After weeks of hype, I finally met my first cicada as I walked
into my apartment building on Friday afternoon. He was sitting on
the concrete steps in the waning May sunlight, twitching one yellow
wing in the soft breeze.
They’re larger than I expected, I thought as I knelt
down to examine the awkward looking insect whose last mass
appearance was in 1987. He looked eminently modern, however: No
mullet, no spiky hair, no spandex or Day-Glo colored shirts. The
cicada turned his beady red eyes to size me up as well, and then
took a few quick steps to the right before looking back up at
me.
I’m sorry. Did you want to get by? he seemed to
say.
As I was standing there contemplating the polite, if ugly, bug
before me, a squirrel came tearing across the walkway, grabbed the
cicada in his mouth and ran up a tree in a blur of brown.
This wanton cruelty was indirectly my fault. The squirrels in my
neighborhood know me as the guy with the pocket full of peanuts.
They don’t fear me, and I can nearly feed them by hand. On this
particular afternoon I had no peanuts and the squirrel took the
next best thing, the polite and friendly bug. Being my friend can
be difficult sometimes.
NOW, ONLY A FEW DAYS removed from my first encounter, the concrete
is littered with cicadas and the empty amber shells they’ve molted
off all over the place. Children from the building I live in are
playing a kind of bug hopscotch seeing how many cicadas they can
crush at a time. People huff and puff angrily, as if squishing the
bugs beneath their heels is more of an inconvenience to them than
it is to the cicada.
Anytime a squadron of carousing cicadas takes flight, girls can
be heard squealing in terror. A young boy trying to shoo one of the
bumbling bugs with a baseball bat accidentally cracked his friend
in the nose. At a comedy club in Fairfax this weekend I watched a
comedian picking on cicadas get some of the biggest laughs of the
night.
Can cicadas be a nuisance? Sure. This is, after all, Brood X,
one of the biggest on record. The bugs will probably number in the
trillions at the peak of their short season. The most
cicada-friendly areas will host approximately 1.5 million bugs per
acre.
And the number of plants they eat are outnumbered only by the
number of creatures (including humans) that eat them. A recent
Reuters story quoted University of Connecticut biologist Christine
Simon euphemistically describing the cicadas’ lack of street
smarts: “We prefer the term ‘predator foolhardy’ to stupid,” she
said.
I wonder what you call the Indian guy who had to be rushed to
the hospital after having an allergic reaction to the
sautéed cicadas he had for dinner?
BUT I KEEP THINKING about that first cicada I met. How sad it is to
think that he spent the last 17 years eight or more feet below the
ground, sucking on tree roots to survive all in hopes of enjoying
two weeks of mating, mating, mating in the sun before shuffling off
this mortal coil, only to be crunched his first day above
ground.
That’s as tragic as having a heart attack walking down the
cruise ship gangplank the first day of a long-delayed vacation,
never to wiggle your toes in the warm sand of some tropical
paradise.
It is worth keeping in mind that there are worse insects out
there. Cicadas don’t bite or swarm, although they do have a problem
flying those big bodies of theirs in a straight line. They are the
second longest living insect, and much more pleasant than the
first, the termite queen.
Nearly two decades ago the insects before you now hatched from
eggs left in twigs and tree branches and dropped to the ground,
burrowing deep on the same pure instinct that would last week call
it to the surface. In fact, cicadas are some of the most
considerate creatures ever to roam this earth. Name one roommate or
co-worker you’ve ever had who stayed out of your hair for 17 years
at a stretch. We should welcome Brood X.
Sunday afternoon as I brought my garbage out, I ran into an old
black woman who was nervously kicking cicadas off the pavement in
front of her. In a near whisper she asked me if I had ever seen
anything like these strange insects before, and I repeated roughly
my thinking as recorded above to her.
She smiled and said, “Well, I guess they’ve waited long enough
for their time in the sun, haven’t they.” Walking back from the
dumpster I passed her again. She was sitting on the stoop, nudging
a cicada with her index finger and cooing, “Yes, you’ve been
waiting a long, long time.”
