Adam's Cool Website

A Familiar Hum

Hiking through the heart of the biggest cicada emergence in more than 200 years

This bug and his friends are almost 18 years old— but will never quite make it there.

I have made some Content. I didn’t mean to: I’m on parental leave for almost another two months. By all rights I should be spending my fleeting free time either exercising or scrubbing yogurt / dried Play-Doh / infant vomit out of whatever surface my children have most recently befouled. I can’t help it. I’m like a cat chasing a laser pointer: Even if it’s pointless, it just feels good. I’ve been doing this for nearly 20 years and I think it’s probably too late for me to change.

Earlier this month, my older son and I flew to Chicago for my sister’s wedding. Our trip happened to coincide with one of the rarest wildlife events in the United States, an overlapping emergence of a 17-year and 13-year cicada brood, which hadn’t occurred in 221 years. I was 18 and still living in Chicago the last time the 17-year brood, Brood XIII, emerged. I remembered how all-encompassing it was, the swarms and the din surrounding my friends and I everywhere we went. The ungainly bugs would ricochet off your chest while you walked down the sidewalk and get stuck in the gaps between your car’s paneling. Everything ate them, from spiders to chipmunks to coyotes.

I guessed, correctly, that Rhys would appreciate the spectacle. The kid lacks whatever gene or psychological flaw makes most people afraid of bugs; In his grandparents’ backyard, he collected the buzzing insects and stuffed them into a magnifying-glass-equipped bug catcher until they were a ball of tangled legs and wings. We shot most of the following video on a six-mile hike through Waterfall Glen Forest Preserve, a swatch of hardwood forest, ponds, and tumbling creeks that surrounds Argonne National Laboratory in the city’s southwestern suburbs, using my budget Android phone and a cheap, one-axis gimbal. If nothing else, it was a fun father-son activity, one that said son has now insisted we watch a dozen times and counting.

I’m thinking of becoming the cicada equivalent of those people who travel around the world following eclipses or drive into tornadoes to film them: a swarm-chaser. As I note at the end of the video, I’ll be 52 next time Brood XIII comes back. Instead of waiting, I’ll pack my bags and spend my years searching for the buzz across the midwestern and eastern U.S. I don’t think I’ve ever slept better than mid-afternoon, with the light streaming in through the half-open blinds, listening to the drone of billions of summer bugs calling at once. It might not be a bad way to spend a life.