by Paul H. Thompson

Created on: July 22, 2008

It was an August evening. Well after sunset, the sweltering heat lingered and the humid air pulled buckets of sweat from our pores. My sons and I were wading a stretch of water on the upper reaches of the Meramec River in the Missouri Ozarks, one of those fine, clear streams that rapidly alternates from riffle to pool to run. Shallow enough to wade safely even in the dark, the river allowed us to extend our outing long past the time when most anglers had departed.

The gravel bars and chunks of rock harbored scads of crayfish, the favorite meal for hungry smallmouth bass. While the sun was up, catching bass was tough as they skulked in the shade in inaccessible pools beneath overhanging trees, under logs or in the crevices of boulders. But with darkness falling, the bronze backs-the champion natives of Missouri's rivers-were feeding actively. Swooping bats occasionally chased our flies through the air as our fly lines looped toward the water. A pack of coyotes yipped and howled in the distance.

My twelve-year-old Robert was getting the hang of fly casting, accurately able to zing line a fair distance into fishing-holding water without spooking them. I shared his excitement as fish after fish sucked his floating fly from the surface. Good-sized smallmouth, goggle-eye and other hungry panfish swirled, some with scarcely a ripple, others aggressively splashing, as they steadily took his bait. Robert beamed, especially thrilled when smallmouth leapt or tail-danced across the water, fighting the tension of the line, flailing to throw the hook. As usual, my sixteen-year-old wanderer Jacob had moved farther downstream, beating us to unmolested waters. In the twilight I could hear more than see that his fishing success equaled our own.

With full dark engulfing us and hunger and thirst sapping our energy, we began quietly making our way the several hundred-yard walk toward the car. We continued our casting, not quite ready to call it a day. We stepped sideways to keep our eyes fixed on the deeper run lined with weed beds extending into the water beneath a limestone bluff.

Robert asked me what the lights were. What lights? The little ones, like lightening bugs, he said. I strained my eyes but saw nothing. Where? On the shore. I was facing the bluff. Was I blind? No, behind us, he said. Ah, there-I don't know what those are. Spanning dozens of yards of sandy, gravel shore was a constellation of luminescent dots tinged with a green-blue hue. Puzzling. By August the lightening

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