Listen Up: My Favorite Summer Song

Image via the US Department of Agriculture

They are heard more than seen, emerging from their pine trees and hedge rows seemingly just to leave delicate, hollow shells of themselves on porch rails and blacktop. They are hunchbacked recluses, the sight of them somehow stranger than the sound of their relentless shuddering drone—unless, of course, you've never spent any amount of time in the scattered zones where they take hold every summer, clinging high up in trees, their trembling hollow bodies all joining together in one of the most bizarre and beautiful cacophonies not made by man, in which case it can be deeply disconcerting, like a manic crinkling siren call, like the terse warning of a hidden viper in advance of its strike.

But no, they're just cicadas—just thousands of palm-sized dude bugs calling out for ladyfriends, desperate and wheezing the moment it hits 80-something degrees in whatever month your temperate climate's global-warming addled summer begins.

The cicadas I've known all my life—in Southeastern Tennessee and North Georgia and now in odd wooded pockets of Atlanta—generally have two songs. During the day, there's a fussy, impatient rattle that swells and ebbs throughout the sunlight hours; if you are inside your blinds-drawn, air-conditioned house and you are wondering how warm it is outside and there's a substantial patch of woods nearby, get as quiet as you can and just listen close—if you can hear the bugs at all, you might want to just stay inside, or else be prepared to brace yourself against the crushing wave of hot, damp air that will invariably roll up to greet you as soon as you open your front door. Sometimes they keep that up well into the night, though then of course it always sounds louder because everything else is quieter, but other times they slide into a far more alien mode—an endless round of eee-oooh, eee-oooh, eee-oooh.

Their songs are structureless, absolute chaos. No matter how still you sit or how closely you try to tune your ear to isolate and follow one specific part of the whole scattered racket, you can't do it; as soon as you think you've singled out one individual bug, it skips five beats and shatters into a dozen clashing plastic songs. When it's too hot to sleep, this is a blessing and a curse; the sound can lull you, or it can dig into your brain and pulse and whine with all the soothing rhythm of the second practice of a band of renegade jazz amateurs.

It can be frightening, too. Like when you are ten years old and you're at Girl Scout sleep-away camp for the first time, on the first night, when you're laying on your back on top of your New Kids On the Block sleeping bag because it's 85 degrees in your platform tent and five feet above you is a dusty green sloping canvas roof and just beyond that—sitting up in the oak trees, you are sure—is a swarming hoard of three-foot alien creatures rubbing their spindly forearms together in a terrifying rendition of a pre-feast blessing. (It's dinner time, you imagine them muttering. And on tonight's menu—Brownies.)

I knew those girls, slept across four-person tents from them almost every summer of my early adolescence, but I did not understand them. I didn't even feel bad for them. The song of the cicadas was oppressive and overwhelming and sometimes kept me awake but it has always been so deeply comforting to me, steady and dependable in its deep, earthly weirdness. I have never lived anywhere that I was not certain that the cicadas would emerge as soon as the sun grew closer and the humidity spiked, and I am not sure that I would want to; I think about them in the winter when all I hear at night is cold wind if I'm lucky, in the early spring when all the bugs emerging from the cold months seem so tender and quiet, fluttering their damp wings and silently lighting on dewy young flowers.

Sometimes, when summer unfurls its smothering blanket over the South before the cicadas are ready, I feel unsettled not because it's early April and I am already sweating through my t-shirt on the walk to work but because when the night comes it's too quiet, the trees swaying empty in the stifling breeze, the bugs all sitting still in their hidden sacs, readying themselves but not quite ready. I need them to pull my mind away from the heat, give some voice to the sick mirage wavering above every flat, dark surface, need some reedy, crunching noise in a season of slow, melting softness. I need them, always, to sing my favorite summer song.

Rachael Maddux is Paste’s associate editor. Her column appears at PasteMagazine.com every Monday.