About two weeks ago, the front page of every newspaper and the feature story of every news broadcast in the city of Chicago centered around a surprise 17 years in the making. Cicadas, nature's fine wine aged to perfection, were about to make their grand entrance.
There were cicada recipes, cicada t-shirts, cicada forest reserve viewing tours, cicada information sessions at Lincoln Park Zoo and the Field Museum. Pictures captured jubilant youngsters smiling from ear to ear as they held one of the little red-eyed critters in their palms. All was well and, being 17 years old myself, I was admittedly as excited as the rest of the city's adolescent population to see the cicadas for the first time. But that was two weeks ago.
I've spent the majority of the ensuing days sweeping up dead bodies, decaying exoskeletons, wings, antennae, and legs, scraping "cicada juice" off of my sneakers, and washing sea gulls' (who apparently are happier than a kid in a candy store to see the cicadas arrive) crap off of my car. I feel deceived, hoodwinked, bamboozled, flim-flammed. This isn't a visit, as the Tribune so often liked to call it as they monitored the days left on their "Cicada Countdown". It's an infestation.
Unlike most of the city, my neighborhood, Morgan Park, features a gallery of parks and spacious, green lots. It was a suburb until the '50s. It also is the cicada capital of Chicago. I've read reports that in the Dan Ryan Woods, a forest preserve about two miles north of my house, there've been estimates of over 5 million cicadas per acre.
They don't bite or sting, they aren't aggressive, and they live a miserable life above ground - which consists of 6 weeks spent mating, laying eggs, getting stepped on, and getting eaten by everything from dogs to sea gulls. But they spend every waking hour of their time here singing mating calls in unison. It's a mind-numbing harmony akin to a million rattlesnakes shaking their tails and that noise being amplified by a sound system at Lollapolooza, a sound system that doesn't go off. It's irritation in surround-sound.
I guess the rant stops here, my mom just found another cicada in the kitchen.
There were cicada recipes, cicada t-shirts, cicada forest reserve viewing tours, cicada information sessions at Lincoln Park Zoo and the Field Museum. Pictures captured jubilant youngsters smiling from ear to ear as they held one of the little red-eyed critters in their palms. All was well and, being 17 years old myself, I was admittedly as excited as the rest of the city's adolescent population to see the cicadas for the first time. But that was two weeks ago.
I've spent the majority of the ensuing days sweeping up dead bodies, decaying exoskeletons, wings, antennae, and legs, scraping "cicada juice" off of my sneakers, and washing sea gulls' (who apparently are happier than a kid in a candy store to see the cicadas arrive) crap off of my car. I feel deceived, hoodwinked, bamboozled, flim-flammed. This isn't a visit, as the Tribune so often liked to call it as they monitored the days left on their "Cicada Countdown". It's an infestation.
Unlike most of the city, my neighborhood, Morgan Park, features a gallery of parks and spacious, green lots. It was a suburb until the '50s. It also is the cicada capital of Chicago. I've read reports that in the Dan Ryan Woods, a forest preserve about two miles north of my house, there've been estimates of over 5 million cicadas per acre.
They don't bite or sting, they aren't aggressive, and they live a miserable life above ground - which consists of 6 weeks spent mating, laying eggs, getting stepped on, and getting eaten by everything from dogs to sea gulls. But they spend every waking hour of their time here singing mating calls in unison. It's a mind-numbing harmony akin to a million rattlesnakes shaking their tails and that noise being amplified by a sound system at Lollapolooza, a sound system that doesn't go off. It's irritation in surround-sound.
I guess the rant stops here, my mom just found another cicada in the kitchen.
