34 I kneel over the trays, my baseball cap turned around to shade the back of my neck, as Theodore takes notes on stream conditions, peers into his own trays, or replenishes them with matted leaves and twigs or substrate caught in his kick-seine net. He will plant the long-handled net on the creek bed and kick water across the front, dislodging stones and silt. The midges, nematodes, snails, shovel-headed planarians, beetles, backswimmers, and innumerable “fly” larvae—mayfly, black fly, dragonfly, damselfly, stonefly—drift in with the substrate. This is what slaps or clatters into our trays out of the net. Covered with water, it teems with living creatures. Theodore has a name for each one. While most midges carry some nondescript brown-gray color, I enjoy finding the red ones, called bloodworms, from time to time. Theodore says it’s hemoglobin that makes them red, and because of that, they’re better at surviving in oxygen-poor environments. They wriggle too, and are easier to discern against the silt and pebbles. I watch the sun gleaming off their ruby, wormy sides after I catch them, before I release them into my ethanol-filled vial, and they stop squirming. A water droplet enters the clear ethanol with it, rippling like the heat off August asphalt turned upside-down. The alcohol will discolor the worm in a minute or two, just as it discolors the dark, slow, tadpole-headed pupae. Once, taking the depth at the last site, Theodore sank past his knees in mud. I asked if he needed help. He tested the mud, trying to lift a foot, then nodded and said, “Yeah.” My own feet squelching, I stepped to the water’s edge, squatted with one leg in front of me to brace myself, and extended my hand. He grasped it. I began to pull backwards. It was strange to pull my older brother out of that mud. It felt like he should have been helping me. The mud glistened on his waders as he emerged. Below his knees, it was all black; it splashed like paint over his first few footprints. “What does it mean that it’s black like that?” I asked. “Anaerobic,” he answered. A few bloodworms and pupae later, we waded back through the tall grasses to pack ourselves into the car and head for home, out of the narrow, blindly-curving, gravel roads no minivan should ever have to drive on.
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