Periodical

I was walking one evening early in May, and an NPR news story that I was listening to on the web app opened with this intro: “A question you may be asking about periodical cicadas is why do they stay underground for 17 years?” 

First, a quick note to NPR. I wasn’t asking anything about periodical cicadas. Ignorance is bliss. Second, maybe some backtracking is necessary. Brood X, which is apparently one of the largest broods of underground-dwelling periodical cicadas, is coming up this year. I’ve lived here in Montgomery County, Maryland for over 20 years, so I remember the last visit from Brood X, and I can tell you that it doesn’t seem like 17 years have gone by but I know that they have, and not just because NPR says so. I was pregnant with my younger child in May of 2004, and he will be 17 on his next birthday. The math is correct. It all adds up. 

But NPR was asking the wrong question. The question is not why they remain underground for 17 years, but why they need to come up at all? It’s been 17 years since the last time I had to dodge cicadas, living and dead, and I didn’t miss them. Why not stay put, where it’s dark and cool and safe? Why bother at all with the unfriendly, unwelcoming world of humans? We’re up on the surface killing each other left and right. Cicadas, you're not safe here. We’re not even safe here. 

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My first Maryland cicada event was in 2004. As I mentioned, I was pregnant with my younger son (who is now almost 17, of course) and my older son was just a bit shy of his third birthday. We lived in a townhouse, in a neighborhood that was then about ten years old. Apparently, excavation and construction disrupt the underground lairs of the periodical cicadas, and newer neighborhoods see far fewer of the invaders. I remember seeing only a handful in our immediate neighborhood. My mother-in-law lived in Aspen Hill, a nearby but much older neighborhood; and my older son, who spent most days with her while I worked, was completely fascinated with the cicadas of Aspen Hill. He chased them, and played with them, and talked about them,  and lamented the lack of cicadas in his own backyard. Necessity is the mother of invention, though, and he remedied that lack by filling his little pockets with cicadas to bring home. 

I learned about the take-home cicadas the hard way (which is how I learn most things). I was doing laundry. As always, I checked my son’s pants pockets for pennies and rocks and Lego pieces and crumbs and all of the other little-boy things that he gathered and pocketed throughout his days, and instead of rocks and pennies, I got a fistful of crunchy dead cicadas. That was, of course, 17 years ago, but it was a lesson well learned. I still don’t reach blindly into anyone’s pants pockets when I’m doing laundry. 

A smarter person, of course, would have learned a different lesson altogether, which is that the bursting-at-the-seams pregnant lady shouldn’t have been doing the laundry in the first place. I never did learn how to use my pregnancy privileges. 

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Every March, the news is filled with stories about cherry blossoms--when they’ll start to blossom, when they’ll reach “peak bloom,” and when they’ll start to fade, not to return for another year. The whole thing comes and goes in about three weeks. 

Cicada forecasts, because this is a once-in-17-years phenomenon, started much earlier. The experts knew that the cicada emergence would happen sometime in May, but no one knew exactly when. It’s hard to predict exactly what nature will do, isn’t it? Cicadas and cherry blossoms don’t look at calendars. They don’t set reminders on their iPhones. They do what they do and we just wait. The first two weeks of May were colder than usual, and I guess the cicadas didn’t see any compelling reason to come out.  Too cold for outdoor brunches. I saw and read and heard almost daily predictions of cicada emergence and peak cicada activity, but nothing actually happened. 

Then one night, I went for a walk. It was 7:30 or so, with about an hour of daylight remaining and I heard what I thought sounded like a weird hedge trimmer. And then I happened to look down, and the sidewalk was alive with cicadas. They moved drunkenly, disoriented and confused, newly up from underground and struggling to acclimate themselves to daylight. 

Live cicadas congregating on the sidewalk or in the grass or on my backyard fence (they love my backyard fence) are not all that dreadful to behold. I don’t particularly like them, and I really hate when one of them flies toward me, but they’re mostly pretty sedentary. They don’t swirl around en masse like the proverbial swarm of locusts. When they fly, it’s a short-haul trip from one comfortable roost to the next. They sit around; and more often than not, the birds get to them before they even sense the imminent danger. Nothing that lives underground for 17 years and then emerges into the bright May sunlight is prepared for the only-the-strong-survive struggle of life above ground, I guess. 

The cicadas that manage to escape the birds aren’t long for this world. They come up, they see what’s happening on the surface, they enjoy a few days of fence-sitting or tree-roosting, they mate and deposit eggs that will hatch into nymphs that will burrow underground and remain there for 17 years, and then they die in droves. And while the live cicadas aren’t completely horrible, the dead ones are revolting. And dead cicadas are everywhere. EVERYWHERE, I tell you. You can’t take a step outside in Silver Spring without landing on at least one, and usually more than one deceased cicada. A dead cicada underfoot is gut-wrenchingly repulsive. Step on one of these crunchy motherfuckers, crushing the hard exoskeleton, and then feel the squish as the milky white viscous guts spill out under your sneaker. Don’t even think about wearing flip-flops. 

As you walk amid the corpses, you can easily distinguish the long dead from their more recently deceased compatriots. The newly dead cicadas are mired in mucous-like translucent white innards. The ones that have been dead for a few hours or more are just flat wet shiny black stains on the sidewalk. Neither one is anything you want to look at but the former is definitely worse than the latter. 

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I went for a walk last night, and I inspected myself very carefully when I came in. So that’s two cicada precautions: Avoid flip-flops (and it really is perfect flip-flop weather) and be sure to do a very thorough cicada check when you come in from outside. Cicadas like to roost. They like vertical structures, like a fence post or a tree trunk or a wall, and a human body standing around and minding its own business is just as good a spot as a wall or a tree or my very popular (among cicadas) wooden backyard fence. 

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The cicada invasion will be short-lived. According to my cursory internet research, which is the only kind of research I do, they’ll all be gone in four to six weeks. I don’t remember that the 2004 emergence lasted that long, but I wasn’t taking notes, so I can’t say for sure. I didn’t keep records. I don’t have a Power BI dashboard. Anyway, I won’t miss seeing them or stepping on them or plucking them off my t-shirts, but I’ll miss the sound. 

Yes, they’re not pretty to look at and they’re disgusting to touch, even through half an inch of sneaker sole, when dead, but they sound lovely. Some people don’t like the sound. It’s a steady and incessant drone and I can understand why people might find it bothersome. But I find it soothing.

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I can’t possibly be the first person to observe that the cicada emergence, at least here in Maryland, coincided almost exactly with the CDC announcement that fully vaccinated people can stop wearing masks outside. That day happened to be the two-week mark following my second shot, meaning that I was fully vaccinated, and I shed my mask and went on my way rejoicing. I think that the (unmasked) walk that I was writing about happened the very next day. THE VERY NEXT DAY! That’s right, just as we reached milepost 1 of the home stretch toward the end of the plague, the pestilence began. I know my Old Testament (right now, I live in it). God promised that he wouldn’t send another flood, but He didn’t take fire or famine off the table, did He? Maybe we should buckle up. 

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You know, I think that NPR needs to shut its big fat piehole for a while. Just after I finished writing most of this, I was out walking again and dodging cicada carcasses, when I heard yet another NPR cicada story. This time, after the obligatory discussion of culinary uses for cicadas (why?), the reporter casually noted that we’re just getting started with these little motherfuckers, and that the coming few days will bring “billions” (his word! “billions!”) more cicadas up from under the ground where they belong. Billions! I mean, there are cicadas everywhere right now, but if I had to hazard a guess on the current aboveground numbers, I’d have to guess no more than 10 million or so. Billions means that this cicada situation, already unpleasant, is about to get downright untenable. 

Nature is a beautiful, beautiful thing. But it’s disgusting right now, and I want no part of it.