers, sunning themselves on the path, jumping off into the dried leaves just ahead of me, a noisy procession of tiny insects that together created a cacophony of the obscure.