The Countrey is strangely incommodated with flies, which the English call Musketaes, they are like our gnats, they will sting so fiercely in summer as to make the faces of the English swell’d and scabby, as if the small pox for the first year. Likewise there is a small black fly no bigger than a flea, so numerous up in the Countrey, that a man cannot draw his breath, but he will suck of them in: they continue about thirty days say some, but I say three moneths, and are not only a pesterment but a plague to the countrey. -- John Josselyn, Two Voyages to New-England (1674). [Josselyn spent several years on his brother’s farm in Maine before to returning to England to become the first naturalist to describe the Maine interior.]

Learn to Live With Blackflies?

It’s Possible, Up to a Point

Question: Why are the best canoe tripping rivers in Maine almost deserted during the good weather and water flow conditions in early June?

Answer: The blackfly, a biting insect of genus Simulium.

Question: What is Kimball’s Plane?

Answer: A mental, possibly spiritual, state of interaction with black flies in which the black flies don’t bother the human subject.

Question: Are you serious?

Answer: Read on…….

Introduction

I swear this is a true account of pesterment.

There’s a moment of awareness, sometimes, when an event occurs that leads you to discover that you’ve passed some sort of boundary. Or perhaps an event doesn’t occur, as when the dog didn’t bark in the Sherlock Holmes story, and you notice it only in retrospect. Just as deja vu is the sensation that one has been in a similar place or situation before, the feeling I’m trying to describe is the sensation that one hasn’t been in a similar situation before, that something about the situation is new. Something that isn’t obvious to you.

Say you’ve spent a long time learning to ski. One day you realize, after absent-mindedly making it through a difficult section, that you’ve achieved a level of competence you hadn’t known before, and this new awareness makes everything a little different -- makes you a little different -- from then on. Before, you had to think about technique – you planned how to cut a turn -- but now it’s become part of you, and you simply do it by imagining it.

Sometimes you find yourself aware of a change that has gradually happened. Once during a casual conversation at a campsite an Allagash ranger said to four of us old friends -- he was describing his colleague – “he’s about my age.” That was all, just an offhand remark. After a few minutes it dawned on us that he meant “in contrast to your advanced age.” We knew only then that we four had become old, had passed into forty-something maturity in the eyes of the twentyish ranger. Our realization of this passage in our lives could not have been more dramatic if the ranger had waved a magic wand to suddenly give us gray hair and crow’s feet. To suddenly discover something new about oneself can be a startling experience. Sometimes it’s unsettling, sometimes uplifting.

Here’s the the true account of pesterment, blackflies in particular: one subsequent June there were again four of us on the Allagash, each with a canoe and a fishing rig. Every day the sun beat down from clear blue skies; good food and dry firewood were abundant; our pace was leisurely. We all agreed it was as close to an ideal vacation as could be imagined. We wore the familiar Allagash like our favorite flannel shirt. We even located a legendary secret fishing spot that had eluded us for years.

At our unhurried pace other parties would pass by as we stopped to make camp and to fish. One party was a business-like group of men who appeared experienced and well-equipped. They passed us at Long Lake Dam.

When we arrived at Michaud Farm ranger station, we asked about the availability of campsites downstream. During this conversation we learned that the party who had passed us had quit their river trip. “They couldn’t stand the black flies,” the ranger explained.

“Black flies?” we asked. “What black flies?”

Aha! A moment of awareness crept up on us! We knew then that we had passed a boundary, a boundary of bug tolerance. We had not merely endured, we had not even noticed a plague of black flies that had driven others away.

Airborne Vermin

Canoeing adventurers divide “bugs” into three categories of man-eating insects. These are mosquitoes, black flies, and no-see-ums. Each has its modus operandi.

Night and day, as long as it’s warm enough, mosquitoes will be homing in on warm-blooded creatures. Their needle-like mouths can probe through almost any layer of fabric, even a tight weave of canvas or denim. However, mosquitoes provide their human victims with a sporting chance. They announce their presence with an audible whine. They can be felt, just barely, when they land on skin, and they can be felt, some seconds later, when they break the skin, giving the victim a chance to react. Besides, it’s rare when mosquitoes occur in packs dense enough to cast a shadow.

No-see-ums live around warm, moist, grassy areas and come out only at nightfall and go away again when the sun comes up. Their individual bites are insignificant, but their aggregate effect is an exquisite itch over all the victim’s exposed skin. Fortunately, this irritation seldom lingers when the no-see-ums are gone.

Black flies are more numerous and barbaric. Compared to the surgical precision of the mosquito’s bite, the black fly’s bite is a bloody serration. They travel in regiments, crawling under cuffs, collars, and button plackets. They are often so numerous that a person’s sense of touch can’t detect them individually on his skin. By the time the victim feels them, they’ve already drawn blood and left a welt. They fly into ears and eyes, find their way through hair and under hatbands. They seem to have no fear of being crushed. The only good part is that black flies go away at night, and don’t bite while inside of tents. Hands down, black flies are the pre-eminent airborne vermin of the Maine woods. Whoever originated the phrase “in your face” as a description of aggressive persistence could have been thinking of black flies.

Conventional Defense Against Bugs

We will not pretend that bugs never bother even those who have passed the boundary of bug tolerance. If you’ve never spent whole days among them, without the luxury of going indoors for a rest, you’ll just have to use your imagination to understand why some campers give up and go home as fast as possible. We have been plagued mightily over the years and we’ve used a whole bag of tricks to avoid them.

An obvious line of defense against bugs is clothing, covering as much skin as possible. Since mosquitoes can penetrate through a single tight weave, there must be two fairly fine layers of cloth to protect against them, evidently because their probosci are not flexible enough bend around and through the second layer. Black flies are stopped even by a single layer of any moderate weave but they readily crawl around openings. Tight cuffs, waistbands, and hatbands are helpful. No-see-ums are also stopped by a single fine weave (We vividly recall that older-style mosquito netting didn’t work!) and tight openings. For defensive clothing, then, the best all-around outfit is tight enough to stop blackflies and no-see-ums at cuffs and collar, and dense enough to keep mosquitoes from drilling through.

Knowledge of the adversary’s habitat is a big help, too. Open spaces have fewer bugs than sheltered, shaded areas. Bugs have a harder time staying aloft in breezier areas. Dry areas produce fewer mosquitoes than wet areas. Black flies hatch from cool running water. Adding all these together, a general rule is that a higher, drier, and wider resort is less buggy. The ability to pick a good situation is helpful.

Both heat and smoke repel bugs. A campfire, even on a warm day, will provide the temporary relief of a bug-free zone. A smudge is a fire made smoky with green leaves or grass added to the fuel; bugs avoid flying into smoke. A smudge pot is a portable smudge, a metal bucket or large can containing hot coals and green stuff.. A smudge pot can be placed upwind, or under a table, so that the smoke drifts among the beleaguered humans. Smudges can provide a little zone of sanity at the campsite.

We’ve never found head-nets to be effective -- they’re more distracting than just the bugs. The black flies who specialize in mining and sapping inevitably get inside head nets and then one must try to crush the invaders without letting even more inside the headnet. Still, some folks like head-nets. We can’t argue with that.

There are various insect repelling substances, ranging from home-made to high-tech. American Indians used to rub down with fish oil when the bugs were thick. We haven’t tried this one, but it probably works, since bugs don’t like to land on oily or sticky surfaces. We suspect that this quality partly explains the effectiveness of Avon Skin-So-Soft, a skin lotion not developed or sold as bug juice, but nonetheless a reputable dope. There are aromatic washes, typified by the kind formerly sold as Old Woodsman, containing various proportions of camphor, pine tar, and pennyroyal. We think this combination smells nicer than Old Spice, and it invariably reminds us of old times and happy fishing. We’re not convinced of its effectiveness, however.

There is also a theory that the color of one’s clothing can affect the attention of black flies. We have never noticed any difference.

There is the organic compound DEET (diethyltoluamide, if we remember right) which removes varnish from paddles and fishing rods, causes skin irritation after a few hours, and probably causes cancer in black flies. We hate to use it, but since it seems to work we sprinkle it into our neckerchief when things are tough. Fortunately, things haven’t been tough for several years.

The fact is, however, that there is no truly effective means of avoiding contact with dense clouds of the crawling, biting pests if one is to sojourn in the woods during prime trout season. They will be there by the thousands, flying into your eyes, flying into your ears, biting you in several places as soon as your hands are occupied. They will be there. There is nothing one do can about the omnipresence of black flies.

Still, lots of old-timers survived black-fly season. How?

Dealing effectively with black flies is a matter of attitude. In fact, it would be more accurate to say that living comfortably among black flies is a matter of not dealing with them. The proper technique is no technique.

The Tao of Kimball

A few years ago we were introduced to an old fellow named Arthur Kimball who lived in a cabin beside a cool stream in the Maine woods -- in other words, he lived amid prime black fly habitat. When we met him, Kimball was relaxing, outside his cabin, in the spring sunshine. While we fidgetted and scratched, we noticed that Kimball hadn’t bothered to button his shirt and that dozens of black flies were continuously landing on his exposed skin, crawling around for a while, and then flying away without biting. This didn’t seem to bother Kimball. He didn’t seem to react to the insects, and he didn’t appear to have suffered a single black fly bite as he sat and talked. His apparent self-control was just short of astounding. Obviously Kimball had achieved a higher state of consciousness than we. We named this zen state of no-mind “Kimball’s Plane.”

Up to this point in our education, our approach had been to study just the black flies, assuming that the way to avoid being bitten was to find some substance or technique to do something to them. Intrigued by Kimball’s example, we set out to study not only the black flies, but our reactions to them.

What was the nature of the communication between man and pest? Our first hypothesis was that Kimball wasn’t bothered (and bitten) because something in his attitude or posture neutralized their predatory inclinations. Or perhaps other people get bothered and bitten because they somehow alert the black flies to their availability as prey. In either case, let’s call this the Attitude Hypothesis, which is ABlack flies bite humans only when the humans behave in a certain way in the presence of black flies.@ Was the unscathed Kimball doing something, or was he doing nothing? What was it that he did (or didn’t) that was different from what the itching, suffering we didn’t (or did)? If we could identify this behavior we could confirm the Attitude Hypothesis as an explanation of Kimball’s Plane.

A second hypothesis, not mutually exclusive with the first, was that the communication from human to black fly was transmitted through skin chemistry. We’ll call this the Immune-Response Hypothesis, and state it as Prolonged exposure to the bites of black flies elicits an immune response in some humans which tends to inhibit the biting of black flies, or perhaps minimize the effect of the bites. Although it was possible that Kimball’s attitude alone had altered his skin chemistry so as to produce a natural bug dope, we thought it far more probable that, if such an immunity existed, it was the result of many bites over a long period of time, an acquired immune-response.

And so, in the interest of science, we began to test these theories. For our first experiment, during a moment of leisure on the Saint John, we simply sat still and watched the black flies.

There were hundreds of them. They landed and crawled on our face and neck and hands, into our hair and ears -- you get the picture. Calmly as we could manage, we imagined that we were Kimball relaxing by his front door on a spring day.

Having more-or-less achieved a state of serenity (as close as anyone could get while crawled on by dozens of little flies), the first thing we observed was that very few of the black flies we could feel crawling around on our skin stayed long enough to bite. They’d land, take off, fly around, land again, and so on. Sure, some of them bit, but not nearly as many as we might have expected. It really wasn’t so bad! After a half-hour, we received perhaps a half-dozen bites after observing hundreds of black fly landings. We concluded that in our previous agitations we had wasted a lot of effort slapping at flies that wouldn’t have bitten us anyway.

The next thing we observed, as we maintained our cool for an extended period, was that the incidence of black fly landings diminished, although we could still see them flying around us. When we resumed moving our arms, they came closer and landed again. After further observation we concluded the bugs’ attraction to the human was related to the rapidity and range of the human’s movements.

Since our cool attitude seemed to have been effective, we concluded that the Attitude Hypothesis merited further study. It seemed that an effective response to black flies would include minimizing movement, particularly by not reacting to the feeling of the black flies landing on one’s skin. To this end, we would not slap at any bugs we felt on our skin, but would economically rub out any fly we felt biting us.

Our next experiment was conducted by observing others – that is, other people and other black flies.

At an Allagash River campsite abounding in black flies we observed several human subjects, some known to us and some not.

It was apparent that the subjects most disturbed by the black flies were the persons who were most agitated. Those subjects whose movements were economical and task-related expressed the fewest comments and displayed the fewest slapping and waving behaviors. Those who waved their arms around and slapped frequently expressed more (and more vehement) comments concerning their perceived vexations. We acknowledge the circularity of the proposition that calmer people appear to be less agitated. Even so, we concluded that as far as we cared the Attitude Hypothesis had been verified. That it provides a practical approach is the main thing. Since black flies are attracted to the sorts of movements that frenzied people exhibit, it is evident that the subjective experience of being vexed by black flies becomes a vicious cycle in which the subject’s response induces an escalation in the black flies’ activity.

Believing we had hit upon a useful method of minimizing the bother of black flies, we accustomed ourself to remaining calm in their presence. We didn’t wave our arms or slap at them, secure in the faith that if we didn’t get the heebie-jeebies we’d end up with just a few acceptable bites. After a while this deliberate approach became second nature and we didn’t think much about it.

What is the Sound of No Hand Slapping?

We never devised a way to test the Immune-Response Hypothesis. Truth is, we almost forgot about it as the years went by. When we ventured into the woods the black flies never seemed to be as bad as we might have expected. Since we never used it, we stopped bringing along a bottle of bug dope. We dressed defensively, of course, and we fired up a smudge pot once in a while, but mostly the presence of black flies became part of the background.

Then one day the Allagash ranger told us that the black flies we hadn’t noticed had driven others away. Suddenly we saw that gradually we had changed. We had arrived at Kimball’s Plane.

Remain calm. Keep practicing.

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