• Skip to secondary menu
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to secondary sidebar

New York Almanack

History, Natural History & the Arts

  • Email
  • Facebook
  • RSS
  • Twitter
  • Adirondacks & NNY
  • Capital-Saratoga
  • Mohawk Valley
  • Hudson Valley & Catskills
  • NYC & Long Island
  • Western NY
  • History
  • Nature & Environment
  • Arts & Culture
  • Outdoor Recreation
  • Food & Farms
  • Subscribe
  • Support
  • Submit
  • About
  • New Books
  • Events
  • Podcasts

Poetry: Blackflies, Hence Wisdom

May 14, 2022 by Edward Zahniser 1 Comment

Blackflies, Hence Wisdom

The summer after I got out of the Army
in February 1968, Chris and I, who had
married while I was still serving, lived at
Mateskared from mid-April into October.
This was, even to this day, my worst ever
experience of blackflies. My family’s habit
of August vacations put us in the “between
season,” as the late Earl Allen often said:
“First the snow flies, then the blackflies.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson would have added:
“Blackflies live up to the brag about them.”

They irrupt like an Old Testament scourge,
begetting fear of the Lord, hence wisdom.
The only thing I could compare them with
were summer mosquitoes in Arctic Alaska,
in 1961, except blackfly bites are far worse
than mosquito bites. Both were scourges
before repellents: 612, then Off, now Deet.

In the Arctic, at Lobo Lake’s Sheenjek River
region on the Brooks Range’s south slope,
I never cleaned a lake fish whose stomach
wasn’t distended with mosquito larvae.
But Adirondack blackfly season is worse.

Read More Poems From the New York Almanack HERE.

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

Filed Under: Adirondacks & NNY, Arts Tagged With: art, Poetry

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Bob Meyer says

    May 14, 2022 at 11:32 AM

    Well Ed,
    My Alaska experience was luckily in the short fall period, late August/early September so not too bad.
    In my days of a full head if curly hair I painfully remember post hike showers where the initial rinse would be very red. Those bastards love me. 😡

    Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Primary Sidebar

Help Support Our Work

Subscribe to New York Almanack

Subscribe! Follow the New York Almanack each day via E-mail, RSS, Twitter or Facebook updates.

Recent Comments

  • David G Waite on Ellis Corners: Before Saratoga Spa State Park & SPAC
  • Eric braverman on Wall Street History: The Politics of New York’s First Banks
  • N. Couture on Haudenosaunee Creation Story & Sculptures with Emily Kasennisaks Stacey
  • Lee on The Mysterious Death of the Angel of Sing Sing
  • Elisa Nelson on Replica Canal Schooner Lois McClure Being Retired, Dismantled
  • Julie O’Connor on James Eights: An Albany Artist-Scientist Who Explored Antarctica in 1830
  • Bob Meyer on Geo-Musicalities: Jessika Kenney & Eyvind Kang in Saranac Lake
  • John Tepper Marlin on John and Vida: The Other Milhollands
  • Brandon Braman on The Two Hendricks: A Mohawk Indian Mystery
  • John Stewart III on The Saratoga Racecourse Backstretch Backstory

Recent New York Books

Spaces of Enslavement and Resistance in Dutch New York
ilion cover
Spare Parts
new yorks war of 1812
a prison in the woods cover
Visitors to My Street
Greek Fire
Building THe Ashokan Reservoir
ilion book cover
Bryan Jackson the Titanic Was Dooomed

Secondary Sidebar

preservation league
Protect the Adirondacks Hiking Guide