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Wherein the cicadas sing... if you can call it that—

and panicked noobs call the police

Two weeks ago, the /SouthCarolina Reddit was convulsed with collective laughter because the cicada clamor had started up and folks were calling the cops.

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You read that right. They were .. literally… calling the cops.

Reddit turned into a free-for-all as “been-yahs”[1] leaped at the opportunity to dunk on “come-yahs.” The comments covered the spectrum from tongue-in-cheek …

… to not so much.

Anyway, we made the news! The national news, I mean, and not just as the butt of the joke. NBC Nightly News used Newberry as the peg for a really well researched and entertaining national report. The graphics illustrating the brood emergence are especially good, IMHO.

I’m also including this Good Morning America clip, partly because cicadas are pretty bugs and the ABC video team manages to capture that better. Also, ABC managed to conduct an interview with a Southern official that didn’t make him look like a sinister clown. Impressive.

I’m not joking. I truly appreciated the fact that Newberry’s Sheriff Lee Foster gets the chance to explain (at ~1:11) why those poor noobs to the Southern wilds were concerned enough to call 911. The sound isn’t just insistent—it’s relentless. A reverberation as much as a music—as mechanical in its regularity as something that’s never been alive. People thought they were hearing a burglar alarm or even some kind of emergency warning signal.( For what, who knows?)

So I get it. If I’d never heard the trees singing, I might well have taken fright, too. Even now, inured as I am by all these decades of Southern living, if I really allowed myself to think about exactly how many jeweled bodies that vibration from the trees represents… I might have to pack up and leave for someplace cicada-free. For a month.

I don’t think about it, though. We’ve had no nightmare visitations at Bellaflora, no hydrangea bushes crawling with red-eyed, winged beasties—the sight that sent our friend Joanne bolting back to the safety of the garden view from her kitchen last week. I’ve had, to be sure, a few bad days. The first morning I opened the front door to find eight of the red-eyed buggers napping on the inside of the screen—yes, that made me take a giant step back. But they’re so comically non-threatening at close quarters. They don’t bite. They hurtle their bodies into space with abandon, but their aim is terrible and they often wind up sprawling helpless at your feet while they right themselves. If they land on you, it’s almost certainly by accident and a flick of the wrist sends them flying…

Growing accustomed to them has made me curious, and reading about their emergence alongside watching the slow, relentless swelling of their numbers has me … thinking. The video I posted at the top of this post, for example, is a very short segment of a much longer, much more meandering meditation. With the cicadas the soundtrack to every waking moment from dawn until the sun dies in the sky—with us as we shower, on our zoom calls, and, yes, every moment in the garden—you can’t help but … ponder them.

What I’ve learned is what we’re seeing is Brood XIX, the Great Southern Brood, which arrives every 13 years, and that it’s emerging simultaneously with the 17-year Brood XIII, aka the Northern Illinois Brood. That in itself is a marvel because it means that each of crazy, glittering beings vibrating so wildly around me as I write on my front porch has been underground for over a decade, never once seeing the sun. I think of what I’d do granted wings after such a long sleep, and I’d do the same as them— I’d be turning and turning in a widening gyre[2], too, as I careened in eccentric circles through the trees…

But there’s something that makes this scenario even more marvelous. While cicada brood co-emergences are not unknown, this one—representing the intersection of broods in time but also geographically in space—is fantastically rare. The last time it happened, in 1803, Thomas Jefferson was president. I have a history at Monticello, having spent a few years there as a “plantation life interpreter” while I was in grad school so this is a provocative thought. T.J. wrapping up the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 amid the flourishing of his second family—Beverly, age 5, and Harriett, age 2 (with two more, Madison and Eston, to come). I imagine Sally Hemings, their mother, dandling them on her knee or staring out from the big house over Mulberry Row, with its stunning Appalachian Mountain views, while the trees vibrated overhead. In 1803, there would have been enslaved elders at Monticello with memories of Africa, too; some may even have passed down stories of “why the cicada sings.”

So, I guess I will call it that, “song.” And even though it’s not exactly musical, I’m nonetheless practicing thankfulness to my cicada neighbors for giving me, through their song, a glimpse of the wheel of time.

The fact of you gives raucous testimony to the succession of forests over time cycles of unimaginable antiquity—cycles that existed aeons before us. And that will exist after us.

I feel a momentary twinge of vertigo as I imagine this: the end of all cycles, including my own …

And then, it’s just fine.

_______

  1. South Carolinians are notoriously persnickety about drawing lines between natives and migrants. When I was a girl, white Charlestonians called anyone not born in the Holy City a “foreigner.” The Gullah Geechee version of that is “been yah” (“been here”) versus “come yah.”

  2. Yes, the cicadas have me thinking about William Butler Yeats’s gyres, but then many things bring him to mind. A boy read “Brown Penny” to me when I was just 16, and I was ruined for life.

Escaped from Cultivation
Escaped from Cultivation
Authors
K. Hamilton