We spent Memorial Day weekend in Washington County again this year. The sun was out pretty much all weekend and so, of course, were the black flies. This year the mosquitoes seem to be waging a major counter-offensive in their endless turf war with Maine’s infamous black flies. Think of it as a downeast, backwoods version of the Crips and the Bloods, only you supply the blood.

So, what is it about black flies, anyway? We certainly don’t love black flies, do we?  Maybe we just love to hate ‘em or complain about them? But that’s not it either, is it? I mean, when it comes to black flies we don’t complain, exactly. What we really do is that other thing, that quirky Maine thing that is so much a part of our Maine way of doing things.

I call it “celebrating adversity.” Not diversity, chummy, although we’ve been known to do a fair amount of that, too.

Nope, I’m talking about adversity. Celebrating life’s adversities large and small is as quintessentially Maine  as bright red hotdogs with a Moxie chaser.

Mainers tend to view our annual black fly plague the same way we do ice storms, potholes, frost heaves, a chronically anemic economy, mud season and hundreds of similar indignities which, to hear us tell it, would have crushed a lesser state years ago. We’re not victims. Not by a long shot, chummy. By gawdfrey we’re not victims — we’re survivors!

A well developed sense of humor is, of course, the one absolutely indispensable tool in any true Mainer’s emergency survival kit. How else could you possibly explain the existence of The Maine Black Fly Breeders Association in Machias?

I had the distinct pleasure of interviewing these folks for CBS News Sunday Morning a few years back. Believe me it was a challenge for me to keep a straight face on camera as we toured the basement workshop where various M.B.B.A. members, tongues firmly planted in their cheeks, labored to create such hot-selling mail order items as the original Black Fly Swarm Dome. If you don’t have one of these in your trailer yet you’ve must have been snoozing on the couch all winter.  

The swarm dome’is a downast Maine variation on the old glass globe “snowstorm” trinkets you remember having as a kid. Only when you shake the globe in this version instead of white flakes swirling around a church steeple or jolly snowman, a swarm of black flies erupts up from a grassy knoll hovering in a dark menacing cloud around a tiny replica of an old Maine farmhouse. Just like real life! Following that broadcast we got literally hundreds of responses, comments, and inquiries wanting to know how folks could acquire one of these unique treasures.

Back in the summer of ‘81 (where the heck is my walker anyway) I had the great privilege of touring Maine with the late, great Marshall Dodge who, along with Bob Bryan, created the timeless, early Bert and I records back in the 1950s. Performing as Sample & Dodge, Marshall and I worked at dozens of venues across the state that summer and we were onstage at Monmouth’s Cumstan Hall when we first came up with the “Black Fly Festival” routine, which has since gained a life of its own.
  

The theater was packed that evening and the audience was having such a good time that they wouldn’t let us get off the stage. Having pretty much exhausted our repertoire of prepared material we stepped out for a second encore with absolutely no idea what we were going to do next. Luckily, the energy of the crowd and the pure fun of working comedy “without a net” spurred us on and pretty soon we had folks roaring with laughter as we explained the details of “The Black Fly Festival,” which according to us was held in the IGA parking lot in Rangeley. Of course, we were just making it up as we went along, fishing for laughs as we described the “Miss Black Fly Competition,” which  “ …aint just a beauty contest. Matter of fact, beauty don’t hardly enter into it.”
  

As I say, the story took on a life of it’s own. It’s on “Back in Spite of Popular Demand” one of the albums I recorded for the Bert and I label a few years later and  in my book “Saturday Night at Moody’s Diner.”

Marshall and I just made up the whole thing on the spot, right? So, imagine my surprise when sometime in the early ‘90s I stopped at a store in Presque Isle and saw a poster advertising “The Black Fly Festival.” I think it was in Ashland. Well, I looked into the matter and discovered that life was indeed imitating art in a number of locations around the state. Turns out there have been several “Black Fly Festivals” over the years. I’ve never actually attended one of these events but one of these days I just might. Keep an eye out.

I’ll be the tall guy with the extra large bottle of old time woodsman’s fly dope in my back pocket and the Celebrate Adversity! T-shirt.

Humorist Tim Sample is as legendary in Maine as black flies. See more of his books and tapes here.

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