This post is mostly about my anxieties over the death and discomfort of insects. It's probably a bit pathetic, but I put a lot of time into writing it, so here it is.
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The cicadas fall silent when it rains and I wonder how they are doing up in the trees as they wait it out. I have seen them on the bushes, clinging in place, water beaded on their bodies. I wonder if the rain bothers them, if feeling bothered is something they experience.
I wasn't sure that the sound I was hearing in the woods across the street was the cicadas until I heard it again in D.C. -- an echoing whirling sort of sound, like a UFO spinning in the distance. I spent several days anxious that I wouldn't be able to hear the song before I left, but then I realized I had been hearing them - sometimes the eerie "whee-whoa" of Magicicada septendecim, sometimes just the accumulated sound of thousands of cicadas singing all at once. It sounded like a communication from another planet. I began hearing the raspier calls too, when driving through the neighborhood with the windows down. I grinned to hear it. I heard this back in 2004, and not since. If my memories were clear, I'm sure it would be just as I remembered it.
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Documentation says Brood X began emerging in Maryland on May 11, 2004. Perhaps this was the day when, before going to school, I spent a long time with a cicada that was molting on the red maple in our front yard. I don't know if I found it of my own accord or if my parents saw it and showed me. I just remember the white body emerging from the crispy brown shell, how I stood there in the early morning cool and watched with anxiety then, at some point, decided to intervene. I didn't comprehend that most cicadas manage this process without difficulty.
I tried to tug it out with tiny fingers, trying to speed up a process which is meant to be slow. When the creature came out with twisted wings, I believe we kept it in a Tupperware with some twigs and leaves. It didn't occur to me that I might have been the cause of its damaged wings. I wrote of it, and the other "help" I performed, with regret in a journal from 2009, saying with brusque darkness, "I twisted wings and legs."
I loved the cicadas from that first day. In another memory, I walked home from school and picked up every single one I found on the sidewalks, gathering them on my hands until their hooked feet caused me pain. I'd carry them to safety, usually by the stream down the street from my house.
The boys at school said that if you pulled on some part of a cicada (wings or legs? I don't know) the head would pop off. These horrible snots liked to torment them at recess, so of course I had to intervene and tell them off. I was a little cicada protector, fighting off misinformation and cruelty and carelessness wherever I saw it.
In retrospect, these memories have an aura of revelation, of religious fervor and suffering. I remember walking home one day through blistering heat, coming up the street from the stream. The chorusing of the cicadas was so loud that sound and heat became indistinguishable. The air wove and waved sinuously around me; I was in it like a fluid, barely pushing through it, entranced and sick. I thought I would pass out, but I made it into the house, into the AC and quiet, relieved. This experience was so unpleasant, but like a pilgrimage. No amount of discomfort could change my mind; I loved the cicadas and already thought of when I'd see them again.
I did the math -- I was 11 at the time, so 17 years from then would be when I was 28 -- an incomprehensible age. I told myself: come hell or high water, I would see the children of the cicadas I had saved and adored. (And boy, did hell and high water come!)
When the cicadas died, they did so in such masses that the air stunk for days. I don't remember how long their remains hung around, but there was one that had, at some point, gotten squished in our back door -- the side with the hinges, where the door slams into place against the door frame. It remained there, perfectly flattened and symmetrical, its color never fading, until the door was replaced in 2008.
Afterwards, I cherished the emergence holes that stayed in compacted earth for years after. I wrote into my middle school books a fantasy race of people with orange-veined cicada wings. I mentally marked the 2004 Brood X emergence as an important event in my life, fell into reveries at the sound of any cicada song. I kept exuviae and corpses of Neotibicen in a small box with other curiosities. One of my favorite bits of Plato is the origin story of cicadas in Phaedrus. In it, the first people who discovered music sang without interruption until they died. The muses turned them into cicadas -- creatures that could sing without need for sustenance.
And, of course, I got vaccinated and came to the East Coast to see them again. Come hell or high water.
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The nymphs came out in droves on the night of the 18th. First I found one scrabbling around in the dirt, then another, then discovered them clinging to the leaves of bushes by the driveway. I sat in the driveway, talking to Tim on the phone, and they started to climb up my back, appearing to my senses when they scraped their claws against the nape of my neck, seeking purchase. I greeted them, flustered, and delighted, "Hello! Oh my god! Hello little one!"
I tried to put them on the bush, but they tended to fall off, a little plop in the mulch, where they'd writhe about on their backs, trying to get back up. I settled for just putting them on the mulch, facing the bush. Everywhere I looked, they crossed the driveway, wandering with dogged persistence, searching for a spot to transform.
Then I felt one crunch under my foot. I decided to stay still, then noticed another I had accidentally crushed in the mulch. Its insides had squirted out, gooey pale yellow-green. Too many. Time to get out of there. I turned on the flashlight on my phone and picked my way through the flood of cicada nymphs back to the house, where I couldn't accidentally kill anything. I stayed off the driveway at night for the next few days.
The next day I went to my hometown and, while I didn't see cicadas everywhere, there were areas where they were everywhere you looked. First I saw their corpses squashed into the sidewalk, then I saw a stump covered in living cicadas. Many were well-formed, their flat wings meeting in a peak beyond their abdomens, but many others had twisted wings, shriveled wings, wings sticking out at absurd angles. They'd never be able to fly. Did it really matter that, in this same neighborhood, I had pulled cicadas out of their shells? Had I really twisted their wings, or was that always going to happen?
I began to notice cicadas that hadn't made it out of their shells, often with their backs arching out of the split, already turned black. Later, I sat by the stream I grew up exploring, in the cold breath of a storm drain, trying to dry off my sweat-soaked shirt. I took a moment to Google this phenomenon of cicadas getting stuck in their shells and found this article on the subject. With detached sympathy, it describes how cicadas can tear themselves apart in their struggle to escape the shell, how they can bleed into it and cement their doom, how they can sometimes make it out, but with too much damage to fly or, presumably, be successful in mating.
The only reasonable thing to do, I deduced, was to crush any that were stuck. Not carelessly, of course -- give them time, see if they can make it out. After becoming acquainted with the ecdysis process, I've learned it's easy to tell when something's going wrong.
The next day I found what an example of what I've started calling "molting failure" (since whipping out the word "ecdysis" in daily conversation surely alienates people): a cicada still trying to struggle its way out of a shell blackened with blood, its thorax still pulsating. It couldn't be smashed. The blood had formed a sort of hard, unbreakable cask. I left it under a car tire.
Last night I found one, still white, trying to drag itself out of its shell with its legs -- which normally don't firm up until after the cicada is mostly out of the shell. I tried to help, but it was stuck by both of its wings, which were starting to turn dark with hemolyph. I had Tim kill it, because I had already killed two that morning.
I killed another two this morning. Both crunched easily under my shoe. One of them I had noticed as a nymph the night prior, doing the wiggle dance that signals the beginning of ecdysis. I had a bad feeling about it for some reason. I suppose I was right, for I found it in the morning, its shell barely split, its thorax already the black of hardened exoskeleton. A hopeless situation. Crunsch.
Even as I heard them chorusing in D.C., I found death everywhere. Cicadas in all stages littered the sidewalks under trees, crushed by careless pedestrians, many of them presumably molting failures. A stream of tar seeped down a utility pole, puddling on the sidewalk. Somehow, some cicadas had managed to molt here without an issue. Not a majority -- a mess of dead nymphs and fully formed cicadas tangled in the tar like some nightmarish prehistoric scene, a precursor to fossilization. "Rough life out here," I remarked to the dead cicadas. Their luckier brethren shrieked in the trees.
I wasn't surprised to find all this horror, just to find it in such detail. Headless cicadas still trying to walk, nymphs lying baking on the ground, cicadas dead for no reason all over the driveway. So many of my memories of the 2004 emergence are tinged with discomfort and distress. Still, I loved them, and still I love them now. What good is a quasi-religious experience if it's not laced with horror?
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I find myself bumping up against an idea so obvious and yet so huge and deeply felt. It feels trite to just say it when I have felt it so deep in my gut, but here we are:
Nature is horrifying.
I find myself bouncing back and forth here about whether it's worth it to make a distinction between this construct of "the natural world" and human activity, I find myself wanting to say generally that "Life is horrifying," but then my thoughts become diluted.
I'm thinking of the feeling when I stood in the water before a deep spot in the stream by my old house, disrupting the current. Dead nymphs swirled up from the depths and began to flow downstream. Rolling through the water with all those waterlogged corpses was a tiny bird egg. Plucking it out, I found it was cracked open. I pulled off one end, smelled the slight stink of rot, saw the gray flesh, the pins that would've been feathers, the small point of what might have been a beak.
I wish I had something more meaningful and insightful to say, but all I can do is try to convey how powerfully I felt it during this trip, how it was one of the few strong emotions I had the entire time
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It's been several days since I've left now -- I've been so busy since I got home. But I'll do my best to describe what felt like the climax of the cicada experience, which occurred on my last day there, just a few hours before we left.
When talking to Tim's brother about the likely moral necessity of killing stuck cicadas (for, even if they don't feel pain the way we do, they certainly must feel suffering), they mentioned a tree they and their girlfriend had seen when walking in the woods. It was in a park and covered in "mercy killing situations" or something like that. I said I wanted to see it.
This was the first day the cicadas sang in earnest -- the first day the atmospheric UFO hum from the forest was met with a robust shrieking from the trees by the house. We plunged into the woods, into the sound, found cicadas congregating on broad leaved plants, found the 1950s car rotting in the woods, found honeysuckles and ferns, etc. The calls got louder as we approached the park, and peaked when we entered the clearing. Why that is I'm not sure, especially considering what I saw after.
The carnage was spread across two trees. On the first tree I found a molting failure so violent that the shell, which hadn't even split, was glued to the bark with a puddle of dried black hemolyph. Entombed in its own blood. Meanwhile, just inches away, newly emerged cicadas hung onto their shells, their unfolded wings white and perfect.
The "Tree of Death" as I came to call it had no such singularly dramatic scenes, but it made up for it with sheer quantity. At the base of the tree was a welter discarded shells, failed molts, dead cicadas, and living ones. Any nymph that wished to molt on that tree would have to climb through this mess of the living, the dead, and the successes. The trunk was covered not only with failed molts but with a showcase of unfortunate deformities: cicadas with shriveled wings, twisted bodies, too-small abdomens. Mixed in and outnumbered were those who had molted without incident.
Even so, this was one of the loudest places I encountered. Evidently, there were enough healthy cicadas to produce this enormous, unearthly howl.
Considering that the damaged cicadas probably couldn't get far from where they molted, it looks like there's an issue with that tree or with the area. My guess is the application of pesticides -- perhaps they affect growth, as well as interfere with the doubtless complicated minutiae of ecdysis. The article I shared above poses the possibility of trees disease and death (resulting in cicada malnutrition) as a cause as well -- so maybe both trees were sick, though I didn't notice any obvious illness about them.
There were too many molting failures for me to kill. Given that trying to crush one on the ground could result in collateral damage to one of the many cicadas crawling in the grass, it was time to let the task go and simply observe.
Despite our caution, we accidentally killed at least two or three cicadas on our way out. Some survived the first blow, crawled about frantically with their insides oozing out. They wouldn't survive. Best to kill them quick. Crunsch.
Now, a few days later, I'm just getting out of the habit of panicking whenever I step on something small and unfamiliar, such as a dropped piece of dry pasta.
What conclusion did I draw from the Tree of Death? Humans only make nature more horrifying.
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I love them so much. I sometimes feel like I'll lose my mind thinking about what I'm missing out on -- from the chorusing to the sight of cicadas mating ass-to-ass (a sight which disturbed me as a sex-repulsed 5th grader) to their death in piles under trees and the smell of their rot. I just have such affection for them, "my sweet babies," as I'd croon, and such awe at the whole process. I'll be 45 for the next Brood X emergence -- another unimaginable age. I hope I get to see some other emergence sooner -- a 13-year cicada emergence would be cool.
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After all this horror, let's remember something important: the cicadas are still a successful species. Their sheer numbers have, so far, always won the day. Most of the ecdyses I watched went just fine. Here's my favorite thing in the world at the moment: what it looks like when a cicada molts successfully.
When I would go out into the front yard at night, there were so many nymphs clumsily crawling around you could hear them: a general ambiance of scratching and fumbling. They reach out with their front claws first, and sometimes get tumbled over clinging to a piece of mulch or someone else's abandoned shell, or else fell repeatedly from walls and bushes and leaves. I liked to help them get on their feet again. Their bodies are smooth, dense, and delightfully cool to the touch from seventeen years under the earth.
They rarely stop moving until it's time for ecdysis begin. I think that time just happens when it does, whether or not the cicada's in a good spot. I've seen them halt on the edge of the sidewalk and molt there, but I've also seen one at the top of a bush, trying to climb higher, not ready to settle.
After they stop, they do a little dance -- at least the ones molting on a horizontal surface did. I never caught one starting a molt on a vertical surface. So, they wiggle in place, as if they're trying to make a pair of jeans more comfortable. It's unbelievably adorable. I wonder if it's getting the right fluids flowing or something.
After doing this for a few minutes, they fall utterly still and, shortly thereafter, the back of the shell, right over the thorax, splits. The difference between shell and soft body is indistinct at first -- the shell is brown, and that mantle-like part of the thorax that first thrusts its way out is a pinky-gray color, reminiscent of a brain.
The back arches out, the face parts from the mask of the shell, the legs slowly extrude, one pair at a time. All the while, one can observe the thorax pulsing arrhythmically. If the cicada is on a vertical perch, it will start to hang out of the shell, arching out like a strange white flower, held in place just by its abdomen. If it's on the ground, the cicada just extrudes straight out, like sausage meat of a casing, holding its soft little legs off the ground.
It was during this process that I sometimes had to intervene. Well, I didn't have to -- the species will always survive. But still, if I'm there to help, I might as well. This time, I think the helping worked -- all of these cicadas wound up with perfect wings.
Anyways, those that molt on the ground often didn't get a good enough grip and the shell would fall over, taking the molting cicada with it. I got into the habit of making a little hollow in the mulch and propping them up with little twigs and wood pieces so they wouldn't have to emerge on their sides.
It seems like the cicadas have to wait for their legs to firm up a little before they can do anything else. When the legs are ready, the vertical cicadas do an intense sit up and get a grip on the shell. They pull themselves out and hang there until their wings dry. The ones that molt on the ground have a bit more of a complicated time. They sometimes find it hard to get the very end of their abdomens out if the shell isn't gripping the ground -- I found it easy to gently pull the shell off.
The genitals are extremely prominent at this point, so the moment the shell comes off is like a "it's a [x]!" moment. It's easy to tell the difference: the females have a pointed end, the males have a flower-like structure. When they're all pale and new, one can see the delicate intricacy of these genitals, alien loops and folds.
In both I observed this moment when, having fully emerged, their entire bodies pulsed and wriggled. They'd pause to experience it. Surely there's some pragmatism to this movement, but I can't help but wonder if pleasure is involved. If there's an impulse to get out of the shell, then surely there's some sensation that follows the success.
The cicadas that have molted on the ground still have a journey ahead of them -- they have to find somewhere to hang up to dry. They begin to walk absurdly on their new legs, reaching out too far in all directions, their movements exaggerated. They move in fits and starts. I think at this point they can see a lot better than when they were nymphs -- while the nymphs wandered in no particular direction, falling off bushes and then accidentally walking away from them, we observed one of these "freshies" walking towards whoever stood nearest, adjusting its course whenever its target moved.
At first we just tried to guide them in the right direction. Eventually, I figured out I could just offer my finger and they'd climb on. They felt so much lighter than the nymphs, probably because they were far less dense -- often, after emerging, they'd be almost twice the length of the shell. The bushes provided the best spots for them to hang out, so I'd take them there, coax them onto the bush. They'd climb until they found a good grip, and then finally be still.
As the night wore on and I attended to other cicadas, I'd check in on the ones that had already molted. I always felt such joy to see the wings unfurling perfectly, like lace made of moonlight. This is what happened most of the time. The deformities I witnessed directly almost all came from when a cicada wandered too long in search of somewhere to hang. Their wings would unfurl, dragging like a bride's train, and be stuck in that shape forever.
Slowly, their white bodies would turn gray, then black. Sometimes you'd find them hanging in the same place in the morning, no longer ethereal but sturdy and hard, with orange-veined wings. Before long, they go off into the world, into the indistinguishable masses, to sing and fuck and produce the next generation.
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Tim's parents are in a Facebook group for their neighborhood. A week or two before the emergence began, someone posted something to the effect of, "Just learned about the cicadas! How bad is it?! How long will I have to stay inside?!"
We all laughed about it -- this person seemed to think a plague of locusts had come to eat people alive. Of course not! Cicadas are so docile, helpless even. But also, so amazing, with such a beautiful song. I wish I could have told them not to stay inside, but to go outside and see it all, and love every second of it.
