An unforeseen consequence of writing and sharing all of these stories is that I then think to send them along to some of the people in them, people that I generally wouldn’t have spoken to in many years, and then sometimes they read them and say a few things back and this triggers and unlocks a few more details and features to add to the tottering memory tower. This is, of course, wonderful as I am absolutely ravenous when it comes to memory and I get to feel like a fat, contented spider sitting at the center of a giant web made of memory but instead of flies it paradoxically catches more and more pieces of memory.
The web grows larger and the spider grows fatter and the whole thing feels very decadent, indulgent and luxurious – like the pleasure an athlete must feel while stretching and reveling in their perfectly constructed body.
This brings us to rural Northern Illinois and the Summer of 2007 and the ballad of Brood XIII. I had mentioned Eleanor and the recently vegetable oil converted box truck that she brought to Chicago at the beginning of that year. Several years earlier an inspired genius named Dave Tortuga had realized that most of his musician friends had large vehicles, were already used to carrying heavy amplifiers up and down stairs and in constant need of quick and casual methods of making money. The second half of this thought was that all across Chicagoland people without large vehicles who would rather not carry heavy things up and down stairs would be willing to pay other people to do it for them and the Starving Artist Moving Company was born.
That isn’t really going to play into this story – I more just wanted to talk about why it was a particularly astute move for Eleanor to bring a box truck to Chicago and how around 2007 you would have had an easier time getting booked to help move people’s furniture for money than you would playing an actual show. The clients invariably asked all of the movers what kind of artist they were and then looked visibly deflated when everybody ended up answering that they played in a band. I’d imagine that people eventually just started lying and saying that they painted or carved giant blocks of marble into statues just to avoid the mild disappointment.
Anyway as long as I brought it up I might as well tell the most entertaining story about it I can think of. There was one job when I was working with a couple of guys who were super “holier than thou” back to nature lifestyle types – like eat roadkill and brain tan the pelts, urban foraging, anti-consumerism. I don’t know if they actually did any of that stuff but they really liked posturing about it and egging each other on. We were discussing the great deal I had just gotten on a room and one of them offered this nugget of wisdom:
“Yeah, whatever kind of house you end up getting it’s just not healthy to live indoors.”
I didn’t hear anything about what their living situations were but the general attitude was that I was savable in their eyes: I had moved into a room this time around but I’d get it right the next time and end up in a tree or a hole in the ground but the young couple we were moving furniture for were completely beneath them and worthy only of contempt. After all they had lived in one house or apartment and then made a conscious decision to move into another one: totally irredeemable.
So as we were leaving the old home for the final time the boyfriend of the couple we were moving mentioned that his girlfriend had gotten drinks for us and when we got outside one of the guys smirked at the other one and said the word “drinks” with the maximum serving of ironic sarcasm. Obviously he was expecting soda or Gatorade or another post-Capitalist processed beverage and was savoring the anticipation of pronouncing judgement on how utterly undrinkable it was.
We get to the other house and he passes me on his way outside:
“Oh, there’s water inside if you want it. Bottled water.”
I thought it was hilarious that these people had so thoroughly defied his expectations by buying us the purest and most healthy potable substance on the planet but he was so committed to his earlier judgement that he still found a way to denigrate it. There are times when I wish these stories were conveyed through recordings of my voice rather than the written word because the way that somebody said something is so hilariously specific.
Basically take the thing I said about “drinks” being pronounced with the maximum sarcasm and amend it only to the effect that it apparently was possible to squeeze slightly more sarcasm into a spoken word and he did so with “bottled”. I didn’t actually think of the following comeback in the moment. I wonder about things like this: would it make for a better story if I lied and claimed to have thought to say the witty thing in the moment? Or is it better as something I only thought of later? Either way here it is:
“You mean to tell me that they don’t have an actual river running through the center of their new apartment? These people are savages!”
Anyway enough of all that – let’s talk about the real stars of this piece. Let’s talk about Brood XIII. Brood XIII may well be the most famous of the periodical cicada broods as it takes place so close to Chicagoland. All cicadas, periodical and annual alike, burrow deep into the ground while in their wingless nymph stage and spend a good deal of time gnawing on roots or otherwise feeding. This always reminds me of Nidhogg, a dragon from Norse mythology that gnaws on the roots of the Yggdrasil world tree biding it’s time until Ragnarok.
In this scenario Ragnarok will arrive once a squirrel named Ratatosk has carried enough insults back and forth between Nidhogg the dragon and an eagle named Avenir that they are willing to rip Yggdrasil asunder just to get their claws on each other. In the case of Brood XIII this always takes seventeen years with no squirrels, eagles or insults required and the trees are left relatively unscathed except for a few leftover molts from their mass metamorphosis. They transform themselves into winged adults and get right into the adult business of both mating and making a lot of noise about mating.
Most places with periodical cicadas also have annual cicadas so the noisy insects are a feature of every Summer but every seventeen years, or thirteen in some cases, there are suddenly a lot more of them. Sometimes they emerge in such numbers that entire streets run black with them like a living river and motorists have no recourse but to crush them under their wheels. This wasn’t the case in 2007 or at least not in the Riverwoods suburb where Eleanor had brought me to work for her step-father.
Another event that always accompanies the emergence of a periodical brood is a small number of deaths from anaphylactic shock. With so many cicadas suddenly available a small but dedicated number of adventurous gourmands decide to try frying a few in butter or otherwise preparing the exotic snack and then eating them. It seems unlikely that a person who is willing to eat wild arthropods from the ground would never have had occasion to experiment with shrimp, crab, lobster or crayfish but there it is.
Tropomysin, the muscle protein responsible for shellfish allergies, is also found in the exoskeletons of cicadas and a few unlucky souls always seem to discover this sensitivity by consuming a lethal dose and then dying from it. Those in proximity to Brood XIII might also feel that they are being exposed to a lethal dose of the cicada’s droning calls but this is always survived. What the cicadas tend not to survive is the process of mating, or at least not for very long, their winged bodies aren’t particularly durable and once the deed is done and the eggs are laid they are left to start falling apart.
I can’t remember how it was arranged that I would be doing some yard labor for Eleanor’s step-father or if she brought me there in her box truck or not. I suppose it’s possible that he reached out to Starving Artist for somebody and I was the only one to accept but it’s also possible that Eleanor and I were just driving that way and he had a to-do list. The tasks he gave to me had a consistent feeling of futility and pointlessness – lots of taking a pile of one thing in the yard and moving it into another pile on the other side of the yard for some esoteric reason.
I’m not sure why he had a row of clay bricks laid out about three bricks high but he wanted me to recreate it in a similar form but about one hundred feet away from where it was. Out of all the tasks this was certainly the most pointless seeming – I can’t remember if anything there was actually made of brickwork but I do recall some of the bricks having a specific antique imprint he was excited about. I have a feeling that somebody was throwing old bricks away and he decided to save them in the hope that a future use would someday occur to him.
This is the thing about the bricks: I was nearly finished moving the entire bottom row when I discovered a dead cicada nymph poised at the mouth of a perfectly round tunnel underneath the final brick. Seventeen years ago this cicada had burrowed into the ground in this exact spot but sometime afterward a human being had put a row of bricks on top of his tunnel. When the seventeen years were up he went to burrow back up but found himself coming up against this immovable obstacle and died.
I couldn’t help but be moved by the tragic and near unbelievable kismet of this situation. Here I was moving the very brick that would have allowed the cicada to emerge, transform and mate had I only arrived to move it just one or two weeks earlier. Against the sprawling contours of seventeen entire years what were these tiny weeks? The very last brick had been the one to block his tunnel so a million small chances could have changed everything: slightly less bricks, the pile starting a foot or two earlier or the bricks being stacked four deep instead of three.
There are things in this universe: insects, people, animals, countries, ideas and religions that always seem to find themselves on the wrong side of destiny. The air was absolutely buzzing with the siblings and cousins of this unlucky individual who had neatly shed the shells of their last seventeen years and were poised to pass life to the next generation who will be emerging a little over a year from now in 2024. This guy had died under a brick – not for being weak or foolish but unlucky. The one sin that nature simply can not forgive.
There were two other adult or near adult children in the house. One lived in the basement and had been struggling with drugs for years. I had been dabbling again but my recent encounter with “Rocky” had filled me with new optimism and positivity and I wasn’t even thinking about that sort of thing. Honest labour and communion with nature were my bread and butter then. I’d either just been at the rafts or would be soon.
The other sibling was a daughter referred to as “beauty” who seemed to be kept in the center of the house. She was probably little more than a nymph herself – possibly approaching her own period of seventeen years and Eleanor’s step-father seemed to be carefully avoiding her coming into contact with me. The very air was buzzing with insect sex and who knew what kind of molt unchaperoned contact with an energetic hired hand might set in motion?
I can’t remember if we ever even saw one another but when I try to conjure a mental picture of her she seems to be behind a wall of sleep – dreaming through the mornings and into the early afternoons, perhaps drifting downstairs to eat some toast and jelly. I want to be clear: I wasn’t actively lusting after this girl nor being so presumptuous as to assume that she would have lusted after me. Rather the whole situation seemed to carry a fairy tale like quality: her name was “Beauty” and she lived in a hidden room with what Eleanor referred to as “Rapunzel Shutters” overlooking the very yard I was working in.
I walked down to a local nature park and spent the next morning hiking its trails and reading signs about a local endangered population of blue spotted salamanders. Back at the house I was now moving some piles of firewood and to my great surprise found one of the very creatures when I moved the final log. Amphibians have always been my totem – if the failed cicada nymph had represented a cruel cosmic joke this new discovery carried the promise that nature would be renewed and life would find a way.
Back in Chicago I was Substitute Teaching at some of the Elementary Schools near the Projects. I cut black salamander bodies and blue circles out of construction paper – helping my young students to produce small representations of my happy discovery. I was hoping to instill a love of nature in this growing generation, offering my own roots to gnaw for the future day they might also climb upward toward adulthood. The air continued to buzz heavily with the songs of thousands of cicadas. Eggs were laid in clutches and nymphs burrowed patiently into the ground.
I’ve been talking with Eleanor again and learning that since moving to rural Missouri she has been living as a beekeeper and pollination scientist. The fairytale ending never came with the fellow experimental musician she moved out there for but instead she is celebrating ten years of marriage with a handsome dairy farmer named for an Archangel. With a home full of birds and bees, egg layers and pollinators, nature has decided that the tree of their Union would not be blessed with fecundity.
Like the brick and cicada sometimes it all comes down to the luck of the draw and short straws need hands too. For a hungry cow all straw is created equal.
With Brood XIII set to re-emerge LaPorsha and I are looking toward our own ten year anniversary and our own hopes and thoughts are turning toward fruitfulness. The second hand story of the Schumacher’s situation has called my own virility into question – in something less than an embarrassment of riches I have only had occasion to father a single abortion and the tenuous timeline always left me with reservations. Should I make a date with a cup to determine if it runneth over?
Or should we wait, less than seventeen years I would hope, until we find out where the brick is?
Adventures in the Undiscovered Interior of Underground America 