Inevitably you will eat a bug someday. Living on the shores of Lake Michigan, in the Northern Wood, is a privilege. Indeed, I am sitting here looking at the Lake in a southerly blow, watching white-caps form or a turquoise sea. It is cloudless, except for the swarms of this black gnat that form above the tree lines. You can see these swarms from miles away. It is amazing. If it’s not windy in the morning you can hear them buzzing overhead. The mass of gnats makes that humming sound you hear from one of those big mercury lamps that humm in the night. The columns of bugs rise in a tornado like pattern above the trees as much as 300 feet long and 50 feet wide. You have to be careful when they are hatching and you are outside because they will find their way into your ears, nose, mouth and yes, I’ve swallowed or inhaled them. Now if you’re a trout this is a pretty good thing. It’s the feast time of year for fish following the long winter fast. In fact, I just finished catching 5 very feisty rainbow trout today. They were 10 to 15 inches. The largest fish I had on today was the first one I hooked, but he obtained his freedom by spitting the hook before I could get him near the bank. He had a rather large girth to him, I think he must have been 3 pounds. Pretty nice for a cold pond Michigan rainbow. I used a variety of bugs, trout candy, but alas the wooly bugger outperformed them all. This is typical of course. So anyway, it occurred to me that dealing with these relatively harmless, non-biting swarms of gnats is just one price I must pay to be surrounded by one of the most beautiful places on earth. Sometimes you have to swallow your pride in life. Sometimes you have to swallow food somebody prepared that tastes awful, because you are polite. And sometimes, we must even eat a bug. Even bugs are good, they fatten the fish in advance of when the long, cold nights come to the land. They are good in that they give me something to write about. They are good because somebody gets paid to study them. Yeah, for me, up here in the Nook in the North, I’ve come to even like the bugs too.