Ode To A Large Green Insect That Bounced Off My Windshield Yesterday Morning

In yesterday's post I noted that I had heard the Brood X cicadas locally for the first time. (We have cicadas every year, and usually refer to them as "heat bugs", but the Brood X cicadas are periodical and only emerge in their adult breeding form every 17 years. They sound very different from the more common "heat bugs".) It was not long after I wrote that post that, on my drive into work, I saw my first cicada. And about three seconds later, I hit my first cicada.

Seventeen years ago was the summer between my Sophomore and Junior years in college, and I was spending my time off working in the TV faceplate factory where my father worked. I remember my father, my sister, and me driving through a swarm of cicadas in more-or-less the same place where I hit one yesterday (and two more this morning.) This isn't really surprising, since I believe cicadas tend to mate, lay eggs, and die fairly close to their spawning ground, so the next generation will tend to cover the same turf as the one that preceded it.

My little Toyota Tercel is a sleek, aerodynamic piece of equipment that regularly gets between 35 and 40 miles per gallon. It slices through the air like a flying wedge, and creates a nice airflow up the hood, over the windshield, along the roof, and back down the rear window and trunk (or "boot", as some of you danged furriners call it.) In an earlier model of the same car I watched a bird fly straight at my windshield and get drawn up and over the top of my car without touching it. (It was probably promptly killed by the car behind me, but its blood was not on my hands, or my car, for that matter.) The cicadas that I have hit have not been so lucky; while I have not actually had any of them splatter on my windshield yet, I have heard distinct thunks that could not bode at all well for continued success in their mating efforts.

Every living thing on Earth represents the end product of over a billion years of evolution (a thousand million years, for you consarned funny-talkin' furriners again.) Every amoeba, every tsetse fly, every blade of grass, every duck-billed platypus and every annoying jerk in line at the supermarket checkout can trace his, her, or its respective lineage to that great primordial unknown from which all life developed. Each of them has come from an unbroken chain of forebears which, it can be demonstrated, managed to reproduce in some way. Every fly you swat, every germ you kill as you wash your hands, every weed you poison, and every bug that smashes off your windshield is the end of the entire history of life as represented by that individual's heritage. Death is no small matter.

So, to those cicadas who bounced off my windshield yesterday and today, and to all those who shall bounce off tomorrow and in the days following, I say this:

Sorry.
-or-
Hey, watch where you're flying! Stupid bugs.

***

My state modified its motorcycle helmet laws last year to permit most adult riders to forgo the use of a helmet while riding a motorcycle. I'd like to go on record as stating that it was perhaps unwise to do this just before a major eruption of freaking giant hardshelled flying insects. I suspect that the number of motorcyclists killed or injured in motorcycle-cicada collisions will be higher this year than it has been for the past seventeen years.