Watching cicadas emerge made me feel something special about my own species

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 ecological benefits of the emergence, like how cicadas’ husks are a kind of fertilizer to the forest. And how a year after a major cicada emergence, trees have been found to be healthier, producing more fruit and flowers (possibly due to the females sawing into outer branches as they lay their eggs).

She taught us what the three colors of cicadas meant: The brown ones were nymphs, freshly emerged from the dirt. The white ones were freshly hatched softees (or "teneral adults" as the scientists call them) that had just climbed out of their nymph shell. They looked like they'd been designed by a ’70s stage designer for a horror production on just a hint of acid. And the black ones were adults. We learned that it only takes 90 minutes for them to turn from white to black. I lost myself in looking. The brown ones showed their secret relation to shrimp and lobsters. The black ones were my favorite. I picked them up in my hands, let them nudge through my fingers like puppies. I lifted them higher into the tree to help them on their climb.

I saw a cicada emerging, upside down from a branch, with a nearly full moon behind it. It felt like I was seeing Dracula, or a bat, or something witchy and forbidden and almost fictional.

Kids were lifted onto shoulders to get a better look. I heard an older woman whisper to a stranger that her husband had died just 10 days ago, and she was out “just to immerse ... in something.”

I am a nature lover; I thought I had come to lose myself in this once-in-a-lifetime natural phenomenon. But what kept me there, on that random street corner in Skokie until 9:30 p.m. were the humans.

All these humans out here: little kids just beginning their lives, their parents blowing their bedtimes because it was worth it, college kids letting the veneer of cool melt away for a bit, older souls, hearts wracked with grief, still able to become rapt by the outside world. I wanted to be near this energy. The emergence of this brood of humans. I felt proud, for a rare moment, to be a part of our species. I came home itchy and vowing to blow my sons’ bedtime the next night, so they could be a part of it too.

For more information on the cicada emergence tours, go to Landmark Pest Management’s Facebook page for tour announcements. The next tour is at 7:30 p.m. Thursday.