The Summer I Got Buzzed
Every 13 years it begins. One morning this summer, I awoke to one of nature's true wonders, an explosion of giant insects. From North Carolina across to Arkansas and up into Missouri and Illinois, Brood XIX cicadas, the "Great Southern Brood," began emerging from underground, molting, flying, singing their rhythmic songs -- and landing on me. That is when wonder turned to panic.
Cicadas spend those 13 years sucking on tree roots, molting and remolting until they are two inches long. Then they tunnel out, climb up the nearest tree or other vertical object, and molt once more, leaving behind an exquisitely detailed exoskeleton that glows golden in the sunlight. As adults, they are red-eyed and equipped with transparent wings, with which they clumsily fly to ear-splittingly loud lek trees to mate. Then they die, rot, and enrich the soil, feeding the trees they once consumed.
My first Brood XIX cicada landed on me as I left the house to get the paper. I flailed. I screamed. Its hooklike legs had got stuck on my shirt. It was panicking too, buzzing loudly in distress. I finally pried it off and bolted back to the house, my heart racing. The next time one mistook me for a tree, as they so often do around anything even vaguely vertical, I screamed again.
I tried to shake off my irrational terror. Cicadas don't sting or bite, unless you hold them quietly long enough to make them think you are a suckable tree. I tried to tough it out, but dreaded after-dinner walks. The bugs were everywhere. After a few days, I gave up and stayed inside. I read that the emergence was to last six weeks. I despaired. I would be a prisoner in my own home for half the summer.
And worse! I would make a prisoner of my toddler daughter, in whom I hoped to inculcate a lifetime love of nature. Adele had no fear of cicadas. She picked them up gently and let them roam around her pudgy limbs. It was only after witnessing my transparent fear and attempts at nonchalance when she brought me the wriggling, buzzing insects as gifts ("Oh, thank you, dear! Why don't you put him on the ground?") that she began to handle them with some suspicion.
My terror of cicadas plunged me into an existential crisis. I preach the gospel of connecting with nature right in your own backyard, rather than fixating on spectacular nature far away via documentaries about elephants or sharks. Now I was afraid of my own backyard.
Eventually, I got a temporary prescription for clonazepam, an antianxiety drug. Flying high on our pharmaceutical bounty, I could hang out the laundry, take my daughter to the lake, and remove the cicadas that landed on me with only the mildest spike of adrenaline.
But what does it mean when one of nature's greatest wonders -- and I really think of the periodic emergence of cicadas as the insect equivalent of a wildebeest migration or a sandhill crane superflock gathering at dusk on the Platte -- drives me to drugs?
At first, I was heartily ashamed of myself. I felt as if I had failed some test of biophilia. But then I thought about wolves. In their seminal 1998 paper calling for a rewilding of North America, Michael Soulé and Reed Noss spoke about ecological reasons for restoring missing carnivores. They also talked about how predators supply "human opportunities to attain humility."
Wolves aren't just beautiful or ecologically important, in other words; they are also terrifying. Fear is a value they provide. Nature isn't supposed to be a pleasing production number filled with charming creatures and pretty plants. Wild nature can frighten, hurt, kill. And when we lose nature, we lose fear along with beauty.
I'm not going to lie; the pills were great. I was arguably a better mother: laid-back, relaxed, able to slow down to my daughter's pace. But I don't think she noticed a thing. The cicadas are all fertilizer now and the pills are back on the shelf. Adele and I can romp outside without fear. Playing in our suddenly much less threatening yard, I realize that I have done exactly what I advise us all to do. I have experienced the nature that is all around us in a deep and visceral way. I didn't have to drive to Yellowstone to "attain humility." I found fear in my own backyard.
