Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities

Crunchy - but not in a good way

I saw a recipe for cicada cookies this week that took me back in time.

While I have zero desire to incorporate these large, loud, and crunchy (I’ll come back to that) insects into any aspect of my diet, they are part of one of the most vivid memories of my life.

It was purely by accident that I happened to be living in the Washington, D.C., area in 1987, during one of the mega-emergences of the 17-year cicadas that make their home in the Midwest and eastern United States.

The group that crawled forth that year were in Brood X, one of the largest of the 17-year cicada families, and the one that happens to be burrowing out of the ground right now, for the second time since the year I met them.

For all but about a month of their lengthy life cycle, cicadas are buried deep in the earth, far from sight and sound and even thought.

When they do make their appearance though — as the grand-nymphs of the ones I met are doing right now — it’s a spectacle like no other.

On that memorable Saturday morning in May of 1987, I unwittingly volunteered to help at a charitable fun run being held through tree-lined neighborhoods in the northern Virginia suburbs of our nation’s capital.

Local news sources had predicted the onslaught for weeks, but the organizers of that race had either missed those reports, or they had a twisted sense of humor.

Windshield wipers were essential as I drove to my station on the course … not for rain, but for the hailstorm of freshly emerged cicadas clumsily trying out their new wings.

The ground was also crawling with the thumb-sized critters, which sport bulging red eyes. It was the stuff of a Hitchcock film.

We intrepid volunteers were assigned to a table stocked with five-gallon coolers of juice and water, towers of small paper cups, and cicadas. So many cicadas.

In theory, we were to fill the cups (ideally with ONLY the liquids) and pass them to the runners as they jogged past our section of the course.

Did I say jogged? I mean crunched.

Oh, the crunching.

It’s that crunching that will forever be etched in my memory. (And by etched, I mean deeply and painfully carved with the jagged blade of a rusty butcher knife.)

During the peak of emergence in prime cicada territory (I held winning tickets in both categories that day), scientists estimate there are as many as 1.5 million cicadas per acre.

That’s an area the size of a little over half of a football field. Now imagine it paved, and then add several hundred runners.

Biologists speculate that this mass periodic emergence is designed to completely overwhelm potential predators and allow enough cicadas to mate and lay eggs to successfully continue the great circle of life.

If the runners and race volunteers were “predators” that day, then yes, I confess: We were completely overwhelmed.

I’m more of a nature nerd now than I was 34 years ago, and some part of me would love to be on a plane headed east to watch Brood X do its thing.

But not from the vantage point of a fun run volunteer.

Maybe from the inside of a car.

A rental.

With the windows rolled up.

So I can’t hear the crunching.

Betty Williamson believes the Great 1987 Cicada Race is why she doesn’t run for fun. Reach her at:

[email protected]

 
 
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