I like nature. I eat Nature Valley breakfast bars when it’s not even breakfast. And I use color in my hair that has the word natural in its title. So I’m okay with the sweet sounds of the birds singing, and even the late night bullfrogs doing their imitation of afflicted cows.
Nature. Good. Cicadas. That’s not natural. Who sounds like that?
Turns out it’s the boys. Of course it’s the boy cicadas; of course they’re the ones who are going to make all the racket. Boys are loud like that.
There’s a sign in one of the men’s dorm lobbies of my alma mater, the esteemed Freed-Hardeman University, which reads: Please Do NOT Stack the Furniture or Jump Off the Furniture; and another one that says: “All furniture must remain right side up.”
They don’t have copies of those signs in the womens’ dorm lobbies. So it should come as no surprise that the Cicadas that are showing out to the tune of 8 gazillion and a half decibels are coming from the boys’ bathhouse at Cicada camp.
Cicada camp happens every 17 years. The boy cicadas come up from underneath the ground hoping to find a hot date. Kind of like Bible camp, but the singing’s better at Bible camp, and the boys are better looking, even without a bath since Tuesday.
Cicada singing is perhaps the scariest thing since someone took a shower at the Bates Motel. I mean, especially since we’re not expecting it. We go sixteen summers in a row with regular summer sounds like, you know, crickets at night and the neighbor's dog barking an entire opera at 3 a.m. – just normal, routine stuff. And then on the 17th year, the Cicadas pop up without so much as a warm-up band, and say, “WE’RE HERE!” and they are scientifically proven to be louder than the Kill “em all for one Metallica concert of 1983. See the scholarly publication Proven Scientific Research Journal of Ugly Insects and Concert Tours et al., Vol. XIIWN, issue xiviiybk for further verification.
And suddenly we remember what happened 17 years ago, and run into our houses for cover.
Now, it turns out the boy cicadas who didn’t get the girls had an underground meeting in the meantime to overthrow the more buff and loud cicadas. They came up with the plan to surface after 13 years instead of 17 without telling the other cicadas. The early cicada gets the ugly girl cicada.
So now we have a 13 year rotation of loud cicadas and a 17 year rotation of loud cicadas. It’s a good thing those rotations never coincide in the same year.
Wait, what just happened? I can’t hear you. What?
Are you kidding me? Because science! Science also tells us that this year both groups of loud boys are coming to Alabama, which is exactly what happened at the Montevallo field trip last fall with humans instead of cicadas, and I wasn’t sure I was gonna survive.
Okay, and this apparently hasn’t happened since 1803, which completely explains the Louisiana Purchase. The French were like, “I don’t know what’s happening over there on Bourbon Street, but I think those drunk crickets are gonna wake up the dead. I say, let’s sell the whole state, and be done with it.”
Yeah, so anyone want to buy a couple acres in Hazel Green, Alabama? Country air. Beautiful sounds of nature. Cheap.
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