“… I think life can be very melancholy as well as being inspiring and pleasant. One of the functions of life is that throughout it you discover, sometimes painfully, your limitations. Because you find out not only what you can do but also what you can’t do.”
Sir Peter Ustinov (RIP March 28 @ age of 82)

The Singing Forest

The Magicicada septendecula are coming! The Magicicada septendecula are coming!
Isn’t it marvelous? It’s sooo big National Geographic are, like, all over it. And a bunch of scientists and, Jeeze, everyone’s talking about it. I heard some folks are actually packing up and leaving town! And others are planning on sleeping rough outside! How weird is that?
Do you remember where you were the last time the Magicicada septendecula came?
‘Cause The Grinch knows EXACTLY where he was.
I cast my mind back, awaaaay back to the sunny summer of ’87. Ahh yes, freshly back in the East from a year’s skiing and banging nails in the western frontier, falling in and out of love, bright though bleary-eyed after a second semester back at university, a considerably leaner, un-inked version of myself was thumbing his way south.
Montreal, Kingston, Syracuse, Harrisburg and on down the I-81 to a lonely trailhead outside Winchester, Virginia. Three days hauling ass, dawn-till-dusk and the rides and the road-trash were as diverse and wonderful as a young man might want. There was the businessman who punted me 200 m before the border crossing and waited patiently on the other side for me to clear customs (“No offense, son.” None taken, I’ve done the same).
And the trailer trash who picked me up mid-afternoon somewhere in the Finger Lakes district, mom, dad and a T-ball infield worth of under-nines rolling about the back of a rusted ‘ol Chevy van like softballs in a bat-bag. Dad was determined that one day he was gonna get his-self to Canada on account of how good the huntin’ and fishin’ wuz (“cuz my brother-in-law went up there once and had a real good time ‘cept for all the Frenchies of course, no offence.” None taken, I’m English.)
And then to impress the kids, who had the vulpine look of youngsters who’d pretty much sacrifice one of their own for kicks if it meant turning the van back towards home, the toothless wonder at the wheel asked what winters were like up there in Canada. And then he was wondering how much snow fell and how he reckoned it must be hard on us Canadians always having to dig ourselves out “on account of all the storms and whatnot.” And pretty soon he got around to what he actually wanted to say which was to tell the yoots in the back that it was not uncommon for Canadian children to live in snow houses and take dog sleds to work.
And of course I played along thinking, whattheheck, be a good sport and so on… except for the fact that it took about 30 seconds of banter to realize he was serious. And this guy, this adult who lived maybe a 90-minute drive south of the border reckoned, I guess, that some sort of extraordinary meteorological event occurred between his house and mine that caused the dense coniferous forests of Appalachia to evaporate before and endless tundra populated only by bison and caribou and a particularly hardy sort of elementary school student who tethered half a dozen silver-eyed dogs to a harness and mushed his way to the igloo school. Amazing.
But, as always, more entertainment (Magicicada septendecula!) awaited the further south I went. Somewhere in Connecticut, one of those states about which very little is known in Canada, I put a fair bit of road beneath my boots, walking from one unproductive hitching spot to another, maybe six or eight kilometers south. Effective hitchhikers do this (I oughta write a book) because staying in one place is a bad idea. Give it a couple of hours but if nothing stops for you, move. If you’re gonna use your thumb to travel efficiently then you’ve gotta respect road mojo.
It’s always kinda weird walking along a big highway. The day before, crossing an amazing, mustabeen two mile-long bridge over the muddy Susquehanna River, some hicks in a passing pick-up with Pennsylvania plates threw a beer bottle at me. I don’t think I’m going out on the limb here when I say that a Michelob bottle (they must have been Michelob drinkers) traveling at 100+km/h is going to do some damage if it hits you!
So anyway, yeah, not many people walk on the really big highways that don’t have to. Maybe run out of gas, or run out of town. You get plenty crazy people on the side of the interstate and the T-Can up north; maybe the noise drowns out the voices. I dunno. Mostly they leave you alone.
So I’m walking and up ahead there’s the exit and beyond a ways, there’s the entrance. It’s bad enough that the road is empty except for the odd Freightliner thundering by with a load of denim or scrap metal or frozen All-Beef-Patties but worse yet, through the wet mirage I can see there’s someone sitting by the entrance ramp. Competition.
The guy slowly takes shape as I approach. Pretty raggedly looking, bearded, wearing a baseball cap and an army surplus overcoat and at his feet is a cigar-shaped army surplus tote bag, the kind with just one long shoulder strap. He’s sitting with his back against a metal reflector and he looks like he’s been there for a while. He makes no move to get up so I walk up directly, smiling, nodding, my hands out where he can see them.
Yeah, I know this guy. He’s as familiar as familiar to the road as a shredded tractor-trailer wheel and a red-winged blackbird. I’ve seen him in Northern Ontario and on Vancouver Island and the Salvation Army hostel in the Crows Nest. I’ve never had a bad experience with Vietnam vets though I’ve heard some stories. I cup my palm to light up a couple of smokes and pass it to his remaining hand. Where are you going? Where you coming from? What’s the traffic like? Damn, two days, eh? Anywhere to get water ‘round here? Cops okay? Alright then, maybe I’ll just wander down the road a bit. You take care now. Here, take a couple more smokes for the road. Peace.
And I’m no more than 60 meters down the road when I hear a car coming. It’s natural to turn and face traffic and I do in time to see a powder-yellow Cadillac convertible drift past the smoking man. I see the driver giving him a glance but he doesn’t brake so I turn south. As the car passes though, I catch the driver’s eye and after some quick calculation, he starts to brake, pulling onto the shoulder.
I turn to look at the vet. He just smiles and waves ‘Go on’ and I shrug and turn and jog towards the car.
The driver’s a florid city slicker. New York City is only a couple hours drive from here and this big city queer says he’s looking to buy a property out in the country and, yeah, he’s heading for Virginia.
He doesn’t waste any time. Gets right to the point, tells me I’m a natural for one of the movies he’s producing. No, I wouldn’t only be screwing men, there’s always a couple of women too (yeah, right). Seriously, you’d be great, make a ton of cash. Check it out, he says, pulling a fat manila envelope out of the glove compartment, check out the photos in here, see what you think?
Aggressive homo drivers are an occupational hazard but this guy is soft and I know he’s not going to try and manhandle me, and besides my hand is resting on a concealed six-inch-long Canadian Tire “Bowie” knife strapped beneath the sleeping bag bound to the top of the pack I’ve placed between my legs. I don’t really want to throw a rod and force him to let me off ‘cause the only car that’s gonna pick up a lone guy with a pack in the middle of nowhere has cherries on top and trouble behind the wheel.
So I try and be diplomatic and say, ‘Listen dude, you wanna let me off here I don’t care but if you think I’m going to give you satisfaction for a couple hundred kilometers of open road, you’re out of your mind.’ And I ask about life in the Big Apple and get him talking about something other than his business and pretty soon we’re settled in and chillin’, and the Rolling Stones blasting from the 12-speaker Blaupunkt, are "Coming To My Emotional Rescue".
Of course, every now and then he pipes up with some new line. I mention I’d like to buy a camper van like the Westphalia we just passed: “Three months with me and you can buy it,” he says.
It’s a long 3 hours and early afternoon by the time we hit Winchester. He drops me at a mall in town with a final appeal that I look inside that envelope. By that time it’s pretty much a joke and we part with a handshake.
He pulls away in that luxurious automobile and I shoulder my pack for what’s going to be a two or three-hour walk to the trailhead, with a stop first for supplies at the Mega-Super-Discount-Savings-Special Mart that anchors the mall. And something cold for my parched throat.
I’m not halfway across the parking lot when a snappily dressed guy only a couple of years older than me steps up and into my face.
“How y’all doin’ today, beautiful day…”
I’m looking at some sort of Yankee cowboy in a bigass hat, cowboy shirt, bolo tie, jeans so creased you could crack an egg on em, and some very fine, spit and polish red-leather winkle-picker cowboy boots.
“Son, the Lord Jesus Christ has spoke to me this morning, and I want you to have this,” Tex tells me, handing over a folded $10 bill.
I guess I’m looking a little grubbier than normal, but I tell him I don’t need his money. I’ve got plenty of my own, and walk past. But he’s a persistent fellow and puts himself between me and the milkshake I’ve been thinking about since I woke up on the side of the road that morning, and again, tells me about God’s order to him and so I relent and I politely take his $10 which seems to make him very, very happy. And I’m a sucker for making people happy, providing it doesn’t involve looking in manila envelops. I bought a pair of cheap sunglasses with that man’s money.
And so re-supplied with dried goods, and with a burbling belly full of strawberry milkshake (two of them if I recall) and greasy fried chicken I wandered off through the mid-day sun, an unseasonably hot May day in Winchester, Virginia, to find the trailhead.
The signs there pretty much told me what I already knew. The Shenandoah Valley is one of the oldest stretches of the Appalachian Mountains that run much of the length of the eastern seaboard of the US and southern Canada. Viewed days later from a different perspective the Shenandoah’s undulations from altitude to the valley and back reminded me of pictures I’d seen of sea monsters, only the spiny back of this beast dropped not beneath waves but expanses of farmland dotted with cows and silos and neat-as-a-pin barns. I expected to be there for about 10 days, walking south along the Appalachian Trail about 200 kms.
The other interesting thing about this particular stretch of the AT is that something like a quarter of the US population lives within a three hour drive, but during my late spring hike I’d see only two or three other hikers.
As late afternoon started to get dozy I used my waning energy to clear a camp deep in the bush, some distance from the trail itself. I boiled some water for tea, took out my journal and started to write. And as the last tendril of light cut through the canopy, they came.
Magicicada septendecul is a grand name for a fairly innocuous bug known parochially as the periodical cicada.
Like all cicadas when they're horny they kick up a hell of a racket. Tens of millions strong, the males make their way from the burrows where they spend virtually their entire lives, to the highest point they can find and start drumming out their courtship drill. The females too emerge to find their mate. The males die shortly after copulating and the females will only last long enough to deposit up to 600 eggs in slits they cut in the tree branches. When the wee ones are born they drop to the forest floor and burrow beneath the soil where they’ll spend their adolescence siphoning nutrients from tree roots.
The sound the males make is extraordinary, building in waves that never seem to break, at times discordant, at others seemingly cooperative, soaring with orchestral precision. If shoals of anchovies or flights of swallows sang, this is what it would sound like.
I was entranced, hypnotized, floating in my tent, surfing, surging atop seas of sound. And as quickly as they began, the noise broke off and died. Had an hour gone by? Or five minutes?
Over the coming days the love songs of the Magicicada septendecul followed my every step. And every night, as I lay in my tent or in some lean-to I’d listen as they slowly ebbed away. It was a very lonely feeling at times but one that sticks.
Since the spring of 1987 I’ve heard plenty of cicadas in different countries. The reason I know where I was when these particular one’s emerged is that they only bare themselves to the light once every 17 years.
No one really understands what causes Magicicada septendecul to emerge en-mass like that. I guess it’s the same kind of beautiful unknowable that we find in some species of salmon and butterflies and whales and birds.
And though I’ve no idea where I’ll be in the year 2021, you mark my words that when those days come, wherever I am, in some small measure I’ll be a young man alone and far from home in the ancient forests of the Shenandoah Valley.