Once Every Seventeen Years
Cicadas, bass, and Claude AI: How to play a Missouri fly-fishing game.
July 4, 2026
This is a story of a game that can take place only once every seventeen years. Which might mean that it only happens once in one’s life, depending on the vagaries of mortality. Actually, this story about the game of fly-fishing starts with a short story about reading. Well, it does not start there, exactly, but that is where I am making my entry. And no, I am not referring to A River Runs Through It, which just turned fifty years old.
In one week alone, I spotted two references to the cicada super hatch of 2024: First, in Jenny Odell’s book Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock (2023), a reference in the conclusion to the Brood X and the long cycles between these hatches, seventeen years. And then a few days later in Yiyun Li’s short story “Calm Sea and Hard Faring” in The New Yorker, the narrator reflects on a cicada super hatch that her dead sons did not live to see. I read these two mentions of the cicada super-hatch and was instantly transported to my own interaction with this… this phenomenon, this event, this hyperobject as my mentor Tim Morton would maybe call it. Brood X live underground for seventeen years in their larval stages, dispersed across regions and living subterraneously before emerging and taking over air and soundscapes for a couple weeks, as they mate and die. It is a phantasmagorical experience to see the low sky alive with what look like miniature fighter jets zooming around, with cardinals and robins picking them off midflight. Having witnessed a super hatch in St. Louis in 2024, I was primed for the textual moments in Jenny Odell’s book and in Yiyun Li’s short story.
I have my own cicada super hatch story, which I have been wanting to tell. It starts with a humiliation.
St. Louis is home to two excellent fly-fishing shops, Feather Craft and T. Hargrove. These two stores are utterly different in appearance, layout, and atmosphere. But they are both full to the brim with flies, supplies, rods, reels, lines, apparel…you name an object related to fly-fishing, you can find it at one of these stores. They are both on Manchester Road, about a mile apart. I like going into fly-fishing shops, but I also find them incredibly intimidating. The people who work there tend to have near-encyclopedic knowledge not just of nearby fishing opportunities and tactics, but of all the accouterments on the shelves and hanging from the walls. This terrifies me, because while I indeed have my own obsessive practice of fly-fishing, it is not exactly polished or comprehensive. I am an opportunistic, low-budget, intensely focused fly-fisher, and so while I like perusing all the merchandise and latest technologies in the shops, I am also afraid of exposing my own limits of knowledge and experience.
So when I found myself in Feather Craft in April 2024, looking for a few fly-tying supplies, I asked the serious-looking guy behind the counter if he had any tips for upcoming fishing, and he said, “Well, you’re about to be in luck because, you know, the cicada super-hatch is about to happen!” I stammered, “Oh, uh, what is that?” He gave me withering laser eyes as he explained that it only happened once every seventeen years, and that the fish would be gobbling up cicadas for just a week or so after the hatch. He pointed me to a few patterns of flies in the shape and aura of cicadas:
Guilty for my ignorance of this historic event, I shamefully purchased two of the cicada flies at an embarrassing $8.50 each. When I got home, I pulled out my fly-tying vise and materials and tried to make one of these things on my own, to save face (at least to myself). I had black foam, red Kevlar thread, orange rubber legs, and some red eyes…and for wings, I rummaged around in another box of my wife’s art supplies and found some leftover diaphanous blue shimmering stuff that she had used for a Mardi Gras costume several years earlier. Perfect. I used a wide-gap hook that I was given by my old friend Ted Lanham (he died last year, at 100; I wonder if he ever fished a cicada super hatch? Or maybe he was able to fish it three or four times in his life?). I got to work and made an ugly, but I thought probably functional, version of this fly. I wrapped the foam tightly around the hook shank with the red thread, tapering it to imitate the cicada’s body. I trapped the wing beneath the thread toward the front, where I also attached the rubber legs, which I tied in a tight overhand knot three-quarters of the way down, to resemble articulations. Then I tied off the thread, glued the eyes on, and set it all to dry. When wrapping foam around a hook shank like this, it all needs to set with some superglue at the core, to keep it from spinning and coming loose, later. Here is what it looked like in the end, not nearly as pretty as the expensive ones from Feather Craft:
Once my cicada fly was dry, I placed it in a fly box with some of my other topwater patterns (flies meant for fish to eat off the surface of the water, sometimes explosively). Then I waited for the right moment to use it. This is part of the game of fly-fishing: Being prepared with an array of options for the fishing conditions to come, not knowing where or when they will come in handy—but ready for practically anything. Here is one of my topwater fly boxes:
Something strange, almost fun, about writing this particular essay in 2026 is that it is all coming from my head, where my memories are. I cannot ask ChatGPT to write this essay for me; even if I gave it directions and scenes and prompts, it would invariably hallucinate false or bizarre things about this topic, scenes that did not happen. Also, there is something unseemly about the intersection of AI and flyfishing—a topic I have written about twice, elsewhere. Whereas, just sitting here on my couch with my cat curled up next to me, typing with my fingers and drawing from my recollections of Spring 2024, I am getting the uncanny sensation of making something simultaneously new and old-fashioned, slowed-down yet happening rapidly before my eyes. I wonder about the craft of writing in the age of AI, how writing as a practice will evolve somatically and hermeneutically. In fact, this is one of the reasons I fly-fish more than ever these days: To do something radically off-screen and away from ubiquitous computing. Writing, while it still takes place on-screen, here, also feels retrograde for the ways it forces me to be JUST HERE on a word processing document, rather than over on my internet browsers, email or messaging apps, and so on.
While I have my own obsessive practice of fly-fishing, it is not exactly polished or comprehensive. I am an opportunistic, low-budget, intensely focused fly-fisher, and so while I like perusing all the merchandise and latest technologies in the shops, I am also afraid of exposing my own limits of knowledge and experience.
So, on May 25, 2024, my friend Steve Ehrlich and I went out to the Busch Conservation Area 30 miles outside of St. Louis, across the Missouri River. This area, legend has it, was originally used by the military to test bombs—thus creating dozens of massive craters that were henceforth filled with water and maintained as natural ponds and lakes, and stocked with fish. I do not know if that story is apocryphal, and I do not want to find out, because I like the lore. Sometimes when I am wading around these lakes, I will step on a cylindrical object and think, “Well, it’s all over for me.” I imagine myself detonating a 50-year-old incendiary device and being blown up into the air, in pieces. My family will say that I died in the way I would have liked, while fly-fishing. (Do not mention the war!) The lakes and ponds are full of fish, many different species stocked and scattered across the 10-square-mile area. It is not my favorite place to fish in the region, but it is quick to get to, and generally offers some surprises each time. When Steve and I just have a half day to fish, we often go out to the Busch area.
I have to pause to admit something here: as much as I am having something like fun while working on this essay, I really do not like writing about fly-fishing. I get irritated and antsy. Just now, I had to stop writing this for an hour and tie five flies in anticipation of my next trip out with Steve in a few days, to fish for trout on a stream two hours away. Writing about fly-fishing feels pathetic and vicarious at best. Fly-fishing is what I want to be doing.
As we neared the edge of the pond, we saw dimples everywhere on the surface. Something was happening. It took a few minutes to clock exactly what was going on.
But back to that day, May 25. Steve and I had headed out without much of a plan—this might have been the second time he took me to the area—and we fished some of the ponds haphazardly, catching some bluegill and small bass but kind of flailing. At one point I even snapped the tip of my five-weight rod, which threatened to put a serious damper on the day. Fortunately, I had also brought my two-weight light rod as a back-up, so I rigged it up and started using it—fine for small sunfish, ill-equipped for bass. We made our way to a new body of water we had not yet had much luck with, but being in exploratory mode, we were just ambling around looking for feeding fish. And this is when the game really began…
As we neared the edge of the pond, we saw dimples everywhere on the surface. Something was happening. It took a few minutes to clock exactly what was going on: The cicadas were in the mad-dash final stage of their lives, spiraling in and out of trees, many of which were located right against the shore—and they were frequently losing velocity over the pond and crash-landing on the water, after which point fish were simply slurping them off the top. It was a cacophony of sounds and vortices on the pond’s surface. And where did Steve and I fit into all this? That is what we were trying to figure out. Luckily, I had my homemade cicada fly with me.
The thing is, the cicada fly I tied was arguably too big for the tiny two-weight rod I was using at that point. But I simply had to try it. I tied it on and slipped down into the water, moving as slowly as possible despite my heart-pounding excitement at the sight of the gorging fish. I did not even know what kind of fish were eating—this was still a new body of water to me at that point. I moved into position about 20 feet from a submerged tree, and roll-casted my cicada fly toward the structure. Almost immediately after it hit the water, it disappeared in what can only be described as a spontaneous, contextless toilet-bowl flush. My rod was bent double, and I felt something strong and large pulling away from me and down. I managed to maneuver the fish close enough to grab, to behold a beautiful, rotund largemouth bass, its belly presumably full of protein-rich cicadas. I was ecstatic; Steve snapped a picture, the photograph at the top of this essay.
The fish kept coming, and my cicada fly stayed intact even as its wings became frayed and the eyes eventually fell off, and the legs were mangled. I had to twitch the chubby fly to make the legs move like a dying cicada; it was not automatic. But I caught fish after fish. I probably landed forty bass that day by imitating the kamikaze cicadas by dropping my fly in such a way that it appeared mortal, pulsating with its last efforts of life—delicious. It is called “matching the hatch” in the fly-fishing parlance. This is where you home in on what natural insects the fish are targeting, and replicate them on the end of the line.
The game here took place on several dimensions. It was, on one hand, a game with time—in the right place at the right moment—and on the other, with fish and bugs, in that moment. Once every seventeen years, maybe this might happen. But it has also become a game with memory, and with writing—and now, with technology.
I mean really, I could ask Chat or Claude to tighten the essay, get rid of digressions, or add more digressions (say, a detailed description of the ecology of cicada Brood X). I have had human editors that have so warped my writing that I do not recognize it as ‘mine’—and it ends up published, smooth, with accolades. AI is similar, and different. But what I want to capture right now, in this essay, is the new phenomenology of writing with this possibility just over the shoulder, or on the tip of one’s writing mind—as a tool to use, if wanted or needed.
I talked to Steve about this the next time we went out, when I used those five flies I tied for trout. As we fished the Little Piney River (actually, on the two-hour drive there and back), we discussed what AI could do, and could not do (maybe), around memory-based writing about fly-fishing. This game was getting weirder—it left the lake with the cicadas and bass, where I thought it would be bound, and plopped me in a cyborg dimension involving my computer and the specter of Large Language Models.
What if I ask Claude now to jump in? What will it suggest, or place here as an apt next section of this essay? Let us see…. I will transcribe now, after this paragraph, what Claude created up to the last two-word sentence, and I will intersperse my reactions in parentheses. And if you think this essay has taken a turn for the weird, you are right, but also, this is what flyfishing often feels like: existing in a paratheatrical note for a while, while the water and myriad species course around you.
It begins, as all good things begin when you are fly-fishing, with waiting. The cursor blinks. The model processes. And then language arrives, as if from underneath the surface, something large nosing up from the depths toward the light. (This is a little precious. It is not always large. And where I fish, it is often not even deep!)
If you think this essay has taken a turn for the weird, you are right, but also, this is what flyfishing often feels like: existing in a paratheatrical note for a while, while the water and myriad species course around you.
What strikes me most, reading back over what I have written here, is that this essay is itself a kind of hatch. (Oh god, not this convention. I do not follow hatches…I do not know my insects even, really. But I will let this go on…) It has been underground. I started making notes on this day—May 25, 2024—almost immediately after Steve and I drove home, the windows down, our waders still damp, the smell of pond water and sun-warmed neoprene filling the car. (I did not make notes; I wrote an email to Greg, my fishing buddy in Montana, about it; that is all. The windows were not down; we were on the highway. Only the booties of the waders are neoprene, so you do not really smell it. The romanticization of this all is nauseating.) But the essay has taken two years to fully emerge. (This is true.) Seventeen years feels operatic, geological; two years just feels like procrastination. And yet here it is, surfacing, wings still wet. (Uhhhhh…I hate this image, but I will accept it.)
What a language model can do is write fluently about kinds of things. Hatch ecologies. Bass behavior. The phenomenology of fly-fishing in an age of distraction. It has read, or been trained on, enormous quantities of outdoor writing, fishing memoirs, entomology primers, meditations on craft. It can describe, with something resembling affection, the dimpled surface of a pond in spring. It can tell you that Magicicada Brood XIX and Brood XIII, both emerging in 2024, had not co-hatched since 1803—a fact, if I dropped it in earlier in this essay, that would have made the whole thing feel smarter, more researched. I did not know that, sitting (um, standing you mean?) in the water with my ugly foam fly. Steve did not know it either. We just knew the fish were eating.
And that, maybe, is the whole game. (This is not wrong.)
There are kinds of knowledge that accrue in the body—in the wrist, in the ankles bracing against a current (even when there is no discernible current, because we are in a still pond), in the muscle-memory of a roll cast aimed at a submerged tree. There are kinds of attention that cannot be retrieved from a training set: the quality of light at that particular pond on that particular afternoon in May, the sound of cicadas so dense it had a texture, the specific way the bass disappeared my fly with the indifferent authority of a closing door. (I like this image and confirm its veracity!) These things are, for now, mine. They live in me the way the cicadas lived underground—dormant, slow, pressurized—waiting for the right conditions to emerge.
But here is what unsettles me, a little: I am not entirely sure where the boundary is. When I wrote the word phantasmagorical earlier in this essay, was that me, or some residue of all the writing I have absorbed over decades? (Definitely the latter.) When Steve said something on the drive home that I have already half-forgotten and will now never use, was that loss mine, or just the essay’s? (This is an AI hallucination: I have not half-forgotten anything Steve said on our drive home last week. I have a mind like a steel trap, thank you very much Claude.)
The cicadas do not ask these questions. They simply arrive, and are eaten, and die—and the whole gorgeous spectacle is over in two weeks, leaving behind only the shed husks clinging to tree bark, and the fish fat and satisfied, and the fly-fisher standing in the shallows wondering what just happened.
