Earlier this month the “world’s largest cicada brood” started hatching in the South. Many of my friends in Nashville hate them. The bugs, which come around every 13 years, are loud and gross. But they’re good for some stuff, too! Like:
And laughing!
Ew.
(Thank Reddit for the first link… and inevitable nightmares.)
Bob Dylan wrote a song called “Day of the Locusts” because he was invited to get an honorary degree at Princeton’s graduation in a year when the cicada emerged (yes, the have them in New Jersey) and they were so loud, no one could hear the speakers.
Cicadas are cool because they understand prime numbers.
@1, despite common usage throughout the South, locusts are not cicadas or vice versa. Locusts, as mentioned in the Bible, and which periodically swarm across the Prairie and Great Plains, sometimes in the hundreds of billions, devouring everything in their path including every wisp of your crops, the clothes off your back, and the handles of your tools, are grasshoppers. If you read old newspapers from small towns in Plains states, you’ll see how obsessed people were, and in many places still are, with these bastards, and for good reason. My great-grandfather used to use lead and arsenic as a pesticide against them, which is one reason why I laugh when people try to tell me how much worse pesticides are today than in the misty Arcadian past. Every farm in America used to have bags of arsenic and lead around.
When I lived in Texas we called cicadas locusts, but they weren’t really. They were the huge, noisy frog-faced critters Megan is referring to here. And another thing — any one cycle of them may come around every seven or 13 years, but they’re around every single summer. They’re incredibly loud; the first time we heard them after we moved there we all ran outside thinking there was some kind of weird alarm going off. You get used to it after a while. Their discarded casings, which look startlingly like live cicadas, are everywhere in the trees. I still remember the stupid things crashing into me when I mowed the lawn; they felt like rocks hitting me. Got one right in the center of my forehead once.
Cicadas remind me of spending summers at my grandma’s house in central Missouri as a young one. Thunderstorms, cicadas, and lightning bugs.
I have a fond memories of riding shotgun in my dad’s car, when a cicada collided with our windshield while we were stopped at a light. It slid down to the windshield wiper on its back, clattered around with its wings the way cicadas do, and finally righted itself just as we got moving. Then it took off and flew straight into a lamp pole. Bonk.
The other cicada story I have is from when I was rather younger (about twelve or so). My mom was coming home one evening, and a cicada flew down her shirt as she was walking through the front door and just as quickly flew out into the living room. We tried to catch it as it buzzed loudly from wall to wall, but our cat was way ahead of us. He chased it down behind a large beanbag chair we had, swatting excitedly at it. We followed him over to catch the cicada, but we could not see where it had went; we could still hear it buzzing, however, so we knew it was still alive. We were stumped…and then as our cat walked away nonchalantly, we heard the muffled buzzing follow him. My mom picked the cat up and pried his jaws open, and the spit-covered cicada shot out, made several circuits of the room, and exited through the door under its own power.
I could not make these things up.
i was in kindergarten during a 17-year cicada hatch. i’m scarred. I DO NOT LIKE CICADAS.
Jesus, they’re just fucking bugs, people. Do cockroaches freak you out too? Get a life
Oh, and the kid across the street used to catch one and tie a thread to its leg and fly it around in a circle, but I was too askeered to do it.
Then there were the cicada killers, which were truly fearsome giant two-inch-long wasps that fly in packs in formation like Blue Angels, which were commonly known to be the most frightening creatures in the insect world but which I later learned were pretty harmless unless you were a cicada, or a lawn.
Then there were the June bugs, which were disgusting big cockroach-brown beetles that massed by the thousands by the sliding-glass door and tumbled into the house if you weren’t careful and usually even if you were. There were usually dozens of squished ones by the door.
Then there was the miraculous day when a giant Brazil-nut-shaped white caterpillar with a tall white Mohawk of spines was found crossing the driveway. The neighbor kids solemnly informed me that to merely brush against this monster would cause instant paralysis and blood gushing from the mouth. We watched it march across to the grass verge at a stately one MPW (mile per week).
And don’t talk to me about cockroaches. Here in Seattle, or even in New York, they get these little bastards that are maybe a half-inch, tops. In Texas they grow them two inches or more. We once stayed in a motel in Houston, and when my dad complained to the desk that the tub and sink were left full of standing water, he was told “aw, we dew that to keep the buuugs from comin’ up”. Which they immediately did. Christ almighty what a place.
One last bug story: in my New York junkie apartment, my crazy roommate said “oh, don’t open that, we never open that” in reference to the left side of the double sink, which had a fitted metal drain board on it. I opened it thinking, how bad can it be, I’ll clean it, I like cleaning things. One hundred million cockroaches. I cleaned it but I did not like it.
I went to sleepaway camp one year when the cicadas emerged, and they were fucking everywhere. They were so loud, no one slept for the whole week.
Woodmont Boulevard is a rather long, tree-lined residential street in Nashville that used to be (maybe still is) home to some of Nashville’s more well-to-do residents. From where I grew up there, you had to take it to get to Green Hills, the remarkably named Granny White Pike (lots of pikes in Nashville), Belle Meade, and the road you took to get to Memphis and points west. It was usually a fairly busy, almost bumper-to-bumper road that took maybe 20-25 minutes to get from one end to the other.
I witnessed a cicada plague or two along that street, screaming in nearly constant waves of piano and forte. It could be quite maddening, but of course, the birds and frogs and other fauna wouldn’t call it maddening. They would call it dinner – a big, wonderful, more-than-you-can-possibly-eat three-day eat festival.
@6 – yes. The question is ‘why DON’T cockroaches freak YOU out’?!?!
Cockroaches are bad for people. Cause allergies, etc. Plus they bite, fly and get into everything.