Cicada Invasion

It is the strangest of almost-summers here in Morgantown this year. As I write this on June 18, we are experiencing near-record low temperatures in the 40s at night. One week earlier, June 10, a new record high of 94 degrees was set. I went to Wal-Mart with my wife that day to buy some chains for her hanging baskets. The place was crowded with people who seemed to be just wandering around in the air conditioning. Not buying anything, just killing time and drying sweat, the way people once did under shade trees in the town squares of not so long ago. One more sign that Wal-Mart has become a social hub in American communities these days, including Morgantown.

The thing that's really strange about life in Morgantown in recent weeks is the visitation of the periodical cicada, a.k.a. the "tree roach." Since the middle of May, the daytime air has been filled with the incredibly intense whirring sound emitted by the cicadas as they enjoy their brief stay above ground to mate and procreate. It has been filled also with the critters themselves, flying about, sometimes landing on a person's arm or head. The police blotter in the Dominion Post has ed several accidents caused by cicadas who fly into moving vehicles and cause the drivers to lose control as they try to swat them away. And the cicadas are not charged with causing the incidents—the blame goes to the hapless drivers, victims, in my view, of surprise cicada attacks.

Week before last, I heard a shriek from down the hall in the Communications Building, where I work here on campus. I hear lots of interesting sounds in here, but this one had a plaintive quality about it that was quite disconcerting. I stepped out into the hallway just in time to see a young woman who visits us sometimes from the downtown campus, running toward me with her head bent down and her arms flailing, trying to shake loose a cicada that had landed in her hair just outside the front door. The insect fell to the floor, where it screeched in protest, while the woman ducked into the photography lab to compose herself. Entomophobia is a powerful thing.

But the cicadas are literally everywhere. If they were anything other than noisy and a bit overfriendly, we would be in the midst of a plague of Biblical scope. There is no place one can go within several hours drive of Morgantown where the insects are not singing their song. The trees seem alive with their noxious buzzing. The floor of my car is littered with their orange-tinted wings, its windshield smeared with the grease of their splattered bodies. Birds, happy insectivores, are plump from eating their fill.

This visitation of the periodical cicada, 17 years since the last one, is both miraculous and horrible. My wife, Donna, pointed out that their characteristic whirring sound is the same as in the sci-fi and monster movies of the 1950s and '60s. Her theory is that the sound engineers went to some besieged place like Morgantown and recorded the cicadas, then amplified the noise for an otherworldy sound effect. Some of the screams of people being dive-bombed by the cicadas seem right out of the same movies, in the scenes where some starlet gets her first glimpse of the awful thing that wants to make a snack of her. Invasion of the Tree Bugs. Attack of the Two-Inch Cicada. Cicada Mania. Any of these would be an apt title for a documentary film about life in Morgantown this spring.