on cicadas
flex, scream, flex, scream
The cicadas emerged on the anniversary of my dad's death. Every moment these days feels punctuated by some remembrance of him, of my dead dad. This was the last beer he had. This was the last movie we saw together. He would have told me to do this, or that. This was the mile marker I ripped my hair out onto the highway when my aunt told me "yes" after I said "no no no no."
When the cicadas came, I was climbing a limestone glen where my grandmother used to take us kids when we were little. The mountain laurel had just bloomed, and I was identifying a cutleaf coneflower in the sun. At the parking lot, a young couple in western wear was taking their engagement photos. They were maybe 20, both skinny, she had blue sparkly eyeshadow and long nails and his snuff can showed tight against the backpocket of his jeans. They said "baby" to each other. What you see in a small town is small.
When I got to the passenger door of the truck, I looked down to see the first one I'd seen since 2018, a lifetime ago in grief. It had dropped out of a tree, but was fully in its color, black with copper wings and blood red eyes. It was completely still, as if waiting for me. I bent to pick it up to move it, but it chittered a few inches away from my hand, further under the belly of the car. I don't know what cicadas hear, but if it's anything like the sounds they make, I have come to believe it was drawing closer to the mechanical hum of its mating.
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Periodical cicadas go underground, it's how they get their name. They emerge from long tunnels, sometimes from multiple feet underground, after 13 or 17 years of development beneath the soil. While still underground, they have been feeding on the xylem of roots, tracking the years spent growing by slight chemical changes in their food source. The year before a brood emerges, the trees suffer, the nymphs have started preparing. Scientists have several hypotheses about why periodical cicadas only emerge at 13 or 17 years, both prime numbers. One is that their development cycle is meant to confuse predators - they can't sync up to prey on the cicadas if there is no common denominator.
Once they emerge, they start molting, the pain of being in a body too big for their body sharp enough to rip apart at the shoulders. What comes out is a soft white version of themselves that must then "cure" in the sun. They climb up to safety, attach to the nearest sturdy structure, and stay still for about a week so their pale flesh can turn green or black, their wings unfurl, their eyes go from milky to seeing. That's when they start singing.
How astonishing therefore and inscrutable is the design of providence in the production of this insect, that is brought into life, according to our apprehension, only to sink into the depths of the earth, there to remain in darkness, till the appointed time comes when it ascends again into light by a wonderful resurrection!
Males are really the ones who sing, with a specialized organ called a tymbal which is full of rib-like structures that, when flexed, create symphonies of clicks that reverberate out into the brand new daylight. Flex, scream, flex, scream, flex. They are of course not alone, as anyone who's heard the cicada song knows. Males congregate on trees called "chorus trees" where together their sound can exceed 100 decibels, crescendoes cycling out as some sing and some fly to their respective mates.
The cicada's song came and never stopped, except at night when temperatures dipped and their tymbals and wings could no longer vibrate or flex. I spent a month talking out loud to myself, the sound was so loud. Out in the woods, the cicadas would scream the scream I wanted to scream, an alien scream, a green scraping of metal, an inhuman thing. All-encompassing.
In my season of grief, there are times when my dad comes to me in dreams and we pick his favorite plants or the herbs that help drill away the hole in my throat, the chickweed and the hawthorn and the mullein. Times when I am so tired of dreaming of journeys I must take with him, of camping, of running from bombs. In the rubble, we laugh and eat and hug, but he is always a boy and always looking to me as if to say, "How will I know?" In my season of grief, I am wanting to be loud and simple and whole again.
In 1779, George Washington ordered his General Sullivan to completely destroy the Onondaga nation, which was the capital of the Haudenosaunee confederacy. During the revolutionary war, the Haudenosaunee remained neutral but one of their members, Joseph Brant, had begun expelling colonists from the territory. Washington ordered Sullivan to take every prisoner, burn every crop, tear it all down. It was a brood year for the cicadas and the people survived by eating them.
Almost 100% of a cicada's life is spent underground, all but a few months the summer they emerge. A darkness so black, followed by a brightness so white. The song is flawed, wrong somehow. We push it out to become symphony.
In June, they were gone so suddenly. It seemed as if every cicada had died at once, same as they emerged. I think of them like the pains of birth; I know they were there, I remember the sound, but it's a ghost memory. I can only call it back up by imagining the sound of a chainsaw.
🥲🪰🌾
this is so great.