Cicadas Are Terrible at Living in the World They're Emerging Into. Just Like Us.

 
Periodical cicadas sit on leaves in Rock Creek Park in Washington, D.C. (photo: Astrid Riecken/WP)

By Joshua Keating, The Washington Post

30 May 21

readersupportednews.org

here’s always a surprising wildness to the all-too-brief spring in the D.C. area, that weeks-long lull when the heat is turned off but the air conditioning is not yet on. For a spell, the boundary between the human world and nature feels more porous. The air, thick with moisture and pollen, wafts into our homes through screen windows, clinging to skin and inflaming sinuses. Ducklings putter about in pools on the Mall, and the overgrown trails of Rock Creek Park beckon.

This year, the spring feels wilder than normal thanks to Brood X, its emergence offering a pervasive spectacle of cicada sex and death that has overtaken our environment. The sidewalks themselves seem to be wriggling with tiny bodies and crunchy brown exoskeletons. An eerie high-pitched drone plays counterpoint to the more familiar sounds of crickets and birds. After dark each night, the latest waves scuttle up tree trunks, pulling their pale white abdomens out of their old carapaces.

But as remarkable as it is to watch them crawl out of the ground, the most striking thing about the insects is how bad they are at being alive. After 17 years underground, the cicadas of Brood X really don’t seem ready for the surface at all. They tend to cluster in exposed areas where they’re easy marks for birds and small mammals, or likely to be crunched underfoot by human pedestrians. Haplessly schlepping their half-shed shells across the blazing-hot concrete in the path of an oncoming schnauzer, they seem, as a species, to be somehow unfinished, as if evolution cut a few corners and clocked off early.

When they inevitably end up on their backs — perhaps having fallen from the tree branches to which they haplessly cling — they are unable to right themselves, like turtles, except that turtle shells actually have some value as protection. They’re capable of flight but don’t seem to have learned how to do it properly. Instead, they careen slowly and drunkenly off surfaces, held aloft by fragile, translucent wings that seem too small for their bodies. Birds perch atop lampposts, their beaks hanging wide, as if they were, quite reasonably, expecting their befuddled prey to pilot straight into their open maws.

So the cicadas are all too easy to mock, but every time the impulse strikes me, I realize that their travails aren’t so different from our own. Like the cicadas, we humans are also emerging into the light this spring for the first time after a period nestled in the dark; not 17 years, admittedly, but still much longer than we’re used to. And like the cicadas, we seem remarkably ill-prepared for the world we’ve emerged into.

The excited talk of a “hot vax summer” or a “new Roaring Twenties” is all well and good, but first we’re going to have to relearn how to interact with one another. I know, from talking to friends, that I’m not the only one who seems to have entirely forgotten how to make small talk. When your neighbor greets you with a cordial “Hello,” are you supposed to respond, “Good morning!” or “Fine, thanks, and you?” At least we’ve progressed from the “Hanging in there, I guess” to the “Things are starting to open up a bit!” phase of recovery repartee. But when we do talk, we’ve mostly struggled to talk about anything other than the pandemic, our single topic drowning out all else, not unlike the cicadas’ nightly hum.

Once-routine activities like ordering at a restaurant or taking public transportation seem novel and strange. Ongoing covid concerns and safety protocols don’t help: How wide a berth are we still keeping on the sidewalk? Are handshakes and hugs back? Can we hang out inside yet? If anything, the increasingly bitter debate over masking policy is evidence that we really don’t trust one another, if only because we still fear the lurking pathogens. Here, too, the cicadas — imperiled by a contagious psychedelic fungus that can cause their butts to fall off — may be more like us than we want to believe.

But maybe that’s where the cicadas also have a lesson for us. As a cohort, they’re pulling off an incredible feat of natural choreography, one worthy of awe. They don’t get much time under the sun, and they may not seem particularly well-suited to it, but they make the most of it. Their incompetence isn’t their strength, exactly, but their persistence is evidence that they are, collectively, stronger than they seem. Yes, they are bad at being themselves, but that doesn’t stop them from going for it anyway. As the Tao Te Ching puts it, “Great skill seems awkward; great eloquence seems tongue-tied.”

Emerging into the post-quarantine sunlight, we hopefully have more to look forward to than two weeks to molt, mate and die. (A hot vax summer, indeed.) Seeing old friends, making small talk with acquaintances, eating in public, even working in an office are all going to be more intense and novel than they used to be, and a little tentative ungainliness at first isn’t the worst reaction. But however much the cicadas may remind us of ourselves now, they also show us the truth about our awkward predicament: Ultimately, the only way out is through.

If nothing else, at least they’ve given us something other than the pandemic to talk about.