They, Like the Comets, Make but a Short Stay With Us
Past, Presence, and Resurrection in the Cyclical Company of the Periodical Cicada
i. emergences/ascensions
Our family lives in a quiet and tree-rich neighborhood at the edge of Maryland’s Piedmont, a few miles north of where the Anacostia River empties into the Potomac. Exactly south of us is a stretch of the Potomac bottomlands that over the last few hundred thousand years has at times been covered by literal wetland and was no doubt once a place exuberant with life, but is today filled in and heavily developed, mostly with decidedly non-productive enterprises. Between us and the Potomac bottomlands the Piedmont’s truly ancient metamorphic rocks rise gently forming steep-sided creek valleys and winding ridges in between. We live on one such ridge between two tributaries of the Anacostia, now urbanized but fortunately still rich in vegetation and even some animal life, even if much of it would not have been familiar to the humans who dwelt here in the past.
For whatever reason, the little lot surrounding our modest apartment building, erected at the start of the Second World War, has been host to an absolutely prodigious number of periodical cicadas this year. They have been emerging now for close to two weeks, starting before most other localities nearby or in the region, and continuing strong right up to today. They began singing a couple days ago, went quiet yesterday in the cool rain and gray, but resumed this morning, stronger and louder than before. Cicadas—living adults, shells of nymphs, and deceased cicadas of every configuration—cover just about everything. It is absolutely sublime.
In something of a minor miracle for a region in which many residents are reluctant to take leave of covid-tide, neighbors and passing strangers have often stopped in front of our home to admire the abundance and to talk about the cicadas, to marvel. Others give our sidewalk a wide berth, adverse now to macro-organisms where once tiny viral ones rerouted foot traffic. But most people seem curious, if not enthusiastic, about these creatures, and some are positively rapturous. Given that I am writing an entire essay oriented around the periodical cicada emergence, you can easily enough guess that I am in the latter camp. Yet my enthusiasm is nothing compared to that of my almost-three year old daughter, Vera, for whom the cicadas’ return from the depths of the soil has been quite easily one of the most exciting times in her life. She loves the cicadas, and has taken a personal investment in them. During the height of the nymphal emergence we would go outside before and after dinner to shepherd the nymphs off the sidewalk and into the grass or up a tree. She picks up the adult cicadas and pets their wings, carries them around on her cloths, lets them walk up her arm. We admire them together, collect them in her bug carrier, then carefully release them before going back indoors. Our son Cormac is interested in the cicadas but lacks his sister’s sheer enthusiasm, and while not bothered by them is not thrilled about holding them. But Vera loves them.
Unusually, she is not alone in that love (and, I should note, she is enthusiastic about all invertebrates and small creatures, not just these rather charismatic ones!). While most insects and other small animals are rarely the objects of sustained attention by most humans, or any attention at all, the periodical cicadas, especially those of this current brood, memorably named Brood X, are recurrent celebrities of a sort. From diary entries and notes in historical accounts to academic articles to meditative essays, the periodical cicadas have been attracting attention since the seventeenth century, no doubt featuring in oral accounts and tales of native peoples before that. Everything about them is prodigious and wondrous, from their truly strange—there are no parallels outside of North America—seventeen and thirteen year cycles, to their massive size and massive numbers, to their big bright red bulging eyes, to the ambient din of their song. And just as marvelous, whereas no other abundant and prodigious indigenous animal, the white tailed deer perhaps excepted, can now be seen or heard in our Maryland neighborhood, the cicadas are still here. Passenger pigeons no longer weight down the trees, but the cicadas do, by the millions and trillions. They demand attention, in no small part because they seem determined—if I may be permitted a little anthromorphizing—to survive the destruction we humans have wrought on so many other living things. As such they are worth paying attention to.
In particular, in what follows I want to explore these creatures through a couple of prisms: first, that of history, both the human history of observing, reacting to, and interpreting them, as well as what we know of their evolutionary and ecological history, dating back to the Pliocene. The periodical cicada embodies the tension and interplay between the cyclical and the contingent, between time’s cycle and time’s arrow, traveling in both directions at once, the human side of their story also displaying similar dynamics in observation, interpretation, and effect upon the creatures themselves. This exploration of pasts and cycles leads us into our own reactions in the present, and to what the anthropogenic—and eventual post-anthropogenic—future might hold for the cicadas, and where we might go from our encounter with these marvelous creatures.
ii. pasts and cycles
In this month some singular flies came out of the ground; the English call them locusts. When they left the ground holes could be seen everywhere in the roads and especially in the woods. They were then encased in shells, out of which they crawled. It seemed most wonderful how being covered with the shell they were able to burrow their way in the hard ground. When they began to fly they made a peculiar noise, and being found in great multitudes all over the country, their noise made the cow-bells inaudible in the woods. They were also destructive, making slits in the bark of the trees, where they deposited their worms, which withered the branches. Swine and poultry ate them, but what was more astonishing, when they first appeared some of the people split them open and eat them, holding them to be of the same kind as those said to have been eaten by John the Baptist. These locusts lasted not longer than up to June 10, and disappeared in the woods.1
So wrote the Reverend Andreas Sandel, the pastor of Old Swede’s Church (as it is now known) in Wilmington, Delaware, in 1715, noting in his diary the emergence of the great body of periodical cicadas (neither flies nor locusts of course) we now know as Brood X. Reverend Sandel’s is the first known account of this brood, although the first written account of North America’s periodical cicadas dates back to the mid-seventeenth century. Given the attention they invariably attract (being absent for seventeen years then massively bursting back onto the scene is another aid in sustaining such attention!) our periodical cicadas provide good vantage points for looking at American responses to the natural world over the last three centuries, three centuries in which our relationship to that natural world has been dramatically transformed, generally not for the better.
But before we get to the history of recent human interactions with periodical cicadas, it’s worth mentioning what is known of the creatures’ deep history. Cicadas as a suborder of insects have a long evolutionary history, though as is often the case with insects the paleontological record is relatively fragmentary, marked by spectacular preservation in good depositonal environmnets, absence in many others. Like our periodical cicadas in North America, other cicadas in the past acted as tiny engineers, reshaping the soil through burrowing and chimney construction, akin to those of crawfish and other arthropods, and these constructions have survived as trace fossils, alongside body fossils in those special taphonomic contexts suitable for insect preservation. At any rate, cicadas are of suitably ancient lineage, with the infraorder Cicadomorpha dating back to at least the Permian and the cicada superfamily proper undergoing significant diversification (along with many other insects) from the Late Triassic forward. Our periodical cicadas, of the genus Magicicada, are of comparatively more recent vintage, probably emerging into their current form during the later Pliocene, the current geographic ranges of the various broods taking shape during the Pleistocene and marking the advance and retreat of continental glaciation and the ensuing complex of ecological changes. Generally the present-day range of the periodical cicadas runs up to and a little north of the line of the last glacial maximum. The exact reasons for their curious periodical cycles is still debated, and may or may not have to do with adjustments to the climatically fraught world of the Pleistocene.
At any rate the periodical cicadas have successfully dealt with the many climatic ups and downs and ensuing ecological transformations of the last couple million years, during which time our little part of eastern North America was never glaciated but saw periods of boreal forest as well as periods of almost semi-tropical warmth, with associated floras and faunas. How precisely the cicadas fit into those changes and ensuing odd species assemblies probably cannot be recovered, but in some way their curious ranges—some disjunct to one another, some overlapping—map out the ecological transformations of the late Pleistocene into Holocene. Their rhythmic cycles developed, in other words, both as dynamic responses to certain pressures or changes, whether climatic or genetic, and have survived and adjusted through a tumultuous climatic and ecological history. Interruptions to the usual cycle, in the form of mass early emergences, have themselves led to the establishment of new broods, and no doubt to the success of the species assemblies that make up the broods (three species among the seventeen yearers, more among the more southerly thirteen yearers).
Given that history, we can imagine each cycle of a periodical cicada brood like a series of regularly spaced points, reaching back, generation upon generation, marking the time back into the distant past of North America, back through the earliest human occupancy, back to the cycles of glacial retreat and advance, back to the faunally rich world of the Pliocene and the emergence of floral species and assemblies we would recognize as ‘proper’ to North America. At some point we would see the cycle break, of course, as parts of a previous brood emerged early and set out on their own trajectory, and as other broods no doubt disappeared as climatic conditions deteriorated in parts of their range.
Much closer to the present, that series of cycles intersects with ‘modern’ human history, first in the now largely inaccessible form of indigenous American encounters, then in those of the inhabitants of the new European-dominated colonies and eventually the American republic. If Andreas Sandel’s response was a little ambivalent, later observers would grow increasingly lyrical and would pay more meticulous attention, as the study of natural history in North America grew through the eighteenth century. Here in Maryland, one of, if not the earliest, written record of the periodical cicadas is that of Benjamin Banneker, a free man of color and polymath whose interests spanned from mathematics to natural history to politics. About the cicadas he wrote,
The first great locust year that I can remember was 1749. I was then about seventeen years of age, when thousands of them came and were creeping up the trees and bushes. I then imagined they came to eat and destroy the fruit of the earth and would occasion a famine in the land. I therefore began to kill and destroy them, but soon saw that my labour was in vain, and therefore gave over my pretension. Again, in the year 1766, which is seventeen years after their first appearance, they made a second, and appeared to me to be full as numerous as the first. I then, being about thirty-four years of age, had more sense than to endeavour to destroy them, knowing they were not so pernicious to the fruit of the earth as I imagined they would be. Again, in the year 1783, which was seventeen years since their second appearance to me, they made their third; and they may be expected again in the year 1800, which is seventeen years since their third appearance to me. So that if I may venture to express it, their periodical return is seventeen years: but they, like the comets, make but a short stay with us.
The female has a sting in her tail as sharp and hard as a thorn, with which she perforates the branches of the trees, and in the holes lays eggs. The branch soon dies and falls. Then the egg by some occult cause immerges a great depth into the earth, and there continues for the space of seventeen years as aforesaid. I like to forgot to inform, that if their lives are short, they are merry. They begin to sing or make a noise from first they come out of the earth till they die.2
Banneker helpfully stands in, through his younger self, for much popular opinion and reception of these insects, from the early modern period to today: the view of the cicadas as pests, dangers, or simply disgusting and troubling. But Banneker’s intuitive attention to natural history and his formation within the emergent milieu of scientific interest in early modern America led him to a re-evaluation, and so to a place within the historical stream of observers and contemplatives of the cicadas. The cyclical nature of their life cycle clearly attracted his attention and delight in particular, a recurrent theme in future observerations.
Natural historians would continue to delight in these strange creatures, and the observations and interpretations would grow more focused and comprehensive as the nineteenth century unfolded, the cicadas never failing to draw emergent scientific attention. Nathaniel Potter and Gideon B. Smith, two more Marylanders, put together a particularly comprehensive account of the periodical cicadas, based on cumulative observations and researchers, mostly those of Smith, though Potter, a professor of medicine at the University of Maryland (Baltimore, the now-flagship for which I work had not yet been founded) received most of the credit. Potter’s account waxed quite rapturous, describing the cicadas’ emergence as an ‘ascension,’ language that was perhaps not entirely intentionally religious in connotation but which certainly carries the aura of the transcendent. His description of the aural experience of the cicadas, one of the most-remarked aspects of their life cycle, is worth reproducing:
When thousands unite in the same choir, the universal din seems to compose a musical atmosphere, upon which all other sounds float unmolested. The note is never heard between the setting and rising sun. High winds and cloudy weather repress, but do not silence it. A damp air lessens its shrillness, and the number of songsters. Heavy or long continued rains put a period to the whole process; but it is resumed at the return of the rays of the sin; and no sooner is the water evaporated from the earth and surrounding foliage, than the whole choir is heard in full glee. While the note is issuing, a minute inspection perceives a tremblous motion of the body, vibrating under the impulse of the air in the music cavities, and if the body be touched it is still more evident.3
The fact of the cicadas’ regular re-occurrence, and the ease with which that re-occurrence can be traced backwards historically, is reflected in a tendency in many of these accounts to note previous observers, something I am in fact myself doing now, and so drawing a line between one’s self in a given present and many discrete points in the human- and cicada- past. There is a concreteness, a regularity, at work in the way that the periodical cicada summons a sense of time and of a sort of trans-temporal community of observers, a kind of imagined community formed by the shared experience of seeing, and hearing, and feeling, and perhaps even tasting successive generations of the same creatures in the same places at the same time of the year, in precise and predictable cyclical patterns. The cacophony and the living exuberance of the cicadas unites us, is something non-trivial and exceptional which I can in a way share with Americans long past. There are really few if any parallels- our worlds are so very different, even in their basic ecological profiles, and anyway most notable events are of a highly contingent nature and cannot be repeated. The cicadas are something of an exception. Even if the landscapes and the technological regimes and the political contexts have radically changed, they still work up through the soil, climb out of their shells, and raise their ambient glorious din just as they did a hundred years ago, two hundred years ago, a hundred thousand years ago. Whether or to what degree future generations will be able to link up with us and those past is a question with which we will conclude.
iii. futures, wonder, and resurrection
Early modern observers, and later ones, too, often explored the more metaphysical and theological implications of the cicadas, with philosophical, ethical, and phenomenological explorations precipitated by the creatures continuing up to the present. Moses Bartram’s meditation is an excellent example thereof:
Viewed through a microscope the moment they are hatched, they appear in every respect as perfect as at the time of their last transformation, when they rise out of the earth, put off their scaly covering, expand their wings, display their gaudy colours, dart forth their eggs, and after a few days existence, to fulfil the wise purposes of their maker, close the period of their lives by an early death. How astonishing therefore and inscrutable is the design of providence in the production of this insect, that is brought into life, according to our apprehension, only to sink into the depths of the earth, there to remain in darkness, till the appointed time comes when it ascends again into light by a wonderful resurrection!4
And indeed as Bartram intuited so many years ago, these little ecological engineers are indeed symbols and workers of resurrection. Like the comets they are of short visible duration yet of immense significance for our understanding and for our symbolic use, they mark time and link us to the past- both the relatively visible past of the last three centuries of human occupation of North America but also the deeper past of a continent descending into the transformation of the great age of glaciations. Like comets, they appear to us, not in some wild and remote landscape or protected preserve, but in the midst of our quotidian and tame existence, at the heart of our ordinary lives, they break in upon us, aurally, visually, tactically, engaging, pressing upon all our senses. And unlike comets, which rapidly move away from us only to return at often quite great intervals of time, the cicadas remain physically close to us, though hidden in the depths of the soil, bidding their time, the same as they did long before humans began to observe them and to become cognizant of cicada-time.
If nature is in itself in some ways a given, the human response to it is not, and, as we have learned often at great expense over the last two centuries, how we respond and what we do to the world we inhabit can have immense repercussions for ourselves and for all other living things, including whether the sheer givenness of nature will continue in its present form. How we see and interact with a phenomenon like the periodical cicadas will go a long ways towards determining what our future looks like, and, because of our particular role in this world, what the future of other living things looks like.
That is one reason why my little daughter’s love for and fascination with these strange and wonderful creatures brings me such joy- far from being repulsed by such odd animals and their profligate mass, she cannot get enough of interacting with them and observing them. Her love of living things extends to all invertebrate life, and has for some time- not due to any special prodding on her parents’ part, other than pointing creatures out and discussing them, which perhaps is enough. The cicadas bring special excitement because they are so striking, and so accessible (which excites birds and other predators for different reasons!), moving slowly upon emergence and then for a while after leaving the nymphal stage. Where other insects tend to be rather elusive, requiring the flipping of logs and looking under leaves, or chasing through the air, the cicadas present themselves en mass. For some people this is why their emergence is a plague to be endured; fortunately for Vera (if somewhat less so for her brother who is more mildly enthused!) it is a cause for excitement and wonder.
The cicadas are brilliant survivors. The charismatic megafauna that hundreds of thousands of years ago would have heard the cicadas’ song are now gone, driven to extinction by some combination of climatic instability, ecological change, and perhaps human intervention. While observers from the eighteenth century to the twentieth noted disruptions to the cicadas brought on by the Euro-American conquest of the continent, with some early twentieth century observers predicting an imminent and melancholy extinction on the part of the periodical cicadas, against such expectations these insects have survived and in some cases adapted quite well to the strange transformations our industrial modernity has wrought upon the North American landscape. In our neighborhood, for instance, non-indigenous, often invasive, flora and fauna predominate, many of the most successful species having basically co-evolved with humans over the last several thousand years. Yet the cicadas are still here, burrowed underground, waiting us out, emerging in great masses, and filling the air of our so-called civilized spaces with their ambient ancient hymn, a reminder of what once was here. They quite literally undermine our attempts at control and regulation, coming forth in their great wild masses, our industrial civilization and its disruptions, so far, akin in their experience to the glacial advances, retreats, and climatic swings of the Pleistocene and early Holocene. Industrialization and biotic globalization has been another period of change to be weathered.
That said, I do not know what the future holds for our periodical cicadas. So far they have survived, with some exceptions (at least one brood has been driven to extinction, and parts of other broods have disappeared, often it seems along the northern margins of their range). We know that many insects the world over are declining, for reasons not entirely clear but certainly intimately linked with the massive human restructuring of the earth and its biome through industrialization, the mark of the so-called Anthropocene (which threatens humans as much as non-humans, of course). Habitat destruction is probably less of a threat (particularly given the gradual human retreat from many rural areas, here and around the world) than the all-pervasive threat of the pollutants and free-ranging particles created by industrial processes, the slow and fast poisons that are the piper’s pay of our ease and comfort. The deadly traces of the Anthropocene interlace the soil, the air, the water, bodies, and there is no depth to which cicadas or any other creature can burrow to outpace those traces. What the long-term effects will be no one can know for sure, for the cicadas, for ourselves, or for any other living thing on this earth.
Yet my intuitive feeling, and indeed hope, is that they will continue on their present course and outlast us, that a hundred or a thousand years from now if this green earth persists all our present works and deeds will be gone but the cicadas will emerge after their seventeen subterranean years and fill the air with their choruses. Our work now can make a difference, as cliché as it sounds. My children, at least, are growing up immersed in and valuing the un-tamed and un-sterilized world, the world of the cicada and all other living things. My hope is that as they grow older this immersion and sense of value and of closeness will lead them in better and genuinely healthier, in a holistic sense, directions of life, towards a healing of some of the harms wrought by two centuries of extraction and destruction and absence. And so may the cicadas sing and sing again on their strange and wonderful cycles, even unto the Eschaton- and then, we can hope, afterwards, transformed in a different kind of anthropocene, that of the Risen Christ who brings life and fulfillment, not the death and frustration of our fallen anthropocene, to us and to all creatures, great and small, loud and quiet.
Andreas Sandel, ‘Extracts from the Journal of Rev. Andreas Sandel, Pastor of "Gloria Dei" Swedish Lutheran Church, Philadelphia, 1702-1719,’ Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, Vol. 30, No. 4 (1906), 448-449.
Cited in Gene Kritsky, Periodical Cicadas: The Brood X Edition (Ohio Biological Survey, 2021), 59-60.
Nathaniel Potter, Notes on the Locusta Septentionalis Americanae Septima (Baltimore: J. Robinson, 1839), 8.
Moses Bartram, ‘Observation on the cicada,’ in The Annual Register, Or a View of the History, Politicks and Literature of the Year 1767 (Dodsley, 1768), 104.