How a Biblical plague made me even more jaded – News and sports in the Whitewater Valley

A column by John Estridge

It started on a Saturday night with My Long Suffering Wife Ruth and me sitting at the fire pit.

The weather was great, maybe a little warm for the fire but who cares and there were still no bugs (mosquitoes) to menace us – or so we thought.

Ruth felt something crawling up her leg, and reacted accordingly since it was dark and surely unsettling. However, I did not allow those factors to keep me from making fun of her when her cell phone flashlight showed a red-eyed cicada, our first good view of a living one.

About five minutes later, my old body, which does not move very well since the Events I Can No Longer Talk About But Always Do (EICNLTABAD), almost went into orbit. And people in the neighborhood must have thought a young girl was screaming bloody murder: Ruth’s flashlight showed a cicada moving up my bare leg, since I was wearing shorts. And I apologize for wearing shorts even though it was dark.

My girlie reaction to the cicada presaged Ruth’s well-deserved derision.

We then went walking around our backyard with Ruth’s flashlight in the fore and found three or four more crawling through the grass with one on our back steps. At least I was very excited by this. Ruth not so much.

We spent the next day with very good friends from New Castle sharing a beautiful Sunday in May by sitting on our large, wraparound porch, and engaging in delightful conversation. Cindy, our female friend, startled with seeing four or five cicadas walking along our porch ledge. So, we took a walk around the yard and saw several skins on some large, old maple trees that have stood between the sidewalk and the streets for quite some time.

There were more cicadas and their skins – shells — on the exterior brick walls of the porch. And there were quite a few shells at the bases of both trees.

We were amazed. If only we would have known.

On that Saturday and Sunday, I regaled Ruth as well as Ray and Cindy, with the words: They don’t sting or bite. They do no harm.

Since that May weekend, the cicadas have taken over. There is really nothing that can be done. Ruth gets frustrated and takes the broom to the nest, swarm, plague — and with the last word I think we can put the word Biblical in front of it as in Biblical plague – knocking the little critters off the porch walls, porch columns and sweeping thousands of shells and living bugs off the porch.

An aside here: Early in the infestation, I would go around the porch’s interior and flip the cicadas, which were on their backs and seemingly helpless, over so they could walk around again. Ruth treated me as if I were coddling and assisting terrorists.

But, I earnestly told her the poor critters have waited in the ground for 17 years for their moment to burst forth and mate. Can one imagine?

My favorite video concerning the cicadas’ life cycle, which I shared with the ubiquitous post on Facebook – I guess it met Facebook’s seemingly clueless and rather alarming censors, I mean fact checkers – from Sir David Attenborough.

One of the things it discusses is how the cicadas know when to emerge in the exact 17-year cycle. It is like with the COVID, the experts – even Sir David Attenborough — are clueless.

But those little red-eyed insects know to emerge. Both males and females have but one thought: To make whoopee in the short time aboveground before they unceremoniously die.

My teenage persona, which is getting closer to my surface with every day I age, has to admire that.

I can just see myself as one of them: I would wait those 17 years thinking about my few days in the sun so to speak but end up on my back on some couple’s porch only to have a broom knock me into the weeds, I mean lawn, with myself still on my back and hear my buds chainsawing away, seeking pleasure and the call of nature.

But I’m far, far past the flipping stage.

Seventeen years ago it was not like this. My youngest, Renee, was either in grade school or junior high – notice my terms, it shows how old I am – and I used that emergence as an educational tool. In the moments before the bus would come and pick her up at our corner, we would look at one of the maples and marvel at the skins and the live ones making their slow journey up the bark of the tree. I did not talk about the whoopee part, but we discussed the 17-year cycle and the fact they did not bite or sting. After school, we would use our Gateway computer and wait for the dial-up connection to slowly bring us facts about how they change colors after exiting their shells and other seemingly amazing facts. Here is the fact about how they change colors from white to the darker shade they keep until hopefully whoopee and then death.

According to cicadamania.com: “the area of the cicada where the black spots appear is called the pronotum — “pro”, meaning before in Greek, and “notum”, meaning the back, also in Greek. Before the back. The spots contain a pigment that will gradually spread throughout a cicada body as it hardens, and transforms from white to black. People speculate that the two black spots resemble eyes, and that might scare away predators. This might be possible, but I haven’t read anything to substantiate the hypothesis.”

Wasn’t that interesting? Those are the kind of things I subjected my child/children to as she was growing up. I still do not understand why she chose to move to Tokyo and the others about as far away in Indiana as one can get.

Anyway, during that late spring time, the other kids waiting for the bus would come over and look at the cicadas with us. Some young boys about Renee’s age were among the kids, and I helpfully told them you can eat cicadas. They had that teenage persona naturally at that time.

That afternoon, they were out collecting cicadas for their mothers to cook for them. I really do apologize to those mothers about that.

There were maybe 100 cicadas on and around that tree. Renee and I were amazed by them.

But this year is like the cicada cycle is on steroids. People walking through the neighborhood cross the street before they get to our yard. Ruth has given up again. I sweep the 10,000 or so cicadas that are on my porch chair each day so I can sit somewhat undisturbed and drink my coffee. I walk across the porch, yard, sidewalks, crunching the little buggers beneath my shoes and not caring, not even my teenage persona cares anymore.