All the Buzz

 

 

            I had little difficulty in choosing this week’s topic, which was in fact nearly inevitable.   It was all the buzz around here, and it had already been bugging me for several days when over yesterday’s breakfast table Joan excitedly pointed out a terrific article in the “Science Times.”  It had the possibly misleading title “Your Invitation to Party Like It’s 2004”.  She read most of it to me aloud.  The supposed partygoers were “seventeen year” or “Brood X” cicadas rising by their millions from the warming earth just as their parents had done in 2004 and their grandparents had done in 1987 and their great grandparents had in 1970—the first year in which the big red-eyed bugs had come to my attention.

 

            The past week around here was already one marked by certain events of parochial interest.  In addition to the attenuated excitement reported in my last post the period included my eighty-fifth birthday, a family gathering to observe it, and the first restaurant meal and first “in person” religious service (al fresco, of course) I had attended in living memory.  Several millions of flying, chirping, staggering, creepy-crawling, messily mating hyper-bugs showed up to help us all celebrate the easing of pandemic restrictions.  The “millions” is of course an extrapolation.  I can attest to no more than several thousand in the immediate vicinity of my front and back doors.  But as I write this within an enclosed room in an enclosed house I can hear the unceasing hum of  what must be a truly vast chorus.

 

            The story of the cicadas is the story of our greatest literature, though presumably a few hundred thousand years older than the invention of writing.  The first words of the great medieval romance of Tristan and Iseult are these: “My lords, if you would hear a high tale of love and of death, here is that of Tristan and Queen Iseult…”  If you don’t have Anglo-Norman romances at your fingertips, think of the “Liebestod”, the final movement of Wagner’s treatment of the same story.  Denis de Rougemont wrote a once famous book (Love in the Western World in its English translation) explaining the inescapable connections between eroticism and death, but you can save a lot of time and just look at the cicadas.  Love and death are about all they do, and that very briefly, if you don’t count seventeen years of preliminary and subterranean root-sucking.

 

            Gardeners may of course from time to time find evidences of their generally hidden existence.  Occasionally in turning over a spadeful of garden soil I have discovered a pasty colored wingless thing without visible carapace that you might at first mistake for an oversized slug.  These are called nymphs—very sexy name.  But Nature’s clock is ticking and when warm weather arrives you begin to see not merely the fledged cicadas but the little holes in the earth from which they have emerged.  They do fly, but rather awkwardly.  They appear to favor the creep,  and to judge from the hundreds that make their way to our new patio, they are partial to warm, flat stone.  But they are very thick as well in certain shrubs and, especially, in the trees in which they elect to deposit their eggs.  One such tree is the large old oak in our front yard.  I reported in an earlier post the planting of some young trees at Richard and Katie’s place in Kingwood.  We now fear that planting seedlings in the seventeenth year might not be such a great idea!  The egg-layers seek out “pencil sized” twigs according to the forestry gurus.

 

our oak tree

 

            The most evident traces of the cicadas, their abandoned semi-translucent shells or body-masks (exoskeletons), are rather ghoulish.  The insects land especially on vertical wooden surfaces such as tree trunks or wooden furniture or house sidings, wriggle free, and leave the exoskeletons behind, often in apparent defiance of gravity.  The strength of the grip of the tiny claws is nearly incredible.  I have repeatedly cleared the patio with a powerful leaf-blower, which has sometimes been insufficient  to dislodge them from their imperceptible purchase on the flat bluestone!  Then we accidentally learned a more drastic way of clearing the field.  On Sunday we had a belated birthday lunch on the patio, and my granddaughter Sophia and her boyfriend Raymond brought their dog Bambi.  Though the most friendly, mild-mannered, and unaggressive  thoroughbred you’ll ever encounter, Bambi really went to town on the cicadas.  I can only hope she didn’t have any tummy trouble on the ride home.  I believe the protein content of these flying worms is not insignificant, and I hear reports of a rise in their consumption by humans.  It probably would not take too many incidents to make a rise.  Once in the spring of 2004, at the X-bugs’ last appearance and shortly before my retirement, I was walking one day along the back of the building housing the Daily Princetonian.  A group of student journalists, many of whom I knew, were cavorting about; and one of them called me over.  He had a challenge for me.  Would I dare eat a cicada smeared in heavy chocolate sauce?  How could I lose face before my own students?  So I chomped down.  It was really good—tasted sort of like chocolate.  But one such feast is perhaps sufficient for a lifetime.

 

            According to the “Science Times,” their survival strategy is primitive but effective.  They simply reproduce in such extraordinary quantities that there are not in the world enough dogs, cats, rodents, birds, undergraduates, motor vehicles, or size twelve shoes to gobble up, smash, or squash any number of discernible statistical significance.  They do have some serious threats, not all of them fully understood.  There seems to be a mystery about their significant decline on Long Island, for example, though one probable cause is ecological change in the botany, especially an increase in invasive species.  In Princeton they have been more numerous in long settled parts of the town, where it has been many years since bulldozers dug out basements and house foundations.

 

 

            My first experience of the cicadas took place in 1970, when I was one of the ceremonial marshals in the Commencement ceremony.  These were revolutionary times—the Kent State massacre had taken place at the beginning of May—and the emphasis was on Revolution.  One of the honorary  degree recipients was Bob Dylan, then twenty-nine years old but long since a cultural superstar and anti-war “icon”.  There was a very fancy outdoor lunch thrown for the dignitaries on the sumptuous lawns of Lowry House, an elegant historical mansion used to house the President of the University.  Unfortunately the cicadas also found the ambiance agreeable.  The first course, already on the tables when guests took their seats, was a rich gazpacho.  Several of the bowls had been further enriched  with a drowned or flailing cicada.  One soldiers on.

 

 

            Bob Dylan later wrote a song about his experience at Princeton.  It is called “Day of the Locusts”—errant from the entomological point view, but spiritually apt in other respects.  The song speaks of “the man standin’ next to me” whose “head was exploding” with potentially messy results for the narrator.  This is what we call poetic license.  To the degree it is possible to make historical identifications of products of the poetic imagination, this man was Neil Rudenstine,a senior administrator and the future President of Harvard.  It would in fact be hard to find a less flapable or explosive fellow.  Dylan is a genius and a great poet, but even Homer nods and “Day of the Locusts” is not “Blowin’ in the Wind”.  It is, however, the only work of a great artist for which I was present at the birth, and thus has a special significance for me.  Poor Bob Dylan.  Our birthdays are only four days apart, and I am ahead of him by a mere five years.  We were lucky enough to be able to have lunch on my actual birthday with a dear old friend, Dale Allen, of the Great Class of 1970.  Dale is a real naturalist and ecologist who spent his career with the Trust for Public Land in his native Florida.  He and his wife Karen had come up to New Jersey to visit some of her relatives, to bike around on a few interesting trails, and—of apparently equal importance—to see the cicadas.  As one of the graduates of 1970, he remembered both his classmate Bob Dylan and the X-brood of cicadas vividly.