Cicadas > IDEAS & IDEALS

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 In addition to the unpredictable spell of rain, continuing high heat-wave and humidity, what made my life harder and more difficult in enduring the summer was the shrill songs or callings of the cicadas. Cicadas are supposed to live on the trees in the country, but they have moved to the heart of Seoul recently and tormented my eardrums by kicking up so much din and noise. It seemed that they have lost the sense of time and place. They sang from early morning through day to night from the trees around my apartment and even from the iron mosquito nets at my window.
        
     The world has become still and silent all of a sudden. One day I realized, to my great wonder and surprise, that cicadas were all gone from the trees I passed by and under every day. They were there, seen or unseen, until yesterday, but I found none of them this morning. I wonder again, as I did last summer and every summer in the past, how could it happen overnight, as if they had been ordered by somebody above to do so. It is like a secret military operation. Where are they all gone?

     We know how the cicadas look like. They are a large bug with two transparent wings. The male cicadas make a loud, shrill and droning noise by vibrating two membranes on their abdomen. Although called in various names in English such as cicala, harvest fly, a balm cricket or locust, cicadas belong to a large family of homopterous insects, along with grasshoppers, leafhoppers, treehoppers and froghoppers, but there is more we do not know of them than we know of.

     It is generally believed that they spend many years as larvae underground (some say 15 years, some 12, and some 7) and live a sadly short life (some say only 15 days, some a month, and some 3 months) and die, but most of the important knowledge we have about the cicadas is no more than just inaccurate and commonplace hearsay. Nothing is fixed, verified or proven.

     And, do you know that they eat nothing during their entire life? Indeed, through my long experience in watching them I have not found any of them trying to catch anything to eat or eating something. I wonder if they have a mouth at all. I wonder how can they sing so energetically all the time without eating anything at all. No doubt they are the greatest singers in the world. They sing to death. It is said that dew is the only food for them.

     Cicadas are mysterious beings, although they are so common and ubiquitous. They come and go very mysteriously. We vaguely know that they come from earth and return to it like most of other creatures on the earth including man. I have not seen any young of them, nor any corpses of them when they died. Since they disappear all at once, they must leave their dead bodies somewhere on the ground like the leaves in the fall, but they are rarely found. Do they all fly to the sea and drown themselves? Or, do they have any special secret burial ground unknown to us?

     Once I was very eager to catch cicadas when I was an elementary schoolboy in the country. With the long summer vacation we were told to collect as many specimens of insects as possible as a homework. Competitively we caught butterflies, dragonflies, beetles, grasshoppers, locusts, katydid, bees, praying mantis - anything and everything we saw and could lay our hands on. We transfixed them all alive with an iron pin on the wall or on the cardboard box until they died. By the time school was open these specimens, nay, all the carcasses of the dead insects decayed and stank. It was a massacre of the innocent and beautiful insects ordered by the ignorant and unfeeling school teachers.

     Cicadas were one of the most prestigious items for the specimen collection, and the boys who had collected any of them were the envy of those who had not. Cicadas were, however, very smart and very hard to catch. Usually they were high up on the tall poplars, or on the old elms, or on the mulberries. I dared not climb up the tall trees. I just tried to catch one from the mulberry shrubs.

     I knew I could catch one of them more easily while they were singing, but they stopped singing the moment I approached. I waited in silence for them to sing again. They also waited in silence for me to go away. It was a game of patience. When I gave up and walked away from the place, they began to sing more loudly as if they were scorning my impatience and intelligence. One summer, one of the boys, who was very daring and good at climbing trees, climbed up the tall poplar by the creek, slipped and fell breaking one of his legs and became a permanent lame. He is still living at my hometown.

     Last summer I was a cicada-catcher once again. One day my six-year old grandson demanded me to catch some cicadas for him. It was clear that one of his peers in the same apartment boasted of the box full of the cicadas. I agreed. We went to a store and bought a cicada net and an insect box. I slung the rod of the cicada net over my shoulder, and my grandson held the box in his hand, and we marched out of the store in high spirits like two soldiers going to the battlefield.  

     It was so easy for me to catch them. Spotting one on the low cherry trees around my apartment, I approached silently and put the net close over it and it flew into the net without fail. Have all the cicadas grown stupid or dumb these days? Or have I become more intelligent and smart with my age? I thought of the time when I approached the mulberry shrubs. Soon I found the box almost full of the cicadas. My grandson was fearfully excited. He wanted to carry them home and keep them as a pet or something, but alas! he did not know there was no food for the cicadas on the earth. It took some time before I succeeded in coaxing him to set them free one by one. I promised to buy him his favorite ice cream instead.

     It was a beautiful summer. I miss the heat, the rain and the songs of the cicadas.
        (September 10, 2007)