As we end a year of covid gloom, acquire vaccines and adjourn, squinting and stretching, into springtime, those in several mid-Atlantic, Midwestern and Southern states will have company: billions of periodic cicadas known as Brood X.
They are all 17 years old and have not seen the sun since 2004, when they were conceived, laid and hatched. They then tunneled into the dirt and sucked the sap of tree roots while counting the years. This is the one they were waiting for. Once the dirt gets warm enough, they will climb out to summon mates and repeat the cycle.
What the emotionally submerged human dreams of doing the cicada literally does, digging upward into the warmth of late spring, sprouting wings and spending the rest of its life buzzing, bouncing, bopping and blithely bugging out. What a way to go: climbing into trees and falling out of them, drunk on love and sunshine, making a racket using just your drum-tight abdomen, using every second of the time you have left, which is about six weeks.
Cicadas seize the joy that other insects forgo. Not for them the digging of tunnels, building of hives and mounds, cutting of leaves and rolling of dung. No commuting from nest to rotting corpse and back. No stinging, no biting, no sucking blood. No warfare. No anything, except making the most of the brilliant days between the darkness.
As the 17th-century Japanese haiku master Basho wrote: The cry of the cicada/gives us no sign/that presently it will die.
Let humans slog along, piling up the milestones this year's graduating class of cicadas missed: the first iPhone and first Black president; two new popes; hurricanes Katrina and Sandy; the IRA laying down its arms and countless others taking them up; Olympic Games in Athens, Beijing, London and Rio. When this year's cicadas were juvenile and grublike, Mark Zuckerberg was a Harvard undergraduate. Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were toppled while the cicadas waited. Some afflictions have flared and subsided, like Zika and Ebola and "High School Musical." New ones are waiting their turn.
If the cicadas fear missing out, they never show it. But then, always on schedule, they bring in the noise and regenerative funk. They take a hammer to our eardrums. They creep many of us out. But after all those years of self-denying absence, cicadas have earned the right to rumpus.
Then the party ends and all that's left are cicada husks and an echoing silence. The grubs are underground, tenacious and alive, leaving above-ground humans to mull about sorrow and impermanence and death.
Ogden Nash addressed cicadas directly in 1936:
Dear locusts, my sympathy
for you is intense
Because by the time you get
adjusted you will be defunct,
leaving nothing behind you
but a lot of descendants
who in turn will be defunct
just as they
get adjusted seventeen years hence.
Nash's error, besides calling cicadas locusts, was assuming the brood cared about our timetable. Unknown millions of years ago, through evolution's accidental genius, they hit on a way of life of astounding utility and beauty. They need no further adjustment.