Nature – Author Sarah Angleton

It’s been a big couple of weeks in the house of practical history. If you’ve followed this blog for long you’re probably aware that I have two sons. When I started this thing way back once upon a time they were pretty small, just starting school, giving me, their mommy, bits of time to devote to something like blogging about history and nonsense.

As children do, they’ve gone and grown up now. My youngest graduated from high school last spring, turned eighteen this summer, and left this week on a great adventure. I won’t go into the specifics because he is an adult with sole possession of his own stories. I will say that I’m really proud of him and I miss him already.

My oldest son spent the summer away on an adventure of his own, returning about a week and half before his brother’s planned departure, and so as a family we decided to spend a little fun time together. We chose to take a quick getaway in the middle of the week to canoe down part of the North Fork of the White River in Southern Missouri. It’s a beautiful little river and the state has experienced plenty of rain this spring and summer. The occasional low spots one might sometimes experience were nicely covered over and the current was swift.

My husband and I used to be pretty experienced canoeists; my sons, not so much, but after spending the summer apart, they wanted to catch up and canoe together. No mother could say no to that. Of course, we as the the more experienced, took the cooler and strapped the dry bag to our boat.

They worked together really well, communicating through the tougher spots where rocks and debris made the steering (and staying dry) a little more challenging. Despite more experience and twenty-five years of marriage, we didn’t do quite as well. The problem wasn’t our lack of communication exactly. It was more our admittedly slower reflexes and slightly poorer eyesight that got us. And also a fallen tree that we didn’t manage to skirt on an outside bend the way we needed to.

The current was fast where it happened. When the canoe dumped, my husband managed to hold onto it and ride with it several bends downstream, while I grabbed onto the first thing that came to hand, which was the cooler. I clutched it tightly and rode the current, feet first, until I got to a place I could safely stop myself, very near where my husband had finally managed to bring the canoe to shore.

A couple of kind strangers helped him empty the water while our sons chased down all of the wayward objects that had once been in our boat. They found everything except for one paddle. The dry bag was still fairly dry, the cooler that had so beautifully kept me afloat, was no worse for wear, and they even managed to grab my favorite baseball cap that had been swept off my head.

I’m pretty sure this happened yesterday.

Other than a couple scrapes and bruises, we were unhurt, although the strap of one of my husband’s sandals broke during the ordeal leaving him with only one functioning shoe, and of course, there was the beating we took to our egos. That only got worse when shortly after the incident, our just grown sons decided that for our safety, they should each take one of us. And we agreed. Ouch.

Though I don’t think we were at any serious risk of injury in this shallow river, the reality was that for a few minutes there, we were up a creek without a paddle, a phrase that though surely older in conversation, began showing up commonly in American print in the mid to late nineteenth century.

So there we were, divided up between our children, my husband with only one shoe and me without a paddle, each being steered down the river by one of the boys whose lives used to more or less take the direction we chose for them. I suppose now we get to watch them navigate the currents of their own lives.

They were good boys. They are good men. I guess that’s just how life flows.

On April 15, 1791, the first of four stones marking the corners of the Federal District in Washington DC was laid by surveyor George Ellicott and his team, which included brilliant mathematician, astronomer, tobacco farmer, and free-born Black man Benjamin Banneker.

A representation of Benjamin Banneker, who for the next few weeks will be known primarily as the naturalist who documented the seventeen-year brood cycle.
PBS: http://www.pbs.org/
wgbh/aia/part2/2h68b.html, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Banneker is known in the history books not only for his role in the laying out of Washington DC, but also as the man who compiled one of the earliest American almanacs. He provided a copy to then Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson as a counter to Jefferson’s assessment that Black men did not possess the mental capacity of white men. Throughout Banneker’s life he did what he could to fight this unjust assumption and advocate for freedom.

There’s a lot of big and important stuff Banneker should be remembered and celebrated for, but today I find myself only wanting to really talk about one of them—a topic that is at the forefront of the thoughts and conversations of millions of people in my corner of the world. Because according to Morgan State University researchers Asamoah Nkwanta and Janet Barber, Banneker is also one of the first people to have calculated and recorded the seventeen-year life cycle of the periodic cicada.

I admit that among insects that I give regular thought to, cicadas usually rank pretty low, somewhere way behind mosquitoes, ticks, and the carpenter bees that try to eat my deck every year. Recently, though, cicadas have claimed the top spot. I’m not alone, either, because the most frequent Google search topic over the last week in Missouri has been cicadas.

That’s because we make up part of the map covering two large broods of periodic cicadas. To give some context to that, there are some different varieties of this particular insect. One lives out its mating ritual for a few weeks every summer, molting and abandoning its creepy exoskeletons on tree trunks so that big brothers can stick them to the tee shirt backs of unsuspecting little sisters throughout the Midwest.

Top Google searches make great blog topics. Image by Ashlee Marie from Pixabay

Then there are the periodic variety that emerge from the ground to spend a few weeks molting and singing and mating every thirteen or seventeen years. This year, there are two large broods of periodic cicadas singing their way through Missouri’s trees. These particular broods have not been seen at the same time since 1803 and it will be another 221 years before it happens again. There are allegedly billions of them in the state right now. I believe it.

Their high pitched buzz, which peaks between 10 AM and 6 PM every day, was kind of pleasant at first, but has grown into an ever-present eerie drone still audible over the car radio and in every corner of my house. They drop onto sidewalks, hurl themselves into innocent passers by, cling to every rough surface they can find, and people on my social media feeds keep sharing cicada recipes as if I am going to start eating them. I assure you I am not.

Benjamin Banneker didn’t quite know what to make of the periodic cicadas the first time he encountered them either, and didn’t have the luxury of Googling for information. When he was seventeen, a large brood emerged in his corner of the world in rural Maryland. He initially thought they were locusts that would destroy the family’s tobacco harvest. He waged a fruitless war against them before coming to the conclusion that not only was he fighting a losing battle, but that the insects really weren’t doing much harm. And then, because he was a much better observer and record keeper than I am, he eventually mapped out their extremely extended life-cycle.

This is pretty much what the underside of every leaf in my yard looks like right now.

Our cicadas aren’t much of a problem this year, either. They may cause a little damage to trees while feeding on sap and laying their eggs in slits they make in the trunks, but unless the trees are young, it’s not a big deal. And the cicadas have been great for our cherry harvest because the birds have been so busy eating the big loud bugs they have more or less ignored our fruit.

Despite my best efforts, my dog eats the cicadas too, even without including them in a stir fry or dipping them in chocolate as so many of my disgusting friends have suggested. It’s given him a little bit of a belly ache, which kind of serves him right, I think.

I am looking forward to a few weeks from now when the billions of periodic cicadas will be gone, their eggs safely deposited for the next thirteen or seventeen years, and we can all go back to thinking about and discussing all of the many other much more important things going on in the world.

In the meantime, I’m trying to appreciate them the way Banneker came to. In his journal, he wrote “that if their lives are short they are merry, they begin to sing or make a noise from the first they come out of the Earth till they die.” Okay, I guess their singing isn’t THAT irritating. But I’m still not eating them.