Fly Chi

Dateline: Perrot State Park, Wisconsin. July

Max was sitting in the campsite after breakfast, wondering what to do. He sat in the chair, facing the trailer, and listened to some music on his iPod, tapping his foot, oblivious to the couple in the campsite directly to his left. They were a pair of college students on break, flirting up a storm. But Max was oblivious to their carryings on, which had annoyed Isabel so much the day before. Max was in his own little world.

Max was wondering if he should be doing something more constructive. He sat there, tapping his foot, looking around. There was hardly a breeze, and gentle dappled light filtered through the trees overhead. To his left was a little semicircle of small tree trunks 6-8” in diameter.

After a while, max noticed a small fly hovering in the center of the semicircle, about at his eye level as he sat. Grooving with the music, he watched it. It just hovered there, and Max wondered what it was doing. So he began to watch it more carefully. Half his brain was engaged with the fly, half with the music.

The fly hovered, remarkably keeping the same station in space, despite the occasional gentle breezes. Its body was tilted a roughly a 45 degree angle, just like a hovering humming bird, and in the shaft of sunlight, max could see its wings moving as just a blur, roughly in the same arc and degree as a hummingbird. Every few seconds, the fly abruptly swiveled 90 degrees to face in a new direction. It seemed very alert.

Every few minutes, another insect passed by, and the fly, with amazing rapidity, zoomed off, apparently in some kind of chase. But within a few seconds, he always returned to the same station, continuing his patrol. The fly patrol. Some of the insects were smaller, but some seemed exactly the same size, possibly the same species. So, Max concluded that the fly was defending a territory, possibly a mating territory, against other male intruders. Rather like the Prairie Chickens on their booming grounds, Max thought. Either that, or the fly was chasing after prey insects—but Max never saw it catch anything.

Now the fly was pretty small, and Max had to concentrate. What Max didn’t realize is that his intent stare to his left, was directly into the campsite with the flirting couple. But Max didn’t see them—he didn’t see their mating dance—he had eyes only for the fly and it’s mating dance. They began to get annoyed—at first making remarks that gradually escalated to the rude—like “Dirty old man,” and “Peeping Tom,”, etc.” But Max couldn’t hear them because of his iPod.

Eventually, they left in annoyance, and on their way down the campsite lane, ran into Ranger Amber. In righteous retribution, they reported the Peeping Tom in campsite 88. Now Amber knew this was Max’s campsite, and this was the last straw. As a woman--and a woman with a gun--Amber hated sexual deviants. She new Max was a deviant of some kind, and now she knew which kind. So she turned around and marched for 88. Instinctively, as she did whenever things got tense, Amber reached down and patted her gun, making sure it was there. Approaching campsite 88, she recalled with some disgust, the uncle that had touched her, when she was a little girl.

In the meantime, Max had learned all he could about the fly from a sitting position. He decided to get a little closer. So he carefully stood up. Whenever Max moved, the fly darted away about a foot, but quickly came back to its territorial station. When it returned to its station after he stood, Max slowly started to move in on the fly, which amazingly, held its ground. Probably it just figured Max was another tree.

Pretty soon, Max was within an arm’s length of the fly. He wanted to see how the fly would react. He extended his right hand towards the fly, and for balance, extended his other hand backward. His legs were spread, so he could move smoothly, without having to take a step. He began to experiment by moving his body this way and that, to see if the fly was using his body as a landmark to maintain its exact position in space.

It was then that Max noticed Ranger Amber coming into the campsite past the trailer. There he was, staring at a fly, in a really strange posture. He wondered what he could say. He couldn’t say he was watching a fly—that would sound nutty, and probably the fly would promptly disappear, with Amber about to take over it’s territory. It was then that Max remembered the slow-motion Chinese exercises you see older Chinese doing in parks. But still he had the word “fly” on the tip of his tongue.

Amber planed herself squarely in front of Max. “Good Morning, Mr. Berkeley… It’s about your behavior….”
“Yes,” Max replied, “I’m doing my “Fly Chi” exercises. (You stare at a point in space, and make slow moves around it.) I hope that’s not against the rules?”

After Amber had left, Max sat down and thanked his stars that he’d though of Tai Chi. Amber had be caught off guard, and quickly retreated after mentioning the couple’s accusations. At first, with his mind still on flies, Max had been confused, thinking she was talking about flies when she said that courting couples deserved privacy. But then he had caught on, and now she was gone.

Max looked around for the fly, afraid it would be long gone. He imagined how it must have felt, with Amber, a creature about 10,000 times larger taking over its territory. Max thought: “It’s as if you’ve found this beautiful blond in a swimming pool, and you’re starting to move in on her, when suddenly a blue whale lands in the pool and squashes the girl, and all the water spills out.” But then he saw it again, the fly in the middle of the little semicircle of trunks, swiveling this way and that, as perky and defiant of intruders as ever. “Even the flies aren’t afraid of Amber,” Max thought.

Isabel arrived in the campground with her friend Martha, just as the ranger was leaving. She noticed the slightly indignant expression on Max’s face, and said: “What was that all about. Did you get busted again?”

“Naw, I’m squeaky clean. I talked her out of it.”

“Talked her out of what?” Said Isabel, with a bit of concern creeping into her voice.”
“It’s a long story. It was a misunderstanding over a fly.”

Martha said, “You mean one of those deer flies? I hate ‘em. Their bites swell up something terrible.”

“No,” said Max. “A little striped fly.”

And as if on cue, perhaps because the wind had shifted, the perky little fly appeared behind Isabel’s head, where it continued to hover, about a foot behind her red baseball cap.

“There he is, right behind your head!” Max blurted out.

Izzy turned her head, but the fly shifted position in sync, staying right behind her.

Martha laughed, “There he is, still right behind you Izzy!

Izzy turned her head, this way and that, and the fly always stayed right behind. Finally, she got a good look at it. “Oh, that tiny thing. What’s the big deal? You had a misunderstanding over a fly?”

“Yeah, Max said, these flies have a way of causing trouble.”

They were all sitting up on the picnic table, chatting about this and that. Then Max noticed the fly was hovering right between himself and Izzy. It was his first chance to get a really good look at the fly. It had a head completely covered with huge, reddish eyes. And its body, relatively small and slender, was crisply attired with black and yellow stripes, that wrapped around at right angles to it’s length.

Staring intently at the fly, nearly cross-eyed, with Izzy just behind it Max exclaimed: “Wow, it’s really cute!”

Izzy blushed, “Aw Max, you’re so sweet.”

Emerging from his trance, Max replied: “No, I mean the fly!,” but he immediately realized his mistake.

Izzy smacked him on the shoulder. “Humph! You can sleep with the flies, tonight, you… insect.”

“That’s what I was trying to explain before,” Max said defensively. “This fly is nothing but trouble.”