The Seventeen Year Brood
Pillars of Salt, Post Seventeen
The Magicicada had awakened. The last time it had happened was in 2004, when I was an undergraduate at Frostburg State. This time, we had arrived in Cumberland just in time for their symphony.
Among the most striking features of these insects, which emerge once the soil temperature reaches 64°F to a depth of about eight inches, are their red eyes. People are afraid of these swarming insects. It is mostly in the fun, funny way of being scared where we shriek and flail but ultimately laugh at ourselves because there is no real danger at all. Minor discomfort. An unsettling prickle on the back of your neck. But these red eyes are not so demonic as they are stupid and unknowing.
The cicadas fly about, apparently aimless. Their bumbling aimlessness is ironic because they had but one clear cut aim and that is to copulate, ensuring the brood’s reproduction, and then die. You are surrounded by thanato-erotic screams, as Ricardo Friaz put it so well. They emerge, crawl maybe a few inches or a hundred feet, and shed their exoskeletons, revealing a whitish mature creature that then waits for about six days for its new wings and exoskeleton to harden. At this mature stage, the cicadas have their typical black dorsal thorax and translucent wings transected by orange veins.
It has been discovered that the wings of a cicada are densely patterned with microscopic cone structures called “nanopillars” that are responsible both for the insect’s remarkable hydrophobic properties and for killing harmful microbes like bacteria that might cling to the wings. Scientists are studying this structure to improve antibiotic designs in hospitals and other settings were sterility is favored.
There is an old wive’s tale about the patterns on a cicada’s wings.
Sometimes, portions of the veins will grow thicker and darker, giving the appearance of the letter “W.” During the 1902 swarm, a Lawrenceville, New Jersey farmer by the name of Charles Fackler — who was not an old wife — arrived in the offices of the Trenton Evening Times with a specimen he claimed sported an “N” on its wing. Seventeen years prior, Fackler had witnessed periodical cicadas with Ws on their wings, a known omen of war. But the 1902 specimen presented to the Evening Times had an “N” on its right wing and a “W” on its left. This meant “No War.”
The cicadas, unknowingly, are on to something. There is always a war on. Always, something to say “no” to. In 1913, a humorist at the Dallas Morning News suggested that perhaps the cicadas were supporters of Woodrow Wilson.
I doubt these buzzing insects support anything but their own large numbers and the many opportunistic predators that gorge themselves on the swarm. The dried shells of molted cicadas littered the ground around the base of trees and bushes. They clung to every surface, every tree trunk and picnic table, the still tires of parked cars.
They sing loudly.
The abdomen of male cicadas are outfitted with tymbals. These corrugated exoskeletal membranes have segments of alternating thick and thin tissues, which vibrate rapidly to produce the mating call. The tracheae of adult males branch into enlarged hollows that transform the cicada’s body into a resonance chamber. With this amplification system in place, the insect can generate songs as loud as 106 decibels or more, among the loudest of all insects.
This red-eyed orchestra would perform for our entire trip. Everywhere we went, Brood X, as it was called, played its undulating song, chirruping away in the background of every visit and outing we undertook.
The swarm is biblical, except they are harmless. They don’t destroy trees or harvests. Perhaps a very young sapling would not survive the invasion. They wake up, dress themselves, scream, fuck, and die. By mid-July, there will be hardly a sound. The females will have cut their V-shaped slits into fledgling twigs and laid about twenty or so eggs. They repeat this nesting procedure until they’ve deposited a clutch of 600 eggs. In six to ten weeks, the nymphs emerge, dropping to the ground in their first stage to burrow again, down to a depth of two feet, far enough to hid and feed on the roots of nearby plants. Underground, the cicada nymphs develop through five instar stages, moving somewhat deeper as they grow, seeking out larger roots on which to feed. They are not sleeping. It is a busy seventeen years.
People talk about cicadas as if they are down there asleep or hibernating. To hear some tell it, the cicadas live for a few weeks of fervent activity and then die, most of their lives wasted away underground. But that is not true.
Like all things in absence, they go on whether we attend to them or not. Life goes on. Things change, metamorphize, become other, older, further along. When we are gone, when the familiar is no longer apparent, when what was once on the surface has returned again underground, the slow tick of the clock continues without our being aware until we work to rediscover what had once been so obvious because it was there, abundant. It is hard work, but it’s living. Otherwise, we bumble in unknowing, flitting here and there, perhaps to mate or at least achieve a momentary release.
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