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Cicada, Secada

4/19/04

I moved to the greater Washington, DC area—more correctly, Rockville, Maryland—in the fall of 1987.  As it turned out, this was fortuitous timing, since we missed the cicadas (pronounced se-KAY-da) by about five months, enrolling at Robert Frost Junior High School that fall.

Back then, I just thought that cicadas were nothing more than loud bugs, but I had dealt with the stress and the strife of that kind of thing before.  Besides, noise is one thing…two-inch-long bugs that fly into your face, scaring the living bejesus out of you, is a whole fucking other issue.

Earlier this year, I was doing some research on cicadas, because I wanted to know what I was up against.  Needless to say, I didn’t enjoy what I came up with:

-->There are a few different varieties of cicadas, the worst of which are the 17-year variety (Brood X).  These are worse mostly because the sound of these bastards is quite deafening.  If you spend a large amount of time outdoors during cicada season, expect to have to try to talk over the noise of a million bugs singing their hearts out.

-->This upcoming batch of cicadas will be out from roughly May 1st through May 18th, give or take a couple of days.  Essentially, when the temperature hits 64° or higher three days in a row around the end of April, watch the fuck out, because those fuckers are going to launch.  No lie:  according to three different articles I have read now about cicadas, there will be a day where there are literally no cicadas to be found anywhere; the next day, there will be one trillion or more in the air in your neighborhood, making all kinds of noise.  Wow.  I used to laugh at snow paranoia—still do, here in DC especially—but I’ll watch the news every day near the end of the month, just so I can be ready for when these muthafuckas strike.

-->Cicadas are about an inch and a half long, but I still believe that they are four inches in length, despite the fact that I have never seen one with my own eyes before.  At four inches in length, that makes them about two inches shorter than the bumblebees that used to hang out in the Colonnades down in Charlottesville, VA, the single-scariest insect ever seen.  I still remember running through the Colonnades with two other guys once, trying to outrun a pack of those bees, because they were so fucking ginormous.  (You may have guessed this by now, but I'm allergic to bee stings.)

-->Cicadas are incredibly inept flyers.  As such, they fly into people, houses, and each other with frightening regularity.  Worse, because they are completely harmless to humans, they make you look even more stupid as you try to swat them away, because there’s no danger of being stung in the first place.  There were a number of cicada-related car accidents reported in 1987 because people found themselves swerving all over the road while trying to shoo them out of their cars while on the highway.  (Note to self, during May, keep car windows and sun roof sealed at all times, so that those stupid fucking cicadas don’t make me wreck.

-->I will take extra care to avoid having dogs lick my face for any reason during that fateful stretch of cicada season, because dogs seem to have the damned things in their mouths all the time.  Cicada casings will literally litter your driveway and lawn for a while, and Scruffy will be out there lapping them up every so often, much to your dismay.  Poor Scruffy.

-->My original plan was to drive west during cicada season, but I have learned that avoiding the cicadas might be unrealistic after all:  Brood X cicadas will be out in sparse numbers from New York to Georgia, and as far west as Illinois; the concentrated areas are the DC area and nearly all of Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee, with North Carolina another hot spot, too.  (By “hot spot”, I mean that there are as many as 1.5 million cicadas per acre.)  I may have to go to Rochester for a couple weeks to escape…

If you go out into your back yard right now and start digging, you’ll see that the cicadas are pretty much set to launch.  Someone I know recently did this—as if it wasn’t really true—and discovered how it looks to see a thousand bug shells about to burst to life.  Ugh.

In general, I don’t really like bugs, as if you couldn’t already tell.  Crickets were the first bug to really come close to driving me insane, soon after we first moved to Washington; ever since, I realize now that save for San Francisco—our nation’s only bug-free ‘hood—I have had to suffer through bug allergies and bee stings everywhere, and I don’t like it.

I don’t like the idea that I’m going to have to carry around a racquetball racquet to swat away packs of cicadas.  I don’t like the idea that I’m going to walk outside and have to deal with walking around on dead cicada shell casings all the time for about three weeks.  Worse, the crunch that a two-inch bug makes under your feet is a little disarming when you are doing it five or six steps in a row while walking to the car parked in your driveway.  I also don’t love the thought of riding a bike anywhere during cicada season; two-inch bugs running into you, or getting caught up in your helmet, or cicadas that unknowingly fly into your mesh shorts.

Now, unlike singing artist Jon Secada (pronounced greatest-HITS-album??), the lifespan of a cicada is at least reasonably short:  those puppies are here and gone in 17 days.  Hopefully, I won’t have to, you know, leave the house for three weeks or so.

Random Bellviews, courtesy of Bell and Longer Community Trust:

• Softball season:  Opening Weekend

• N*E*R*D/Black Eyed Peas show at 9:30 Club:  $9.50 Show

• Going on vacation...and then going home to reality:  Matinee

• Gas for your SUV:  Rental

• Job hunting:  Hard Vice

 

justin@bellviewmovies.com