A Year of Cicadas

I was born in the late springtime 19 years ago, along with the cicadas. As my eyes were opened and I cried and was washed and wrapped in new linens, insects were crushing through their thin encasings and clawing through roots and rocks to see light for the first time, refracted in the zillion tiny hexagons of their eyes. I slept and woke, slept and woke to a rhythmless symphony of tiny parts of insect exoskeletons beating against each other.

I have heard from the people who were there and could already see and think 18 years ago that the cicadas are neither a good thing nor a bad thing to the sensibilities of most. Life goes on as normal even when billions of bugs crawl out from beneath your porch and your azaleas. One neighbor ate them on pizza; another photographed them in portraits, as if they were people. A lawnmower left trails of the dead and dying, legs kicking in the swaths of sharp trimmed grass. My grandfather says that they were loud “like the plague” and I wonder what plague he means.

The cicadas of my region live underground for 17 years, nestled among deep roots, sipping on tree sap. They emerge from the earth synchronously, like a one-minded being split into these myriad red-eyed shiny-winged vessels. They live above ground for only four to six weeks, and then they die, leaving their eggs in branches so that the young can drop down to the earth, burrow to the tree roots and begin a new generation.

The year I turned 17 was the first year I witnessed the cicadas as a conscious being. Their emergence coincided directly with my birthday, and I could not decide whether that was a good or bad omen. I did assume it was an omen, however; it seemed obvious to me that nature should be affected by and intertwined with the notable dates of my own life. When I woke up in the predawn of that morning to dress for school the cicadas had already emerged, and I walked out on the porch to listen. The sound was deafening, and I imagined melodies in it that weren’t there.

It took me an abnormally long time to come to the realization that other people also possessed an inner life like myself. As a young child I was uninterested in relating to others, as I believed that there was nothing inside those bodies to relate to. I felt alone, but also special, and the latter outweighed the former in my mind. This continued through grade school, and even into high school; though I made friends for the sake of appearances and things to do, I still felt that I possessed infinitely more depth of self than those around me. I was not exactly self-centered in the sense of thinking myself “better than;” however I did think of myself as at the center of things, since I was so much more affected by the world than others, to my knowledge.

The change in my perception of the world and its inhabitants probably came about slowly. However, when I attempt to pinpoint such a moment, I come up with a brief part of my 17th birthday. It was not a moment having to do with the insects that were awakening that day; it occurred in a grocery store, where I was insulated from the cacophony among the fluorescent lights and heat-leeching freezer aisles. It was my night to make dinner and I was rolling my cart among many other carts, pushed along by people with and without children, whose birthdays it may or may not have been that day. As I picked up pasta and bread and fruit and chips, I looked at the contents of other carts and of their holders’ faces. I realized that I had no idea of the purpose or causes of anything I was looking at, why the pickles, why the grimace, and that it could be absolutely anything. I went home that night and made dinner, and realized that I did not know what my mother was thinking at the table.

“What if it’s just one bug who sings and everyone else just copies him,” said my brother sitting on the porch that night. I said it was possible, but highly unlikely. “Scientists,” I told him, “have studied them and found that each one actually has a unique song.” “But they all sound exactly the same!” he said, and went inside and shut the door to all the high-pitched madness.

The song of a cicada is loud enough to cause permanent hearing loss in humans, if the cicada were to sing just outside the listener’s ear. It’s lucky for us that they remain underground most of the time; otherwise, deafness would be a constant threat.

It is truly difficult to listen, to pick up on the notes in a nearly constant, frighteningly loud and discordant pitch. But if you remember that each song is distinct, dissonance becomes harmony, even if it’s only imagined.