This is about bugs. Big bugs. Ugly bugs. Bugs that swarm and eat whatever is in their path. These bugs have disgusting bug orgies and threaten human civilization, or at least threatened human civilization that one time.

Mormon crickets are not, strictly speaking, crickets, but that’s a little like saying that brook trout are not, strictly speaking, trout. It’s true enough, but not important. Mormon crickets are a bug, and they look like a big cricket. If you need to be precise they are a katydid, and sometimes in the spring–not necessarily every spring but some springs–they swarm. Their reproductive strategy is orgies.

The swarming males secrete a spermataphore, which is both sperm and nearly a third of a boy’s body mass. That secreted body mass is food for the girls. The spermataphore is called by entomologists–I kid you not–a nuptial gift. The females eat the nuptial gift and are both fed and fertilized. With every nuptial gift the girls have dinner with their date.

The females bury their now-fertilized eggs in the soil and march off to die. It’s a short but romantic life, but Kris wanted to know how the females got pregnant through their digestive tract? All I can say is that Many are the Wonders of Our World, Many are the Mysteries of God’s Plan, and all in all it’s probably a necessary quirk of evolution. These are big ugly girls, and the boys aren’t handsome either. Nobody’s gonna kiss ’em. They gotta take their romance as it comes.

Mormon crickets are more than two inches long. When they swarm they are everywhere you look. They can’t fly, thank goodness, because flying swarms of Mormon crickets would be a real horror, but what they can do is creep through the sage and down to the river, crawl along through the brush and the grass and the pathways, wander bankside from hither to yon, and best of all (and most relevant here) they can fall into the water.

Mormon crickets look a lot like Gulf Coast water bugs, American roaches, but even the roaches aren’t as big as the crickets. The roaches may not even be as hideous, though until now I’d have bet that every year water bugs were going to be the county grand champion of hideous. Oh my goodness Mormon crickets are ugly. Big and ugly. Hideous.

But not to trout. In the water they are to trout a DoorDash of protein, tasty and efficient for any trout big enough to swallow a three inch bug.

And this brings us to the ugly truth about fly fishing for trout: it’s not actually about casting skill, or beautiful rivers, or even stylish fishing clothes from Orvis or Simms . . . It’s first and foremost about what trout eat, and what trout eat, first and foremost, are bugs. If you can make a fly look like the bug that trout are eating, and make it float somewhat naturally, then you will like as not catch feeding trout.

Artificial flies can be pretty enough, but they mostly mimic bugs, and most bugs for most of their lives are just plain damn ugly. Of course ugliness is in the eyes of the beholder, and finding a bunch of big ugly bugs committing mass suicide by throwing themselves into a river screaming help! help! help! is to a trout a beautiful thing. It should also be a beautiful thing to every fly fisher.

That’s why I am so enamored with Mormon crickets. How tasty they are to trout! How beautiful they are to me!

We started fishing early, before the crickets really started moving, and our guide, Eli Koles with Western Rivers Flyfisher Guides, first rigged my rod with an underwater nymph below a surface foam cricket. I caught fish, mostly on the nymph, and they were good fish, biggish browns. Then around lunchtime the crickets got active. Eli parked the drift boat at the bank, and we watched the crickets march along in twos or threes or half-dozens. It made for a queasy lunch. These are some mighty ugly bugs.

After lunch Eli cut off our nymphs and in the afternoon we only fished with big foam cricket imitations. Everything was crickets. All of our fishing was on the surface.

I fished my foam cricket in softer current downriver below the boat. I don’t know what Kris was doing. I was watching my cricket, not Kris, not Eli, not the shoreline . . . it was just me and that cricket floating together down the river. Did Kris catch fish? No idea. Watching that bit of floating brown foam 30 feet below the boat was all I was good for.

And because the flies were so big we weren’t catching mediocre fish. The browns that came up for crickets were, I swear, all north of 18 inches. I caught one rainbow, and it was easily 20″. No no no no. It was easily 21″. It’s getting bigger as we speak.

If you read much about fly fishing–and only baseball can match fly fishing for the ruination of good paper–you will sooner or later read something about the Green River below the Flaming Gorge Dam, and you will read about the three river sections named, imaginatively, A, B, and C.

A is closest to the dam and is about 7 miles long. To float A, you put in close to the dam. B is about eight miles long, and is, believe it or not, immediately downriver from A. We fished B because, after I’d carefully studied the qualities of the river and considered the various alternatives, Eli told us where we were going to fish. We fished B.

C is furthest from the dam and has the fewest fish, but it’s also the least fished. It’s about 11 miles long.

My suspicion is that the A, B, and C designations don’t really have much to do with the peculiarities of the river or the fishing, but everything to do with where somebody some years ago built reasonably spaced boat ramps. The truer designations would be “the part of the river below Boat Ramp One, Two, or Three.” Unless you’re familiar with the river, then once you get out of sight of the dam you won’t know where you are anyway, and as for fishing, I’m convinced that at least when there are Mormon crickets, anywhere on the Green River is everywhere the best fishing in the world.

Eli told us the story of the Miracle of the Crickets, which was that one time that Mormon crickets threatened civilization. Ok, it wasn’t all of civilization, but it was 1848 Mormon civilization in Salt Lake Valley. Mormons came to Salt Lake in 1846. In 1848, along with their second spring’s crops, the Mormon crickets came. Having properly filled out the paper work to qualify as a Biblical plague, the Mormon crickets started eating everything in sight.

The newly-settled Mormons faced starvation. The indigenous occupants of Western Utah, the Goshute, Paiute, and Shoshone, almost certainly included roasted and dried crickets in their diet, and would have seen the cricket invasion exactly like brown trout saw the cricket invasion: a God-send of tasty morsels. To the Mormons though eating crickets was like drinking Coca-Cola, or worse. There are emergencies when drinking Coca-Cola is permissible to Mormons, but none of the Mormons seem to have considered eating the crickets.

Then the miracle happened. California gulls came out of nowhere and gorged on crickets, then regurgitated the indigestible parts and gorged some more. That’s why seagulls are the state bird of Utah.

To be honest I wouldn’t have eaten a cricket either. At least I wouldn’t have eaten a cricket outside of a hip Oaxacan restaurant.

The Green was particularly high when we floated–I think over 4,000 cfs against a normal flow of around 900. The high flow had nothing to do with rain, but was purposefully released to wash invasive smallmouth from their spawning beds. It’s a smart strategy, and Eli didn’t think that the high flow affected fishing. There were other guide boats on the river with us, and sometimes I would watch them across the river, still fishing nymphs under bobbers. What the hell were they doing? Why were they fishing tiny underwater nymphs when there were all these beautiful, giant, edible bugs on the water?

Eli said that Western River Flyfishers emphasized floating flies instead of nymphs when possible, and seeing other anglers still fishing nymphs made me really happy we’d lucked into Eli. Eli and all those beautiful, giant, edible bugs.

At day’s end when Eli rowed us across the river from the far bank to the final take-out, he told us to skate our flies across the current. It was the very last possible fishing of the day, and it was a fishing method that is guaranteed to work only when you read about somebody else doing it. This time it worked for me. My fly got slammed. I set the hook. I played the fish to the boat and then Eli released it. It was a great fish.

Do you see that photo right there? Do you know why that is the greatest fishing photo ever taken? I, of course, am the angler, but that’s not what’s important. I probably could have tucked in my shirt a bit better, and my sun buff doesn’t really match my shoes. My pants are a bit droopy. My rod is bent, but that’s not what’s important, either. What’s important is the guy standing in the water by the drift boat at the take-out. Look at that guy’s face. I have been waiting for that jealous face my entire life.

And that guy, that guy right there, had to watch. Not that I would ever gloat.

Hee hee hee.

Man, I could have kissed those beautiful bugs.