Cicadas

I walked through the automatic sliding doors and into the main entrance of Billy’s, a small family-owned grocery store in Cataula, Georgia. The checker closest to the door looked up at me as I entered, and she stared. She was a young lady in her early 20’s. I could not help but notice that not only did she continue to stare, but she also started to follow close behind me.

“Where would your cold medicines be located,” I asked her.

“Um,” she said. “Right there on aisle three.”

She pointed and continued to follow on my tail.

What is the problem, I wondered? Has she never seen a man from the Pacific Northwest? Don’t people down here wear blue Jean cutoffs with wool socks and Birkenstock sandals?

I turned around to see her following no more than three feet away. She appeared to be fixated on the black hat on my head.

Cicadas, perhaps if you’re from the west coast you’ve heard of them but never seen one. They are interesting insects in that they live under the ground as nymphs for most of their lives, only to surface above ground to mate. My wife and I were visiting Cataula in the spring of 2024, a jackpot year for Cicadas.  I say jackpot in the same sense as being at San Juan Capistrano when the swallows arrive from Argentina, or at the Nature Conservancy in Santa Barbara when 33,000 Monarch butterflies congregate.

We just happened to be at the exact spot where Cicada brood XIX popped their heads up out of the ground. It was like being in the right spot, at the right time, for a total eclipse of the sun, the blood moon, and the asteroid Apophis hitting the earth.

After 13 years underground as nymphs, the cicadas were emerging, coming forth from the ground like zombies in a horror movie. Millions of cicadas climbing onto trees and on buildings, shedding their old skins to reveal winged adults. It is estimated that there are approximately one million cicadas in the ground per acre, so in the state of Georgia alone there are roughly two trillion, four hundred eleven billion, seven hundred forty million coming to the surface.

The male cicadas serenade the females with their loud calls during the daylight hours, leading to mating and egg-laying. Once hatched, the nymphs return underground to feed on tree roots until the 13-year cycle repeats. Meanwhile, the adults, like salmon, mate and fall over dead leaving a massive mess on the ground surface to clean up. They have no predators except copper mouth snakes which find them to be tasty treats. Land owners have a choice of raking up the cicadas or having a yard full of pit vipers.

For those of you from the northwest, who have never been to the southeast side of the US and experienced the strange sound of a cicada, it is something as foreign to us as our Sasquatch screams would be to a southerner.

My wife and I were picked up from the airport in Atlanta and driven to my daughter’s home in Cataula. As we got out of my daughter’s car at her home it was late afternoon. What hit me first was the high humidity on the 80-degree day. What I noticed next was the sound.

It sounded like the neighborhood was underneath an enormous flying saucer which had a bad engine bearing. I looked to the sky around the neighborhood, but it was impossible to pinpoint the origin of the sound.

“What is that noise,” I asked. “Crickets, frogs, some type of farm machinery?”

“Those are Cicadas,” my daughter Kalene said.

I stood by the car in awe listening to the sound. It was very much like seeing the Aurora Borealis for the first time. Very captivating.

And then I noticed them flying by, their wings humming, not like a bee, but more like a dragon fly or a large moth because these are very large insects with inch long black bodies, red eyes, and clear, orange-tinted wings.

“Wow, they are everywhere,” I said. “Flying through the air and dead on the ground like a swarm of locusts.”

And so, in my life journal I now have a notation which says: May 2024, experienced Cicadas!

Walking to the display of seasonal allergy medicines, I stopped and scanned the shelf for Benadryl. I did not realize that the young checker was inches away. As I bent down to grab a box off the shelf, I felt her strike. It was a good clean blow to the top of my head.

I stood up, pulling my hat off my eyes.

“What the heck?” I yelled.

“Oh, I almost got it,” she moaned.

I heard the drone of wings and the cicada which was on my hat, flew around and landed on my nose and we stared at each other, red eyes to blue.

Startled, I picked the big bug off by his body and held it in my fingers. The checker held out her hand, palm up for me to deposit the bug but I could see that she wasn’t excited to hold it.

“I tell you what,” I said in a calmer voice, “I’ll take it outside for you.”

I have since added to my journal: May 2024, experienced Cicadas, and customer service at Billy’s Grocery Store.

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