The double brood emergence has begun. Some call it “cicada-geddon,” but Rebecca Fyffe thinks of it as “cicada totality” — a rare nature event worthy of awe. On Sunday night I experienced a kind of rapture when I attended a cicada emergence tour led by Fyffe, an urban ecology expert.
The tour was free and open to the public and had a slightly renegade, flash mob feel. Despite only 10 people who had RSVP-ed to the event, by 8 p.m.
at the meeting point at Lorel Park in Skokie, over 50 people had materialized with flashlights and cameras. Young, old, families, friends, solo enthusiasts like myself who had exhausted their friend groups by talking about cicadas. A giddy vibe filled the air.
A delightful range of cicada T-shirts were on display. We were here to witness something that hadn’t happened in over 200 years: the emergence of the 17-year and 13-year cicadas at the same time. At this very moment, Fyffe explained, the 17-year variety was just beginning to crawl out of the dirt.
And over the next couple of hours, each one would undergo a dramatic change before our eyes. As dusk melted quickly to blackness, Fyffe, wearing a cicada shirt designed in the fashion of a tarot card, led us to a street corner where every tree and telephone pole was boiling with hundreds of cicadas. She reassured us that our flashlights would not frighten them, that our touch would not harm them.
As she shared her expertise on cicadas, she spoke calmly but with glee, expounding on the ecolo.
