Cicada Years

01

How overexposed the world seemed that May morning in the graveyard of nuns. After the long months of pandemic confinement, I felt as though my mind that morning had been dilated. The world seemed too busy, too bright, too loud. Loud with cicadas and with jets passing overhead, going to and from Cincinnati’s airport, their arrivals and departures evidence that Americans had resumed the noisy traffic of their lives. The granite crosses marking the grassy graves were radiant that morning. They radiated in the sunshine, and they radiated geometrically in broken, concentric rings. The innermost graves were older than the outermost ones, beyond which the stone crosses gave way to a ring of oak trees planted more than a century ago. In the oaks, cicadas simmered. Most clung to leaves or to bark, but some portion of them was always in flight, clouding around the trees like dozy electrons.

These were not the annual cicadas (Neotibicen canicularis) that one hears every summer in the American Midwest. Annual cicadas rely on camouflage to evade their predators. When annual cicadas are singing, you can spend hours searching a tree canopy without ever spotting the source of that sound, that descant of static. The cicadas audible in the graveyard of nuns were periodical cicadas—seventeen-year periodical cicadas to be exact, of three different species to be more exact: Magicicada septendecim, Magicicada cassini, and, in far fewer numbers, Magicicada septendecula. They belonged to Brood X, the most widespread of the fifteen North American periodical cicada broods, or reproducing populations, that emerge asynchronously on different calendars.

Periodical cicadas do not rely on camouflage to survive. They overwhelm their predators with numbers, billions of them crawling out of dime-size holes in the ground, an evolutionary strategy known among biologists as “predator satiation.” When predator satiation works, every insectivore in the neighborhood can eat its fill and still leave plenty of survivors to chorus and mate. An emergence is a once-in-seventeen-years, all-you-can-eat buffet that sends a pulse of nutrients and energy through a forest ecosystem. Emergences correlate with population booms of rodents and birds. With their squid-ink shells, amber wings, and beady red eyes, periodical cicadas are easy to spot, easy to hear, easy to catch. They fly slowly and erratically. They are not aerodynamic. They drag their tails through the air in the upright posture of a hummingbird sipping from a blossom. The chirr of cicada wings resembles the shuffling of a deck of cards.

The procreative frenzy lasts five weeks. After mating, the female periodical cicada deposits her fertilized eggs into slits that she saws in tree branches with her ovipositor, a nib that protrudes from her abdomen’s pointed terminus. Like the fangs of some spiders and the mandibles of certain beetles, the ovipositors of cicadas are fortified by metals (iron, magnesium, zinc). Serrated along the edges, cicada ovipositors are sharp and hard enough to cut into tender new growth at the tips of branches. A single female can lay as many as four hundred eggs, ovipositing between twenty and forty in every slit she cuts. She spaces these nests evenly, like ellipses or the dashes in Morse code.

02

Two days before my visit to the graveyard of nuns, still too fearful of contagion to risk a motel, I’d towed a camper trailer with me to Cincinnati, anchored it in a state park on the city’s outskirts, and waited for Gene Kritsky to summon me. Kritsky is an entomologist. He is also “a frustrated historian,” he’d told me on the eve of my departure, when we’d spoken to each other through our computer screens. “You may have noticed I’ve written a book on the beekeeping of ancient Egypt,” he’d said.

I had noticed. From this book, The Tears of Re: Beekeeping in Ancient Egypt, I have learned a great many things: that ancient Egyptian beekeepers would attract a queen bee by mimicking her signature call; that beekeepers have a term for the calling of the queen—piping; that a queen bee pipes her signature call by pressing her thorax against the honeycomb and vibrating her wing muscles; that ancient Egyptians made offerings of honeycomb to the god Osiris and sometimes paid tribute in honey; that they believed bees had sprung from the tears of the sun god Re. Reading the book you are left with the impression that beekeepers and the insects they’d learned to husband might explain the sudden blossoming in the early Holocene of agriculture, and therefore of civilization as we know it.

The Tears of Re is generously illustrated with black-and-white photos that Kritsky took on his far-flung travels—photos of hieroglyphics scribbled on papyrus; of the ruined pyramid of the pharaoh Unas at Saqqara; of scarab number 30550, inscribed with the title of Chief Beekeeper, King’s Acquaintance, in the collection of the British Museum. Kritsky’s accompanying commentary quotes liberally from ancient sources, among them a letter Egyptian beekeepers sent in 250 BCE to some guy named Zenon, a Greek bureaucrat, regarding some donkeys. The donkeys were needed to transport beehives that had been in the fields for eighteen days. “Unless the donkeys are sent at once, the result will be that the hives will be ruined and the impost lost,” the beekeepers wrote before signing off with a blessing, “May you prosper!” In the dust jacket author photo for The Tears of Re, Kritsky appears before an Egyptian temple dressed as if for an archaeological dig in a blue work shirt and a wide-brimmed canvas hat, wearing a white beard and little spectacles.

He’d begun studying both history and periodical cicadas in 1974, as a doctoral student in entomology at the University of Illinois. At time scales longer than the changing seasons, there are in the animal kingdom few chronobiological patterns so rhythmically predictable as the life cycle of the Magicicada. No one can say precisely when locusts will swarm, where starlings will gather into murmurations, but with something approaching the wizardly accuracy of astronomers predicting the next appearance of Halley’s Comet, entomologists can tell you when and where periodical cicadas will emerge. If you wish to make sense of the ecological meanings communicated by cicada emergences, you can wait for the next one to happen, which is what most entomologists do. You can also, Kritsky realized, study emergences of the past.

In the University of Illinois library, he’d searched books and strips of microfiche for references to both cicadas and “seventeen-year locusts,” as antebellum American newspapers called the insects. In the decades since, he’d continued scavenging for cicada references, assembling a singular archive of more than eight thousand documents—local newspapers, agricultural reports, diaries, memoirs—with which he has mapped cicada emergences across time and space, searching for pulses and patterns, signals in the historical noise. Upon periodical cicadas he’s bestowed a memorable epithet: “The bugs of history,” he calls them.

03

In May of 1634, William Bradford, Governor of Plymouth Colony, while walking in the woods, encountered “a quantity of a great sort of flies.” These flies were big as bumble bees. They swarmed the foliage and made “a constant yelling noise.” The noise was loud enough “to deaf the hearers”—and noteworthy enough that sixteen years later, in 1650, Bradford would mention the insects and their yelling in his chronicle, Of Plymouth Plantation: 1620–1647, thereby introducing the periodical cicada into the historical record.

The suggestion that cicada songs could deafen hearers may seem a flourish of hyperbole on Bradford’s part, but New England in 1634 had not yet been logged over. The more trees, the more cicadas, and even now, when cicada habitat has been greatly diminished, their chorusing at its loudest can exceed ninety decibels, meaning that cicada chorales can approximate the roar of a passing motorcycle overheard by a pedestrian.

The strange and noisy flies that swarmed the forests near Plymouth in 1634 had “not by the English been heard or seen before or since,” Bradford notes. Who knew what all that ruckus had been about? Creation teems with signs and wonders that surpass human understanding, and the Lord works in mysterious ways. But the following May, in 1651, too late for Bradford to amend his chronicle, the strange and noisy flies would return, crawling forth from their holes to deaf the hearers once more, and they would keep returning in decades to come. Colonial New Englanders took to calling them locusts. The years in which emergences occurred they called “locust years.”

An emergence is a once-in-seventeen-years, all-you-can-eat buffet that sends a pulse of nutrients and energy through a forest ecosystem. With their squid-ink shells, amber wings, and beady red eyes, periodical cicadas are easy to spot, easy to hear, easy to catch. They fly slowly and erratically. They drag their tails through the air in the upright posture of a hummingbird sipping from a blossom. The chirr of cicada wings resembles the shuffling of a deck of cards.

04

This taxonomical confusion of periodical cicadas and locusts is understandable when you consider that in Europe, there are no periodical cicadas, only annual ones. Colonial New Englanders probably hadn’t ever heard or seen a swarm of locusts either, but they had almost certainly read about and imagined them. Locusts appear more often in the Bible than does any other insect—thirty-one times. The plague of locusts visited upon Egypt—covering “the face of the whole earth, so that the land was darkened” and devouring “every herb of the land, and all the fruit of the trees” until “there remained not any green thing” (Exodus 10:15 KJV)—make an apocalyptic impression potent enough to give a god-fearing Puritan bad dreams. It would take about two centuries for New Englanders to determine that cicadas, unlike locusts, do not devour crops. They sip xylem sap from tree roots. Xylem sap—a fluid consisting of water and dissolved minerals—is a nymph’s only sustenance. Their feeding does not harm their arboreal hosts: The tunnels that cicadas crawl out of aerate the soil so that rainfall during arid months reaches the roots from which the nymphs sipped, and by pruning the tips of branches with their ovipositors, cicadas increase the yield of fruit trees in the years following an emergence, orchard keepers have since learned. What Bradford took for a plague turned out to be, ecologically speaking, a benediction.

We don’t know of the emergence of 1651 because Bradford or any other living witness wrote about it. Historical sources are silent that year, and cicadas leave no trace of themselves in the archaeological record. At the end of an emergence, every generation of periodical cicadas dies off, the cadavers accumulating in great heaps around the trunks of trees, making the forests stink. Scavengers—birds, pigs, dogs—eat their fill. Detritivores and microbes take care of the leftovers. The biomass returns to the ecosystem, fertilizing the soil. We have no material evidence of the emergence of 1651, but we know it must have happened, thanks to the calculations of entomologists. Of what value, this knowledge? I can’t say, but I like knowing it. It feels like an addition to the storehouse of trustworthy facts, and it restores to the past an ambient soundscape usually inaudible in historical sources.

For emergences after 1651, we do not have to rely on the calculations of entomologists, since there is a good amount of vivid testimony. The year the Revolutionary War ended, 1783, was a “locust year,” and on June 20, when veterans stormed Independence Hall to demand delinquent back pay from Congress, the trees of Philadelphia rang with cicada song. Seventeen years later, a Pennsylvanian farmer sent an anonymous letter to The Philadelphia Gazette. In early May of 1800, while “removing about two inches of the surface of the earth from under a pear tree,” he had exposed “a great number of holes, in which were locusts, apparently ready for their approaching resurrection.”

05

The sequence of events that would deliver me to the graveyard of nuns was set in motion just prior to the pandemic, in the summer of 2019, when my family and I, after moving houses, became the custodians of a garden in Michigan. During lockdown, I started spending all of my free hours out there, getting to know the local flora and fauna. In particular, I spent much of lockdown looking at bugs.

“I prefer the time of insects to the time of stars,” writes Wisława Szymborska. During the pandemic, I came to share her preference. Any taste for the cosmic or sublime I might have once possessed I seem to have lost somewhere along the way. I prefer the papery hexagonal architecture of a vacated wasp nest to the celestial light show of a meteor shower. I’d rather watch a ladybug transit a sunflower’s spiky pseudanthium than observe a transit of Venus.

One morning, I witnessed the sort of ordinary murder that happens all the time in a garden. At the edge of a flower bed, a cardinal had snared a praying mantis by the thorax. The mantis put up a fight. There was much furious fluttering, of bird and insect both. A few times, the cardinal released its injured prey only to snatch it up again. The situation for the mantis looked terminal. When the cardinal finally flew off with its snack in its beak, I inspected the scene of the crime and found there, on a rock demarcating the flower bed’s border, a single jointed foreleg and a pair of wings. They were see-through, the mantis wings. When you tilted them just so, catching the light, their surface shimmered with a subtle iridescence.

I suspect that my amateur backyard entomology had something to do with some troubles I’d been having with time on Earth—how to keep it, how to make sense of it. I wasn’t, like Einstein, troubled by the physics of time, which suggests that what we call time—past, present, future—is an illusion. What troubled me was the way my own subjective experience of time’s passage had gone off-kilter. I’m not sure when these troubles started. They may have been brought on by the lengthening shadows of middle age. It is well known that the older you get, the more quickly time seems to pass. Psychologists have even measured this effect. One study found that three minutes to an elderly subject feels forty seconds shorter than it does to a young adult. I wasn’t sure, though, that aging alone explained my condition. The symptoms were preexisting, but during the pandemic they turned acute. The monotony of lockdown blurred the hours and days together; meanwhile, the messages we were sending and receiving through the ever-shifting kaleidoscopes of our screens gave the impression that time was speeding up, the present decaying too quickly into the past. The clocks and calendars and subliminal metronomes had fallen out of sync, inducing a kind of temporal vertigo to which my garden offered if not an antidote, then at least a palliative. I didn’t seek eternity there, just alternative temporalities.

Historians since antiquity have distinguished between “mythical time” and “historical time.” In the twentieth century, the historian of religion Mircea Eliade added another distinction, between “sacred time” and “secular time,” that resembles the earlier one between myth and history. Eliade defines sacred time, in fact, as “a primordial mythical time made present.” In secular time, writes the novelist John Crowley, summarizing Eliade, “each year, month, second, is a unique and unrepeatable unit that disappears even as it appears in the infinitesimal present.” Mythical time is static; what seems changing is in fact cyclical and everlasting. Historical time has been imagined as a kind of drama, the rush of events advancing inexorably toward some resolution that lies in the future. My reading about historical time and the history of time did not dispel my own temporal troubles. It left me, if anything, more confused. The philosopher Byung-Chul Han, meanwhile, has proposed in The Scent of Time that we no longer live in either mythical time or historical time or sacred time but in atomized time. Information has atomized history. Time no longer advances. It disperses. When the plotline of historical time “loses its narrative or teleological tension,” Han writes, “it disintegrates into points which whizz around without any sense of direction.”

In a garden, time itself—along with water, soil, and light—is a medium. Gardening is a kind of attunement of your senses and your mind to seasons and to patterns subtler than seasons. Every plant in a garden and every insect is keeping its own time. When we leave other creatures to their own internal devices, their timekeeping is mostly indifferent to ours. I’ve begun to wonder if such indifference suggests a new definition of wildness. To be wild is to exist outside of human time—whether mythical, historical, or atomized. This, I think, is what I sought in my garden: intimations of inhuman time. Then again, time is also ecological. The tens of trillions of biological clocks and calendars in an ecosystem all interact.

Consider what the Swiss myrmecologist Auguste Forel, author of The Ants of Switzerland, learned over breakfast in 1906. Between 7:30 and 9:30 each morning, Forel ate toast and jam on a terrace overlooking his garden, and every morning between 7:30 and 9:30 the jam on his breakfast table attracted bees. One morning when he didn’t bring the jam, Forel noticed that the bees still appeared, searching for it. Their punctuality suggested to the Swiss myrmecologist that his visitors weren’t merely lured by the fragrance and color of jam, as he’d presumed; they could learn and remember time and place. Forel proposed a name for this capacity: “time memory.” Other entomologists subsequently performed similar experiments under laboratory conditions. Even inside sensory-deprivation chambers, in the absence of all known diurnal indicators of time’s passage—the changing angle of sunlight, fluctuations in temperature or humidity—bees remember the time of day.

06

I’d rather look at the world through a mantis wing than through a telescope, and I prefer the time of insects to the time of stars, but I also wonder which insects Wisława Szymborska had in mind when she wrote that line. The time of bees is not the time of beetles. Periodical cicadas and annual cicadas do not keep the same time. Not even all periodical cicadas keep the same time.

In 1956, entomologists tape-recorded two species of periodical cicadas singing in northern Illinois—Magicicada septendecim and Magicicada cassini, the same two species that sixty-five years later I would hear singing in the graveyard of nuns. Only male cicadas sing. They do so by vibrating their tymbals. A tymbal is an anatomical instrument formed by two chitinous membranes that acoustically perform a role similar to the one performed by the stretched head of a kettledrum. A hollow air chamber in the male’s abdominal cavity amplifies the tymbal’s percussive vibrations.

There are in North America three species groups of Magicicada, and each sings at a signature tempo and frequency and according to a signature diurnal pattern. Analysis of the audio recordings collected in northern Illinois revealed that each individual male cicada contributes “phrases” to “the congregational song.” In the case of Magicicada septendecim, the signature phrase is a series of “low-pitched buzzes lasting 2 to 4 seconds,” whereas the signature phrase of Magicicada cassini comprises a rapid arpeggio of clicks followed by “a loud, shrill buzz lasting 1 to 2 seconds.” Individuals punctuate their musical phrases with “bursts of flight”—moving from branch to branch, tree to tree—and with courtship songs that are audibly distinct from the congregational song. They solo, in other words, when trying to impress a prospective mate. In all seven species of Magicicada, the phrases and the song grow louder with the rising of the mercury, but on equally hot days, Magicicada septendecim crescendos in late morning, around eleven o’clock, whereas Magicicada cassini crescendos in early afternoon. These crescendos of song correlate with crescendos of copulation. All cicadas quiet when it rains.

07

“Despicable maggot,” the naturalist Paul Dudley called a newly hatched cicada nymph he observed in a New England grove in 1733. Upon hatching from eggs oviposited in the tender new growth of a branch tip, nymphs are 1.8 mm long—about the size of a hyphen, smaller than a grain of rice. They fall from the branches like strange snow.

By 1733, Dudley had spent thirty-four years intermittently thinking about periodical cicadas, which like other New Englanders he mistook for locusts. He’d begun thinking about them during the locust year of 1699, when he was twenty-three, and resumed thinking about them during the subsequent emergence, in 1716, when he was forty. From these two dates he had sensibly inferred that the insects must emerge every seventeen years. But what if the interval between emergences should vary in duration? How to confirm the seventeen-year hypothesis? One could wait. Dudley did, and in May of 1733, confirmation chorused from the trees.

Son of the colonial governor of Massachusetts Bay and a lawyer, Dudley had served as attorney general, ascending to the position of chief justice of Massachusetts. But the bibliography of his written works reveals an ardor for natural history surpassing his interest in the law. Throughout his legal career, he submitted papers to the Royal Society of London on such diverse subjects as moose deer, rattlesnakes, whales, Niagara Falls, beehives, “a new sort of molasses made from apples,” ambergris, and the cross-pollination of corn. The summer following the emergence of 1733, Dudley, now age fifty-seven, sent to the Royal Society his “Account of the Locusts in New England,” the first thorough scientific study of the periodical cicada.

The adult insect, he writes there, “somewhat resembles a shrimp.” The eyes he compares to “small red beads about the size of a caulking pin’s head.” When the imago first emerges from the split carapace of the nymph’s exuvia, the shell of its juvenile self, the wings are “milk white,” Dudley reports. The singing of cicadas he compares to “the winding up of a clock.”

Dudley called the seventeen-year cycle he’d discovered “A Periodical Revolution of the Locusts.” Patiently, he’d solved one mystery, but then new mysteries surfaced: Why seventeen years between emergences and not some other number? How deeply do the nymphs burrow? What are they doing down there, underground, while waiting to emerge? How, without glimpsing sun or sky, do they keep time?

08

Not all North American periodical cicadas emerge every seventeen years. Some emerge every thirteen years. Entomologists have observed that both numbers, thirteen and seventeen, are prime, and both can be algebraically expressed by the formula 4x+1, where x is either 3 or 4. In one of our conversations, Gene Kritsky gave me a plausible evolutionary explanation for this formula. Prime numbers reduce the chances that two genetically distinct broods will fall into sync and hybridize. The asynchrony preserves advantageous traits. The extended interval of underground gestation is so lengthy, meanwhile, that no predator population can evolve to specialize in cicadas. All cicada predation is “opportunistic.”

The data contain other mysteries. For instance, this one: The distribution of thirteen-year and seventeen-year cicadas correlates, loosely yet suggestively, with the last glacial maximum. Below the Mason-Dixon line, thirteen-year cicadas prevail. To the north, in terrain formerly covered by ice, periodical cicadas stay underground an extra four years. What this correlation of gestational period with glacial geography signifies is difficult to say. Entomologists speculate that periodical cicadas, as they colonized latitudes vacated by the retreating ice, prolonged their life cycle in adaptation to the novel ecology of the ice sheet’s aftermath, in which we are still living.

09

My garden summits a glacial moraine in the watershed of the Huron River. The Huron connects the farmland of Michigan’s interior to the industrial outskirts of Detroit before emptying into Lake Erie. Near Ann Arbor, the river passes under railroad bridges decorated with graffiti from which, in summer, stoned teenagers leap. In late spring, along the outer bends of the wider meanders, water lilies surface in the shadows of cottonwood trees, their green pads multiplying along with the minutes of daylight. You can measure time by counting them.

During lockdown, while digging a vegetable bed, I unearthed a subterranean grub the size and color of an unshelled peanut. It looked dead, ashen and inert. But when I poked it, the bug wriggled with life, pedaling its six feet in the air. Before setting it back in the earth, I snapped a picture, which I then used to consult online field guides in order to solve my little entomological puzzle: The creature my shovel had disturbed was a cicada nymph. Which species of cicada, and whether it was annual or periodical, I couldn’t say—my photograph, zoomed in, was too grainy—but my discovery reminded me for the first time in many years of the afternoon in May of 2004 when, while bicycling beside the Huron River, I’d first experienced a cicada emergence.

Imperfectly, the Huron demarcates a northern boundary of the Brood X habitat range. I didn’t know as much in 2004. There are no periodical cicadas in Northern California, where I grew up, which is why the phenomenon I pedaled into beside the Huron one May morning in 2004—the dozy storm, the sizzling huzzah—had caught me by surprise. Cicadas kamikazed out of the treetops and bounced from my bicycle helmet. They crunched under my tires. They fairly paved the asphalt. There was no dodging them.

By the summer of 2020, when I dug up the cicada nymph while gardening, sixteen years had passed since that emergence beside the Huron River, which meant, I realized, that the next emergence was due to arrive the following spring. I contacted Gene Kritsky because I wanted to know what I was in for, whether the cicada nymph I’d dug up might have been a seventeen-year cicada, whether millions of cicadas might therefore soon throng the rosebushes and fruit trees in my backyard. But I also contacted Kritsky because I was interested in his study of historical entomology, and I think historical entomology interested me because of my troubles with time. “Even in broadest daylight, time moves / quietly like a thief in the night,” reads the epigraph with which Byung-Chul Han prefaces his chapter on Marcel Proust in The Scent of Time. No attribution follows Han’s epigraph. I have searched for the lines in both English and German, but my searching always leads back to the point of departure, Han and his chapter on Proust. The next stanza of the epigraph goes:

To stare at time, shout in its face,  

until it startles and stops,  

salvation or catastrophe?

In the spring of 2021, a year into the pandemic, I could have stared at time until it startled or stopped.

10

During his own pandemic confinement, Kritsky had been laboring to finish an epic scholarly project, a six-volume compendium of articles collected under the title A Cultural History of Insects, for which he’d agreed to serve as both general editor and contributor. The six volumes, arranged in chronological order, would span all of recorded history, from the Stone Age to the present. Each one would feature chapters on insects and disease, insects and food, insects in industry, mythology, religion, literature, art. Kritsky promised to let me know when copies of the six volumes were available, but the project he was most excited to tell me about when we first spoke was an app he’d helped develop called Cicada Safari. All across the country, during the emergence of Brood X, “citizen scientists” who’d downloaded Kritsky’s app onto their phones would upload geotagged photos of cicadas. With these crowd-sourced data, Kritsky hoped to conduct the largest survey of a single emergence in the history of entomology.

The Brood X breeding grounds happen to encompass major metropolitan areas, among them New York City and Washington, DC, and millions of Americans that spring, while sheltering in place, working from home, had nothing better to do than take pictures of insects with their phones. After a year of pandemic confinement, we’d evidently contracted a collective case of cicada fever. “Billions (Yes, Billions) of Brood X Cicadas Soon to Emerge from Underground” ran a headline in the New York Times that March, and by early May people had begun posting pictures of cicadas on social media, accompanying their snapshots with captions (“They’re heeerrreee”) and the hashtag #CicadaWatch2021. Kritsky was seeing more public interest than he had in four decades of doing this.

Since 1984, he’d been teaching in the biology department of Mount St. Joseph University, a Catholic college founded by the Sisters of Charity of Cincinnati. The college, along with a church and a retirement home for the sisters, occupies a bluff overlooking the Ohio River. “Their cemetery, which has been around since the 1890s, is my major study site,” Kritsky told me. He still remembered the first emergence he’d experienced there. This was 1987, when he was thirty-four years old. (Far away in Northern California, I’d just turned fifteen.) Wearing a headlamp, he’d visited the cemetery at night. “They’re coming out in such numbers that the blades of grass in the cemetery were moving,” he said, remembering, mixing his tenses. Cicadas only sing by day. Nocturnal emergences are silent. The sun that morning had risen on a scene out of some book of revelations. “They’re climbing up over the tombstones,” Kritsky recalled. “The whole summit is screaming.”

11

These days it is far easier than it was in the 1970s to go on an archival cicada hunt. At Kritsky’s suggestion, I searched for “seventeen-year locusts” in the database of digitized newspapers that the Library of Congress maintains. One of the earliest matches the database returned was a short item with an exclamatory headline—“The Seventeen year Locust!”—from the May 9, 1843, edition of the Richmond Daily Whig. “In a few days the woods will be thronged, and he who hears their accumulated hum for the first time, will be astonished,” the paper’s anonymous reporter writes. Seventeen-year locusts formerly appeared “in such countless multitudes as to fatten the swine of the country, to whom they are a chosen food, as they are also to foxes, raccoons, squirrels, crows, and every forest bird.” Although the throng will still be great enough to astonish those who hear the accumulated hum, the countless multitudes have, by 1843, already dwindled, “owing doubtless to the clearing up and cultivation of the face of the country.”

Changes in the geographic distribution of cicadas and in the temporal patterns of emergences are what Kritsky has sought to illuminate with his archival field work. The fragmentation of habitat explains Kritsky’s choice of study sites. If you wish to witness an emergence, you would be wise to seek out those arboreal refugia of mature trees and undisturbed earth—nature preserves, city parks, cemeteries.

12

As long ago as 1919 the USDA predicted that deforestation would drive some periodical cicada broods extinct. “We’ve got urbanization,” Kritsky told me. “We’ve got the ash borer. We’ve got tree diseases that have come in. We used to have elm trees. Dutch Elm disease took them out in the sixties. We’ve got—you know, it’s just everything. Climate change. They’re emerging around two weeks earlier than they used to. Almost every seventeen-year brood is spinning off four-year accelerants”—by which he meant some portion of seventeen-year cicadas had begun emerging after thirteen years. “With Cicada Safari last year, we documented that very thing happening now with the thirteen-year brood, Brood XIX, coming out all over the southern states and up through Missouri, coming out after nine years. And those are all tied to climate change. Because cicadas count the years by monitoring fluid flow in the trees.” The time of insects is speeding up.

How do cicada nymphs keep time? Thanks to entomologists at UC Davis, we now know. In 1997, they set up a laboratory with which they could alter thermophotoperiods—cyclical changes of temperature and light, or what most of us call day and night. Into their lab the entomologists brought potted peach trees that had been bred for subtropical climates and were therefore “capable of double cropping under appropriate conditions.” Instead of one crop of peaches per year, they could produce two. The entomologists then dug up from a site in Pennsylvania 130 fifteen-year-old periodical cicada nymphs and transplanted them to the roots of the peach trees in California.

In the paper they eventually published about their study, titled “How 17-year cicadas keep track of time,” the entomologists hypothesize that in subterranean darkness, cicada nymphs sense “changes in availability of or quality of plant nutrients.” They attune their own biological clocks to those of the trees from whose roots they sip. Cicadas aren’t counting solar years or responding to climatic changes. The trees are. The relationship is an example of ecological synchrony. If you could abbreviate and multiply the seasons so that the peach trees “abscised leaves and flowered twice each year,” experienced spring and fall twice each year, you could abbreviate the time cicadas spent underground, the entomologists proposed. You could artificially hasten an emergence.

The results of the experiment seemed to confirm the hypothesis. Fifteen-year-old cicada nymphs attached to trees that underwent accelerated thermophotoperiods emerged one calendar year after the experiment began, having spent only sixteen years underground. Those in a control group attached to unaccelerated trees emerged on their usual schedule, after seventeen years. In both the experimental group and the control group, nearly all of the 130 cicada nymphs died, but five times as many in the experimental group survived. For this discrepancy the entomologists offer no explanation.

13

In a garden, time itself—along with water, soil, and light—is a medium. Gardening is a kind of attunement of your senses and your mind to seasons and to patterns subtler than seasons. Every plant in a garden and every insect is keeping its own time. When we leave other creatures to their own internal devices, their timekeeping is mostly indifferent to ours. I’ve begun to wonder if such indifference suggests a new definition of wildness. To be wild is to exist outside of human time—whether mythical, historical, or atomized.

During the spring of their last year underground, nymphs wait for the earth to warm to 64° Fahrenheit. That’s their thermostatic signal, their cue. Like spring, emergences therefore begin at the warmest latitudes and spread north on a calendar that approximates the planting zones known to gardeners—planting zones that are shifting northward at the rate of 1.3 miles per year. Cicadas, meanwhile, can colonize new terrain at the rate of up to a mile per generation.

Kritsky had correctly predicted that Brood X would appear aboveground near the Tennessee–Georgia border in late April of 2021. He’d also predicted that the emergence would reach Cincinnati by early May, but when early May arrived, he emailed me an updated forecast: “We have a cold spell coming in, so it is unlikely we will see cicadas for about a week.”

A week later, they still hadn’t arrived. I drove to Ohio anyway. On my third morning at the campground on the outskirts of Cincinnati, Kritsky finally summoned me. It was happening. Cicadas had begun emerging the previous night. Better hurry. After unhitching my car from its trailer, I sped to the campus of Mount St. Joseph University. Kritsky met me there, dressed as if for an archaeological dig, in jeans, a short-sleeve button down, his wide-brimmed canvas hat. There was a beehive embossed on his silver belt buckle. He’d been fielding phone calls from reporters all morning and kept fielding them as he drove us out to the graveyard of nuns.

Reporters wanted to know about the psychotropic fungus, Massospora cicadina, that turns five percent of cicadas into “sex-crazed zombies.” Those are the words, “zombies” and “sex,” that made news of the fungus go viral. Fungal spores in the soil inoculate a small percentage of nymphs as they are tunneling out. In males, the fungus consumes the lower abdomen, makes the genitals fall off, and hijacks the nervous system with a brew of compounds that includes both psilocybin and amphetamine. The hosts lose their minds but not their libidos. They keep trying to mate with females and they will also impersonate them by flicking their wings, a semaphore with which female cicadas communicate sexual receptivity. Infected males fuck indiscriminately, males and females both, sexually transmitting the fungus to new hosts. It’s lurid and exciting stuff, irresistible to reporters, and you could understand why Massospora cicadina had infected social media as well as 5 percent of cicadas, but to Kritsky, the cicada fungus was old news—old because, having coevolved with its host, it has long been endemic in the population, and old because it was first reported more than two centuries ago by a free-born African American named Benjamin Banneker, a self-trained mathematician and astronomer who occasionally exchanged letters on scientific topics with Thomas Jefferson. Banneker’s notes on the Brood X emergence of 1766 included this astute observation: “The hindermost part rots off, and it does not appear to be any pain to them, for they still continue on singing till they die.”

Upon stepping from Kritsky’s car, I spotted one cicada, and then another, and then I saw that they were everywhere. They dangled from branches like bunched grapes. They’d ornamented shrubs and encrusted the trunk of an oak. Their abandoned exuviae crunched underfoot. Brush the exuviae away, and you could see hundreds of dime-size holes in the earth. Kritsky showed me a specimen, clinging to the oak trunk, that was midway through its metamorphosis. It had emerged about an hour before, he estimated.

A cicada metamorphosis is a gruesome becoming, one that Kritsky has memorably described, writing, “The immature cicada splits its nymphal skin at the thorax, revealing the milky white adult body within.” Hatching from itself, turning the lining of its tracheae inside out, headfirst the new imago crawls forth. The one Kritsky had drawn my attention to was half in, half out, the adult insect perpendicular to the juvenile husk clinging to the bark. Once all the way out, it would sit beside its vacated exuvia, which would look now like a figurine made of blown caramel. Still “teneral,” meaning soft, it would wait an hour or so for its wings to vascularize and uncrumple, the veins ambering, the transparent membrane stretched between the veins taking on an indigo shimmer. From two black capsules behind the red pinhead eyes, pigment would spread like dye in wet cloth, blackening the shell as it hardened.

So many cicadas had mobbed the oak, they seemed to me too numerous to count, but during a previous emergence, Kritsky had counted them, conducting a painstaking census in the graveyard of nuns. By his estimate, 356 cicadas had emerged from every square meter of the earth under the ring of oaks. A single tree provided refuge to some 700 newly emerged bugs. The population density of the Magicicada in the graveyard of nuns is among the greatest ever recorded anywhere. Four centuries ago, this patch of earth would have been unremarkable, one acre like all the others in the eastern woodlands of North America.

Kritsky took a call from a reporter who wanted to know about the sex-zombie fungus. “What’s really cool about this is that a male infected with the fungus, he will mate with other females but—how can I say this without being offensive?” I overheard him saying. “Although his junk has fallen off, he still tries to mate.”

While waiting for Kritsky to finish his call, I wandered among the graves. A dozen cicadas had ascended the stone cross marking the grave of Sister Mary Casimir Wendlekovsky, who died on November 1, 1920. Five more had scaled the gravestone of Sister Mary Mark Hayes, date of death: December 8, 1909. For some reason the graven inscriptions on the granite crosses omitted dates of birth. No cicadas emerged on this site in either 1909 or 1920, but cicadas did emerge here in 1919, which means that in the last year of her life, Sister Mary Casimir Wendlekovsky might have witnessed an emergence. She might have heard cicadas singing from the very oak tree that a century later shades her grave.

14

The next day I returned to Michigan, trailing the emergence after me. I imagined it as a slow-moving wave of sound, a latitudinally ascendant crescendo rising up to a ninety-decibel roar that, a week after my visit to the graveyard of nuns, came crashing into the watershed of the Huron River in the shallows of which the lily pads had begun to multiply. I visited its banks and felt, as the cicadas whizzed like moments or atoms around me, as if I’d traveled backward in time, as if my thirty-two-year-old self might come pedaling from around a bend.

To my great disappointment, the glacial moraine on which I live proved to be a desert island of quiet in this entomological sea of sound. Every morning for two weeks I headed out to look and listen. The garden teemed with terrestrial arthropods, but quietly. Magicicada did not crawl forth from my lawn to chorus from the rosebushes. I found a single specimen, or rather half of one, dropped, I surmised, by a passing bird.

The weeks passed, the seasons changed, the thermophotoperiods flickered by. Time pulsed like xylem sap through the roots of trees.

15

In the spring of 2024, almost three years after our outing to the graveyard of nuns, Kritsky’s publisher sent me digital copies of his editorial magnum opus, A Cultural History of Insects. Beginning with Volume 1, A Cultural History of Insects in Antiquity, I spent weeks clawing my way across the pages (like Auden with his dictionary), determined to reach the end of Volume 6, A Cultural History of Insects in the Modern Age. From these volumes I’ve learned a great many things.

I’ve learned that 9,000-year-old pottery shards found in Anatolia still contain residue of beeswax. That Beaulieu Abbey produced 1,782 pounds, 803 kilograms, of honey between 1269 and 1270, and that collectively bees would have to fly 240,000 miles and visit a hundred million flowers to produce a single of those kilograms. I’ve learned that in ancient Rome, insect larvae were believed to be the demonic spirits of errant humans who as a repercussion for their wrongdoings had been sentenced to an eternity of hopeless wandering and exile. I’ve learned that medieval scribes dipped their quills in ink made from crushed fermented oak galls formed by cynipid wasps and that gallnut ink is estimated to last for more than 1,500 years.

I learned that in 1479, in Berne, Switzerland, beetle larvae were excommunicated and banished by the archbishop; that in 1493 Lausanne, maybugs were banished for their misbehavior; that in 1713, in Brazil, monks denounced the ants that had invaded their monasteries, sentencing them to leave or suffer excommunication. The ants supposedly complied.

I learned that Earwig is possibly the oldest name of any insect in the English language, dating back to the eleventh century, deriving from the Old English ear wicga, “ear wiggler.” The Gaelic word for butterfly means “fire of God.” The English name seems to originate with the common cabbage butterfly, which would arrive in springtime when butter or cream was being made. Geoffrey Chaucer is the first known writer to use the word swarm and the phrase busy as a bee.

I learned that the Aztecs used the larvae of a scale insect Europeans called “cochineal,” or “grana,” to make a “wondrous” red dye; that in 1587, ships carried 5,677 arrobas, or 72 tons, of cochineal from Lima to Spain; that women in Elizabethan England reddened their lips with ground cochineal from South America, and the red coats worn by British soldiers were dyed with it. Titian and Coello and El Greco, Rembrandt, Van Gogh, and Renoir all painted with cochineal red.

I learned that Aztecs ate both the corn and the corn earworms, a source of protein. That in Scotland, people used to eat butterflies with honey. That in Australia, people used to eat witchetty grubs, Bogong moths, and honey ants, while in Japan, people used to eat and still sometimes do eat the rice-field grasshopper, fried and lightly seasoned with soy sauce. In North America people used to eat grasshoppers and locusts. North Americans also used to eat cicadas, reported to taste like shrimp.

I learned that it takes between twenty-four and forty-eight hours for a beetle colony to clean a large animal skull. That in the fourteenth century, for mysterious reasons, artists began depicting insects with increasingly lifelike precision, a phenomenon that art historians have called “specimen logic”: Whereas earlier artists had drawn insects from memory or fancy, to cartoonishly symbolic effect, in the fourteenth century, artists began depicting individual specimens, placing dead insects before them as they painted and drew. By the early 1600s, artists were illustrating insects so precisely they’d begun depicting the shadows cast by a specimen’s antennae. Then along came Robert Hooke peeping at insects through a microscope, drawing what he saw. Micrographia, Hooke’s illustrations of the microscopic world, which features an illustrated flea magnified to the size of a muskrat, became one of the first popular works of science.

I learned that during World War II, the Japanese began bombing enemy targets in China with plague-infested fleas, that they carried out similar experiments in entomological warfare with typhus-infested lice and Songo-infected ticks, and that all together this campaign of militarized insect-borne illness is thought to have claimed a hundred thousand Chinese lives. I learned that later in the war, the Japanese began dropping “Yagi bombs,” shells full of house flies drenched in cholera, and that “the ensuing epidemic caused 210,000 deaths.” I learned that, inspired by the Japanese experiments, Americans in the 1950s launched their own entomological weapons program, called Operation Big Itch, under the auspices of which they began cultivating mosquitoes infected with yellow fever, malaria, and dengue; flies infected with dysentery, cholera, and anthrax; and ticks infected with tularemia, relapsing fever, and Colorado fever. In a military experiment called Operation Big Buzz, the US military airdropped a million mosquitoes over rural Georgia. The entomological weapons program ended in the 1960s when military scientists invented munitions that could release “microbial aerosols,” no insects needed.

I learned that ancient Greeks kept annual cicadas as musical pets, in wicker cages. Aristotle includes them in his History of Animals. His contemporaries believed that cicadas generated spontaneously in the earth, or from cuckoo spit, but Aristotle had studied them closely enough to know that cicadas reproduce sexually. He describes the act in anatomical detail. When the imago crawls forth from the nymph’s exuvia, it is merely undergoing metamorphosis, Aristotle assures his readers, not regeneration, as many believed. In one Greek legend, Eos, Goddess of Dawn, asks Zeus to bestow upon her beloved, Tithonus, the gift of immortality but forgets to include a critical stipulation. Zeus grants the wish, giving Tithonus eternal life—but not eternal youth. Aging beyond a human lifespan, he eventually shrivels up, assuming the form of a cicada. Eos keeps him as a pet. Tithonus spends eternity serenading the Goddess of Dawn.

16

From sources other than Kritsky’s six-volume magnum opus, I learn that in May of 2024, there will occur another emergence—two of them in fact. Brood XIX will emerge after thirteen years underground in the American South. Brood XIII will emerge after seventeen years underground in the upper Midwest. In central Illinois, the breeding grounds of both broods overlap, meaning that in May of 2024 there will occur in central Illinois a rare entomological phenomenon: a double emergence. The last year in which a double emergence of Broods XIX and XIII occurred in central Illinois was 1803. There won’t be another until the year 2245—presuming, that is, that the periodical cicadas of Illinois survive until 2245 and keep the schedules they’ve kept since the ice sheets retreated.

Kritsky and I make plans to meet up at a nature preserve just west of Chicago. The double emergence does not interest Kritsky. He considers it so much media hype. He is heading to the nature preserve west of Chicago because that is where the seventeen-year cicadas of Brood XIII are certain to emerge in large numbers. I am interested in the double emergence, whatever the hype, and so on my way to Chicago, I decide to detour south into the “overlap zone.” Traveling the farm roads that crisscross acres of soybean and corn, I’ll hit every park or graveyard that my GPS identifies, hoping thereby to map out a cicada archipelago. At my first stop, a nature preserve near the town of Mahomet, Illinois, I am in luck. The cicadas are out. I snap a picture of one—thirteen-year, seventeen-year; Brood XIX or Brood XIII; Magicicada septendecim or cassini, I can’t say, but I upload the picture to Cicada Safari, adding a single data point to Kritsky’s latest census.

This turns out to be the last data point I will contribute. All day long, I zigzag northward on back roads, and in every small-town graveyard I visit, I roll my window down and listen, and in every graveyard, I hear only the white noise of a Midwestern spring: wind, birdsong, crickets.

Two hours of daylight remain when I arrive finally at the nature preserve. There, at last, the silence breaks. There the trees are still loud if not as loud as they would have been when the sun was at its meridian. The emergence of Brood XIII has been underway for eight days, long enough that cicadas have begun dying. Around the trunks of trees there are rings of dead cicadas, and the air stinks of them. I wander the woodsy paths, searching for Kritsky. I’m trying to distinguish courtship songs from congregational songs when he appears from around a bend, walking with the aid of a stick, a crooked branch sanded smooth. Since our outing in the graveyard of nuns, he has suffered a cerebellar stroke. He’s recovered, mostly, but he’s retired from teaching. “I’m a shell of myself, aren’t I?” he says—a sort of joke. We sit on a bench and listen to the ruckus. It’s quieter now than it was a few days ago, he tells me. A few days ago he measured eighty decibels. Today, it peaked at twenty. The stroke does not seem to have damaged his mind. He rambles from thought to thought, rattling off the dates of past emergences, the names of once-prominent entomologists he’d studied with in his youth. As he talks, cicadas keep dropping out of the branches overhead. They land on Kritsky’s shirt collar, in his hair, and he plucks them off absentmindedly.

The cicada fever we experienced during the pandemic seems to have subsided. In 2021, Kritsky received half a million uploads to Cicada Safari. This latest emergence is now nearly over, and he is closing in on fifty thousand data points, an order of magnitude fewer. We linger there a while, listening, and he teaches me to distinguish the song of Magicicada septendecim from that of Magicicada cassini. From a nearby tree come clicks followed by a buzz—the solo of a cassini. “The high-pitched whine?” Kritsky says. “That’s a bunch of septendecims.”

17

A month from now, after dropping from tree branches like strange snow, cicada nymphs smaller than rice grains will burrow into soil fertilized by the rotting corpses of the generation that spawned them. Spending their first two weeks close to the surface, they’ll feed on the roots of grass. After two weeks, they’ll descend to a depth of between eight and twelve inches. There, for seventeen years, until the year 2041, they’ll remain, barely moving in the solitary dark, sipping xylem sap from the roots of trees. If all goes well, they’ll grow, molting five times, and after the fifth and final molting, or “instar” as these developmental stages are called, they’ll rise, approaching the surface but not breaking it as they wait for soil temperatures to warm to 64° Fahrenheit. Go out with a shovel in the months just prior to the emergence of 2041, dig a little, and you’ll find them there, loitering near the entrance, waiting for the doors to open, the grand hoopla to begin.