For survivors of the eclipse comes summer’s round two of the supernatural.
“You’re traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind; a journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination. That’s the signpost up ahead—your next stop, . . .” no, not the Twilight Zone. It’s Brood X according to entm.purdue.edu/cicadas/ online.
Baby Boomers survived both Twilight Zone and Eclipse. Do not confuse Brood X with Gen X, although there are those who say one is as annoying as the other. Brood X refers to a 17-year cicada emergence in 2021. Do not confuse cicada with locust. In Biblical times God sent locust to annoy pagan Egypt.
“And Moses stretched forth his rod over the land of Egypt, and the Lord brought an east wind upon the land all that day, and all that night; and when it was morning, the east wind brought the locusts. Ex10:14” Without an exact year of Moses’ rod-starting locusts, it’s impossible to calculate if this was the beginning of Brood X.
Angelkeep decided to travel through another dimension in time, stealing Rod Sterling’s words, and stop at 119 years ago to investigate the Brood X year of 1905. News-Banner’s Bluffton forerunner published, “According to their peculiar habit they come in the night to the surface of the ground from their subterranean caverns, where they have been maturing and slumbering for the last seventeen years. The ground beneath the trees is perforated like an immense colander with the holes from which they emerged.”
Do not confuse colander with Marie Callender’s perfect pecan pies. Angelkeep could devour a Marie Callender pecan pie in 17 hours, not 17 years. A la mode, and make it an overload. But I digress, and drool.
Do not confuse dining habits of cicadas with locusts. According to “entm” (entomology) at Purdue, “Some people call cicadas locusts, but cicadas can’t eat crops like locusts. They only drink trees.” That’s comforting. Hordes of tree-drunk cicadas could arrive eminently. Will gawking at an inebriated cicada cause your eyes to go blind, like an eclipse peril?
Remember the eclipse trekkers? You may need to travel for cicadas, southern Indiana a good bet, Nashville, Brookville, and McCormick’s Creek were bygone hot spots, according to cicadamania.com. Wait, do not confuse Brood X with Brood XIII and/or Brood XIX. The latter, assigned the moniker of “Great Southern Brood,” emerge as Hoosiers this year simultaneously with Brood XIII. It’s Cicada Super Bowl time. Cicada choruses you hear will not be those of Brood X until 2038. Enjoy the loud tenor pitch of Hoosier annual Cicada. Only boys sing, girls click their responding “I do.”
Brood X had been highlighted by Bluffton’s 1905 newspaper. The paper used both terms cicada and locust in the same story, same paragraphs. They obviously didn’t know the difference. Cicadas fall in the order Hemiptera, locusts the order Orthoptera. In 1905 “Locusts Ravage the Wheat” headlined the story referring to cicadas which eat no field crops via Purdue.
In 1620 Plymouth Colony Gov. Wm. Bradford recorded bug emerging, “…out of little holes in the ground, and did eat up the green things, and made such a constant yelling noise as made the woods ring of them…the Indians told them that sickness would follow, and so it did…”
Remember that for a conversation starter. Why are cicadas an Angelkeep Journals’ topic a second month in a row? Because, as the news wrote in 1915, cicadas can get on your last nerve, they sing until they die. “The innumerable locusts are filling the air with their sonorous, monotonous and doleful song. The farmers are spraying their orchards with prepared mixture of kerosene.” Purdue assures cicadas don’t eat crops, trees yes.
Indiana Cicada Fest runs May 1 to June 21. It’s an iNaturalist project. They wish outdoor lovers to hike, locate, then photograph interesting plants, animals, fungi, and hopefully cicadas. The iNaturalist website desires your downloads.
Don’t embarrass yourself by photographing common annual cicadas. There’s a difference. Unlike as Gen X and Baby Boomers. Periodical cicadas have red eyes and a nearly black body. Annual cicadas have dark eyes and a forest green thorax.
April’s Angelkeep cicada column ends with trivia. The Latin root word for cicada is “cicada.” Like some pronounce “puh-tay-to” as “po-tah-to,” you’re correct to utter “si-kay-da” as “si-kah-da.”
Mr. Daugherty is a Wells County resident who, along with his wife Gwen, enjoy their backyard and have named it “Angelkeep.”
