About a month after I was born, billions of Brood X cicadas came out of the ground, mated, then died. Over the next few years, I learned to walk, to read, to count. I began and quit dance lessons, piano lessons, youth orchestra, soccer, basketball, tennis. I made friends and grew apart from them. I discovered the X-Files, make-up, boys, pop punk, Jagermeister. All the while, those cicadas’ progeny were underground, sucking on xylem from tree roots, waiting to get large enough to come out again as adults.
There’s probably a chair or couch in your home where you read, but I’m talking about when you go somewhere to read. Out of personal preference or because homes can be chaotic or lonely, is there somewhere you go?
I’ve keenly felt the loss of a place to read during the pandemic. We lost not only our workplaces, but also that “third space”—not work, not home—so critical for civil society. But on the eve of opening up businesses in Ontario, it has struck me: Of the places I used to go to read, none of them were actually quite right for reading.
I might set out for a café and perch at a table, but the moment my ear picked up a train of conversation around me, those words would continue to cycle through my phonologic loop as a source of low-level stress until, exasperated, I would leave. Park benches relied on temperature (see: Canadian winters), shade, wind conditions and no precipitation.
Drawing of the vagus nerve by Andreas Vesalius. Wellcome Trust collection
“
“What even is consciousness, though?” my friend B wondered yesterday, squinting into the sun. The air was full of cottonwood dander. Floating on the breeze, the tufted white seeds looked like they were suspended in deep water.
She was nervous about the anesthesia. Four masses in her abdomen, one the size of a football. Likely not cancer, but they won’t know for certain until they “dig around,” the surgeon said. B traced the line of the scar-to-be down her belly with her finger, imagined gloved fingers pulling out her guts. If all goes well, she’ll get to keep an ovary.
To entertain or maybe distract her, I told B about my latest obsession: a wandering web of nerves that carries sensations from our organs to our brains and back again. Most visceral sensations never reach our conscious perception. That’s good. It would be awful to know what your liver and spleen are up to from moment to moment. But it also means we’re largely strangers to our innermost selves. It’s incredible, really, how little we know.
At first B thought she was allergic to gluten. Then she tried to lose weight, and although the pounds dropped off, the bulge in her stomach didn’t go. A year went by, faster than you’d think in a pandemic. She put off going to the doctor until she got a vaccine, then went for a scan, and that’s when they found the tumors.
I’ve known B and her wife for years now, watched them suffer greatly and recover. Neither has aged much on the surface. If anything they’re both more beautiful now than they were before, the way linen gets finer and softer while retaining its strength. No tumors can destroy these women, I thought when they told us. No, no, no.
Signals from the gut to the brain can influence our memory, emotions, and decisions, often without us realizing it. Maybe when the masses in B’s gut are gone, some of the dread and exhaustion of this year will go, too. She loves space and plans to go there someday. Her face lights up when she talks about going to the moon: Beam me up, Elon! She already has a degree in space studies; after she recovers from the surgery, she says she’ll overcome her fear of deep water and learn to scuba dive, so she can train in a weightless environment.
This whole year has been a form of training, B jokes. The isolation of a pandemic, and now, four alien babies. The anesthesia will feel like flying; maybe hospital food will be like spaceship food. “What do you think, am I ready to go to space?” she asked me yesterday. “Absolutely.” When they take her into the operating room, she said, “I’ll imagine I’m a rocket, preparing to launch into orbit.” This morning, she texted: “Ad astra!”
I don’t actually remember that much about the cicadas’ last visit, in 2004. I remember turning onto my parents’ street and noticing how loud the trees were, filled with chorusing insects. But not much about the bugs themselves.
Mostly what I remember is trying to convince bug skeptics that a cool thing was happening. My argument: It’s a fantastic biological event–our version of the wildebeest migration on the Serengeti. It’s epic, and it’s all around us, and it’s worthy of appreciation even if you don’t like bugs. I trotted out this argument a lot this spring, as articles circulated on the internet foretelling doom! Terror! The skies filling with insects!
A few weeks ago I went over to a nearby house to sing with a bunch of friends in the backyard. It was the first weekend that the cicadas had started chorusing from the trees, and we joked about doing every song in E flat along with them. Red-eyed adult cicadas were crawling on the picnic table, on the stairs to the back door, through the grass. I picked one up and it walked around tickling my hand with its grippy velcro feet, then flew away.
I picked up another and it stayed. I admired its wide-set red eyes, its delicate legs, its perfect, leaded-glass wings. I felt protective toward this little bug that couldn’t even be bothered to clean the pollen grains off its face. It had spent almost its entire life to this point underground, and here it was, out in the air, with wings–can you imagine?
It seemed happy to rest on my finger. When I was ready to leave, I put it on a branch of a small tree. It seemed happy there, too.
It’s hard to explain why you love something so much. I probably shouldn’t even try. I love their little faces, with those bright red eyes. Their ungainly, stubby bodies. I love how bad they are at flying, loudly buzzing through the air in hopes of landing legs-out on a hospitable surface. And they’re utterly harmless.
The other day I was walking back from exercise class, and there was a cicada in the middle of the sidewalk. Squished cicadas are all over, so if I see a live one on a walkway, I’ll often pick it up and put it somewhere safe. The move came back to me from 1987, when I played with this bug’s grandparents: a quick pinch to pin the wings near the top, so they can’t struggle.
If you pick up a male, it will often make a distress call. This amuses me. I’m saving this guy’s life, and he’s yelling at me. Ok, buddy. Yes, you’re cranky. How about I rescue you, and you can go do your mating call, and we never have to talk again.
So I put him on a leaf of a nearby tree, leg side down. He immediately let go of the leaf and crash-landed into the sidewalk, right back where it started. I picked him up again, walked him over to the trunk, and set him on top of a horizontal branch, close to a friend. When I let go, he let go, knocking the other cicada off the branch, and they both fell onto the grass. Fine. At least it wasn’t the sidewalk. I left them there.
The cicadas are only here for a short time. I hear they’ll be gone by the end of the June. Some people say they’re already on the decline, already getting quieter. My heart can’t take it. I want this moment to go on and on. And I also want it to pass, so I can look forward to the next generation.
In April, the crabapple across the street from my apartment building had the most glorious blooms and buzzed with bees. Now its branches are covered with cicadas, chorusing together, springing into flight, landing again. I’ve gone out there the last few evenings to watch and listen. I can see where the females have dug fresh notches into the skinny branches to lay their eggs. Over the last month, bits of memories have come back; a little later in the summer, I realized, the tips of that tree’s branches are going to be hanging down, dead, after their once-every-17-years pruning.
I’ll be 62 the next time the bugs come along, an unimaginable age. I suppose 45 was unimaginable in 2004, and 28 was unimaginable in 1987. It’s the obvious essay topic, in this time, to stop and think about where I was in 2004 and where I am now. Only a few miles away, but 17 years wiser, I guess.
Sometimes I wonder just what my life is for. What is anyone’s life for? And this must be part of it: To love these sweet, bumbling bugs, and to tell you about it.
Maybe it says something that one of my first crushes was on Slim Goodbody, a character who appeared on public television walking around with his insides out. He wore a bodysuit painted with images of tissues and organs and sang songs about respiration. There was something about all this that was irresistible—I mean, I thought he was cute, but the living anatomy was part of it, too, because he looked like something I shouldn’t be looking at, except there he was.
I’ve always felt torn about the inner workings of the body. I thought I wanted to be a doctor for years (sometimes I still search things like, “am I too old for medical school?”), and I also passed out while getting a blood test to volunteer at the hospital. One of my favorite books as a kid was called Blood and Guts. Another time, I fainted when the school nurse held up a set of empty blood bags while talking about a blood drive. When the midwife asked if I wanted to see the placenta after my youngest son was born, I was fascinated. It looked like an incredible tree with branching blood vessels. It looked like meat. It was strong and fragile and beautiful and all of a sudden I needed to lie down even though I already was in bed.
Early on a Sunday morning a few weeks ago, my son and I headed out to hunt for morel mushrooms, which are pretty elusive here in New England. Though I’ve searched for them a bit the past few years, I have never yet found them. But I could see from a steady flow of photos in my local foraging group that they were out there.
Morels enjoy the company of dying elms and apple trees, so I asked around for pointers to old orchards on public lands nearby. That’s how S and I found ourselves on a little mound bullishly called Mount Pollux.
It’s hard to describe the beauty of the hills around here, especially in the spring. It’s hard to describe any kind of everyday natural beauty, maybe, without sounding a bit generic. The trees are so green, the sky is so blue, the air smells just like honey. But that Sunday morning on Mount Pollux it was exactly like that. The dandelions practically glimmered like golden buttons in the grass, and the soft reds and oranges from foliage in the distance blended into the land’s contours.
S and I walked along the mowed path, holding hands, toward a lone tree up the slope. He told me how he’d constructed the toothpick shooter he was carrying, and how he’d marked each toothpick with a bit of red electrical tape to help him find it where it lands.
Smart, I thought. I contemplated the intimate thrill of relief he described, of landing on the thing you are looking for, whatever it is. Such relief had eluded me all week as I struggled to alight on a bigger theme in a story I’m aching to write, hoping to turn it into a project worthy of a months-long fellowship. It was the day before the fellowship deadline and I was still aimlessly circling.
In the city, during the pandemic, sometimes this view is my best look at nature for the day. But isn’t it grand? A lovely sunny tree, a starling. In spring: flowers. In summer: cicadas. Throughout the morning, light catches it in different ways. Sometime in the next few years, a new apartment building will appear in this view, but I think the tree is meant to survive. I hope the tree survives.
I like to run this post on Memorial Day; it first ran May 28, 2012. When I think about soldiers and Memorial Day, I think about Uncle Bundy, I’m not sure why — maybe because he stood so straight, not because he ever talked about the war, which he didn’t. Probably, though, it’s because of what this post says, that war, technology, and humans have been linked ever someone improved a stone into both the first hammer and the first spear. Uncle Bundy has since died — at a nice old age with his family around him, but still.
It’s Memorial Day in the U.S. but this is not a war story. It does have a little war in it, but the real reason I’m writing it is because of this ball bearing my uncle had. My uncle’s name was Leverne, some of his buddies called him Vernie, all his relatives called him Bundy – no reason for that – and he’d always been a mechanic. One summer day a long time ago, he was out in his garage working on a car and I was watching him. “Look at this,” he said, “it’s a ball bearing.” It was a grooved ring, and running in the groove were little metal balls. “I just greased it,” he said, “and look how pretty it goes.” He ran his finger over the little balls and, one after another, they turned smoothly and easily in their groove. “Isn’t it pretty?” he asked. No, it isn’t, I thought, but I didn’t answer. I was in high school and an English major. It’s greasy and dirty, I thought. Poetry was pretty, not ball bearings.
Bundy was a farm boy who went to high school, then in November, 1942, joined the army. He was sent first to the University of Utah, then went back to regular duty. Then he requested to be sent to the Fort Sill Motor School, then went back to regular duty. Then he requested to be sent to the 668th Field Artillery School, then went back to regular duty. Then he requested to be sent to the Schofield Barracks Motor School in Hawaii, and he learned to be a mechanic.
In 1944, he got on a Liberty troop ship, a little hollow tub short enough and the Pacific waves big enough that the ship went up one side of a wave and down the other while the seasick troops lined up along the deck and threw up over the side. The ship was headed for the Philippines, to the battle of Leyte in which 3,000 Allied troups and 10,500 Japanese troops were being killed. By this time Bundy wasn’t really mad at anyone any more and didn’t want to fight; and anyway Leyte turned out to need materiel, not troops; and besides the war was ending, so Bundy was just as glad when the Liberty ship turned around and went to Oahu, where he spent the rest of the war.
He came home to Illinois in November, 1945. He and Mitzi, his new wife, lived in an unheated upstairs room in his sister’s house. He got a job fixing cars and tried to figure out a place to live. He found a little octagonal house that had been built for either hired hands or pigs, and bought it for $2,300 which he borrowed from his mother. The house was too far from work so he bought a lot nearer by, and then he measured up the house and measured up the lot. Next he dug two rows of post holes and in the holes he stuck stove pipes which he filled with concrete, and this would be a foundation. Then he asked his two brothers and his brother-in-law if they’d be willing to help move the house; and next he asked a customer at work if he could rent the customer’s flatbed truck for a Saturday at the going rate of $3 an hour. His plan was to raise the house enough to back the flatbed under it.
He remembered seeing some 30-foot timbers somebody had left out along Route 66, and he and his brothers went out and picked them up. They brought the timbers back to the house and with two hydraulic jacks, jacked up first one corner of the house and wedged a timber under it; then jacked up another corner of the house and wedged a timber under it, then went back to the first corner and jacked up the timber and wedged another timber under that one; and pretty soon the house was perched on the timbers up higher than the truck. Then they backed the truck under the house, timbers and all, and headed out — Bundy stood on the roof to lift up any telephone or electric wires. When they got to the lot, they backed up to the foundation, unloaded the house, trimmed it up, and reversed the jacking-up process, removed the timbers, and rested the house on its foundations. It worked exactly as planned. Bundy paid the customer $9 for three hours rental, plus $1 tip.
Bundy and Mitzi lived in the house for five years, then sold it to his mother and moved to a house that could fit the six kids they eventually had, and where they lived the rest of their lives. Bundy kept being an auto mechanic and by the time he retired, he owned his own garage. He told me in the 1970’s to hold on to the Dodge slant-six but for my next car, give up and buy Japanese because otherwise Detroit wasn’t ever going to learn. At age 91, he was fairly creaky but as bossy, opinionated, righteous, and impressively, ingeniously, precisely competent as he ever was.
Four months before Bundy got out of the service, the war had ended with the atomic bomb. That bomb has famously been called “technically sweet.” Technical sweetness is the perfect match between form and function, between a technology and its purpose. Technical sweetness is the satisfying mental click of a thing that’s exactly what it should be and nothing more. Technical sweetness is highly aesthetic and utterly compelling. The U.S. has always been good at technical sweetness, both in training people in it and doing it, for both ill and good — because like other principles, it intrinsically has two sides.
Over the years, I’ve interviewed several whip-smart country boys who had gone into the service, had gotten a technical education, worked on one bomb or other, then come out of the service and gotten educated as physicists and gone on to stellar careers and even a Nobel Prize. I also interviewed ones who didn’t get educated but got jobs as lab technicians; or they got educated and became all kinds of engineers; or they did or didn’t get educated but they write scientific software.
That is, between the time I stood in my uncle’s garage and now, I learned to appreciate technical sweetness. And as technically sweet as a bomb and much, much prettier? A ball bearing.
