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AUGUST-SEPTEMBER 2018 • NEBRASKAland 53 W hen I was a tad, back in Paleolithic times, I may not have understood famine and plagues of frogs, but I sure got the idea when it came to clouds of locusts – with some misunderstanding on my part, to be sure, about exactly what was meant by "locusts." I imagined those great, clunky beasts that shatter a summer's night with their buzzing, slamming into Pharaoh's armies and wiping them out by bodily impact alone. And heavens forfend, what if the attack came late afternoon along the Nile, say maybe August around 6 p.m., Central Standard Time?! The ear-ripping buzz would be enough to send anyone fleeing to the deepest depths of the pyramids. In fact, maybe that's why they built them, I thought! I was genuinely disappointed, if for no other reason in the fearsomeness of Pharaoh's armies, when I found out the locusts in question were mere grasshoppers, which Tut or Rameses or one of those guys could easily have defeated with a counter force of a couple biddy hens and chicks. (When we made our permanent move out here to the edge of the Great American Desert in 1987, we were beset by grasshoppers. They ate all our flowers and shrubbery and even the curtains off the window in the outhouse. Seriously. We put two biddy hens and their chicks to work and soon grasshoppers were an endangered species and the chickens were foraging hundreds of yards away from the house searching for survivors. Linda and I got to the point where we felt sorry for the hoppers and protected a couple in jars full of foliage just in case they went totally extinct.) Now, cicadas – that we called "locusts" in our primal innocence – are truly another beast, not as destructive perhaps as biblical locusts but no less creepy when you're a kid. Like bumblebees, on those occasions when they attempt flight, it seems to be a kind of mad hurling of their massive bodies into the air with utter abandon, without a lot of pre-planning for a safe landing or, for that matter, what lies in their direct trajectory. Like me. Being dive-bombed by a hell-bound cicada is not just an unpleasant surprise, it can be downright bruising. And then there's that "song" that shatters the peace of a summer evening for all the world like someone lighting up a chainsaw behind the shrubbery surrounding the patio just about the time I take that first sip of a cold gin and tonic and settle in to admire the calm of country living in Nebraska. Really? That's an attractive ballad to other locusts? Well, there's no accounting for taste: Linda likes country music and I still love her, so ... Well, there you are. Despite their, uh – I'm trying to be kind here – bad manners, Bob Dylan vocals, and outright scary looks (Linda tells me), cicadas are remarkable creatures, exiting their earthly nurseries after long years of magical transformations in the moist, gloomy dark, leaving their creepy exoskeletons stuck to trees, walls, and, gulp, tool handles anywhere they decide to change their bony clothes. Maybe part of my childhood misunderstandings about how much of a threat cicadas pose arose from the armies of cicada sheddings Billy Danek and I assembled in the Roger and Billy Garage Museum on South 12th Street in Lincoln. We scoured the neighborhood for cicada "shells" and gathered them into rival armies facing off on the fields of some alien planet. An army of Star Wars robots is nothing compared to ranks and rows of cicada exoskeletons! The science of the cicada is remarkable; for example, take a look at this one fact appearing in the Wikipedia entry for "cicada": "It has been found that bacteria landing on the wing surface are not repelled, rather their membranes are torn apart by the nanoscale-sized spikes, making the wing surface the first-known biomaterial that can kill bacteria." I'm having second thoughts about that Pharaoh's army thing! Moreover, unlike crickets and a lot of other bugs, cicadas don't vibrate or rasp body parts to make their "song" (which can be heard a mile away and can actually damage human hearing), which is to say, they don't practice "stridulation" but instead "vibrate their drum-like tymbals." Which brings us to yet another reason why I am a folklorist and not a scientist. I prefer a good story to big words like "stridulation" and "tymbals." A folktale in Dannebrog, where we live, tells of the elderly couple sitting on their front porch swing, enjoying the sounds of a small town summer evening … cicadas and the church choir practicing just down a street a ways. Thinking of the hymn in the air, granny says, "Isn't that the sweetest sound of summer?" Her less romantical husband, hearing only the cicadas, opines, "Yep. I hear they make that sound by rubbing their legs together." I think that was the occasion when Mrs. Nielsen punched Lars so hard she broke his arm. ■ Roger Welsch is an author, humorist, folklorist and a former essayist for CBS News Sunday Morning. He is the author of more than 40 books. Swarms of Locusts and Other Plagues By Roger Welsch A folklorist's view of a scientific phenomena.