The gas station looked less like a place to buy fuel and more like a scene nature had swallowed whole. Under the white canopy lights near Lake Erie, mayflies clung to the pumps, poles, pavement, windows, and cars until the whole place seemed to twitch.
The air looked dusty with wings. The ground looked alive. It was the kind of scene that makes a driver pull in, stare through the windshield, and decide the gas gauge can suffer a little longer.
Northern Ohio knows mayflies, but this swarm still had the shock value of a bug blizzard. Local reports from the Lake Erie region say mayflies were out in force around Point Place, Put-in-Bay, and Cedar Point in late June, right as the annual hatch season peaked along the shore. For anyone watching online, it looked like an invasion. For locals, it was summer doing one of its grossest tricks…