Brood
In Fallston, Maryland, just outside of Baltimore, we stopped at an auto repair shop because our air conditioning was broken. A man wearing two bandanas, one on his head and another as a mask, limped in on crutches behind us. “Hey man, can you check my back?” We looked him up and down. No thumb-sized bugs with red eyes clung to his shirt or pants. “Thanks. I know I shouldn’t complain, it’s only every seventeen years. But I wish it was over.” We didn’t tell him that we had traveled to Maryland from New York because we wanted to see Brood X, the gigantic generation of cicadas that emerges in the mid-Atlantic on a seventeen year cycle. The bugs feel like a plague, literally coating trees and people as well, if you stand outside too long. They don't really harm anyone, but their sheer numbers overwhelm the region and everyone who lives there. There can be up to 1.4 million cicadas per acre, and they leave their husks on trees and on the ground and in the rivers, as if to double their perceived numbers.
Seventeen years ago I was living in Washington D.C. and finishing my miserable junior year of high school. I spent most of my time alone and friendless, reading novels during the day and wandering around my neighborhood thinking too much at night. I remember being excited for the cicadas simply because it would be something different and I couldn’t stand things as they were. Thirty-four years ago I was being born, at the onset of a heat wave in D.C. Because we emerged together, I feel a kinship with the Brood, and had been imagining this return trip since I left D.C. sixteen years ago.
Last weekend, Anthony and I packed up the car and drove south on I-95 for three hours to Susquehanna State Park. Our first indication that we were entering cicada territory was that our windshield was getting dirty. Black pellets flew at us on the highway and smashed into the car, leaving trails of gunk. We got out at a trailhead at the riverfront park. At the parking lot, the hum of the cicadas sounded more or less like all the summers of my childhood, but as we moved deeper into the forest it grew louder and louder. There were at least two layers of the sound, an identifiable buzzing or chirping from the swarms directly overhead, as well as a deep extraterrestrial hum that sounded sort of like a Maglev train passing by continuously. It felt forbidden to keep walking deeper into the sound, as if we would find a horrible screaming center, but of course it only intensified and then lessened around us. Broods have no center.
We stayed that night at a tent set up on top of an old Land Rover in the field behind our Hipcamp host’s home. I watched the sunset from the car roof platform, brushing away the cicadas who tried to fly into my ear and listening to their chirps quiet down as it became dark. For some reason I’d always remembered their noise as an aspect of the night, but most cicadas are diurnal. I thought about returning for the next emergence, which will happen when I’m fifty-one. I've been An impossibly long stretch from thirty-four, just as thirty-four is from seventeen. Not so long after seventeen, I left home and my world transformed through the hard, fast friendships of college. If I had known then what was coming, would it have changed anything? And would the first few months of college have felt, as they did, like such a soaring, astonishing revelation? Only rarely since then have I experienced such total immersion in my own life, too busy living for brooding and rumination. It was, I thought, the climax of my life. I don't think of it that way now, of course. I miss that period of time but not as much as I expected.
Something I didn’t know about cicadas is that they’re not in some suspended state of hibernation for those seventeen years between emergences. They hatch from eggs in tree grooves, but immediately make their way to the soil and spend a lifetime, nearly, underground — digging, burrowing and drinking sap from tree roots as they slowly mature. They have the longest life cycle of any insect. So then imagine what an emergence feels like. After that many years living in dark tunnels, they blast up out of the ground, making a rigatoni-sized hole on their way out. Suddenly in the sunlight, which they’ve only glimpsed once as bleary babies, they can fly through the open air with freshly-grown wings. And the air is full of everyone else just their own age, and everyone out there is sexy, everyone wants to mate. For four to six weeks they literally rule the world. It’s like it was built for them.
When you look back at your life story, it’s easy to feel nostalgia or even regret for somehow losing those moments when it felt like you and the rest of the world were in absolutely perfect alignment. But maybe those moments are not meant to be the normal order of life; they arise briefly only after years of slow growing and maturation. Everything that leads up to them is really what they're about. And maybe right now, and maybe always, there is something latent building in you. It can be hard to identify what the thing is when it’s buried so deep, but someday it will burst forth.