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On our side of town, we had our huge brood of 17-year cycle cicadas emerge in 2004. This year, it was time for those on the eastern side of the city to deal with the loud, massive outpouring of insect sex. I had to take the Jetta over to that side for some work this morning, and on the way home, I must have killed a hundred of them or more with the car on the way home; the highway was littered with cicada carcasses. They're really heavy, slow, and poor flyers.
Which started me thinking about how we never really know a place until we've lived there for years. Someone moving to the eastern side of Cincinnati in late 1991 would have no clue that in 2008, they would be inundated for a month by huge red-eyed insects whose combined racket can reach 100-decibels at times. People in Indiana, Wisconsin, and Iowa are dealing with one of the "hundred-year" floods this spring. At some point, this region will experience another huge release of the New Madrid fault...
You don't know what a place is capable of throwing your way until you've been there a long time.
Which is a writing issue, also, especially in our genre. All those grand stories of First Contact and space exploration -- they often miss the concept of Deep Time: we get a vision of a new and different place... but the truth is that those explorers rarely really know the locale. They know the surface; they know the current. They rarely stay long enough to really know all everything. (That was part of the theme of the story I wrote for Mike Resnick's anthology MEN WRITING SF AS WOMEN back in 2003, "Staying Still.") It's sometimes the same in fantasy: a world is presented, often with intricate worldbuildings, but sometimes the sense of Deep Time isn't addressed: there's sometimes an underlying sense that this world has always been this way and will always be this way...
In another few weeks, the cicadas will have mated, laid their eggs, and died. Their offspring will climb down the trees and shrubs and burrow deep into the earth, where they will stay for another decade and a half (and a little more) before returning. You have to admit that it's a good evolutionary strategy: that long cycle of disappearance (for creatures like us) means that it's highly unlikely that a natural predator can evolve and develop strategies for feeding on them.
So what's a "long cycle" or Deep Time event for your area? What happens where you live that someone who has just moved there won't experience for years and years, long past the time when they feel they 'know' the area?
Which started me thinking about how we never really know a place until we've lived there for years. Someone moving to the eastern side of Cincinnati in late 1991 would have no clue that in 2008, they would be inundated for a month by huge red-eyed insects whose combined racket can reach 100-decibels at times. People in Indiana, Wisconsin, and Iowa are dealing with one of the "hundred-year" floods this spring. At some point, this region will experience another huge release of the New Madrid fault...
You don't know what a place is capable of throwing your way until you've been there a long time.
Which is a writing issue, also, especially in our genre. All those grand stories of First Contact and space exploration -- they often miss the concept of Deep Time: we get a vision of a new and different place... but the truth is that those explorers rarely really know the locale. They know the surface; they know the current. They rarely stay long enough to really know all everything. (That was part of the theme of the story I wrote for Mike Resnick's anthology MEN WRITING SF AS WOMEN back in 2003, "Staying Still.") It's sometimes the same in fantasy: a world is presented, often with intricate worldbuildings, but sometimes the sense of Deep Time isn't addressed: there's sometimes an underlying sense that this world has always been this way and will always be this way...
In another few weeks, the cicadas will have mated, laid their eggs, and died. Their offspring will climb down the trees and shrubs and burrow deep into the earth, where they will stay for another decade and a half (and a little more) before returning. You have to admit that it's a good evolutionary strategy: that long cycle of disappearance (for creatures like us) means that it's highly unlikely that a natural predator can evolve and develop strategies for feeding on them.
So what's a "long cycle" or Deep Time event for your area? What happens where you live that someone who has just moved there won't experience for years and years, long past the time when they feel they 'know' the area?
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One year on our family camping trips with my dad's side, my grampa had huge trailer and we'd all come and pitch tents around it. So it was camping with a shower and bathroom on a lake. Anyway we knew the May Flies would happen that Memorial weekend but we didn't know exactly when. It really was something out of a bad 80's horror movie when all the sudden this black cloud rises from the lake and hums it's way to you. We all took cover. Apparently they lay their eggs in the lake as they rise up, then they basically land and die. We went inside for ten or twenty minutes huddling in the trailer some in their tents and when we came out everything was covered in dead black May flies. It was really pretty gross.
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In this one post I found things about you that make the world seem smaller - You live in Cincinnati (hi, neighbor!). You are friends with
Apropos of nothing, but yes. Small world.
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Hi right back at ya!
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I literally was picking husks off every blade of grass and every leaf last week - my neighbor called them "cicada nymphs".
This is all very strange to a girl from California. Our mass events every year were the grunion runs and the swallows returning to Capistrano, but I can't really recall a deep, 17 year event like the cicadas.
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In real life ... I'm not sure I've lived in Oregon long enough to really know what the Deep Time events are like. I can extrapolate, but I don't know if I've experienced any. I mean, if I have, I haven't been here long enough to realize that they /are/ Deep Time kinds of things, as opposed to things that just happen every so often and are normal, if you know what I mean. When we moved here after a couple years we came to see flooding every winter as totally normal, because it had happened every winter in our experience. But this winter, there was no flooding around here - so was this winter the normal winter and the last few winters abnormal, or is this winter the abnormal one? Some things though - if there were an earthquake it would be shocking yes, but not exactly surprising. I mean, I wouldn't be expecting it, but the actuality of it wouldn't surprise me, I know they're possible. Same with a volcanic eruption. We've been here 7 years now (almost to the day).
I grew up in Seattle, and though I haven't lived there in 17 years (good grief, I've now spent almost half my life living somewhere else, that's a strange thought) I know what to expect from Seattle. I know that a normal Thanksgiving time involves storms (sometimes doozies), that there will be landslides and no one in their right mind ought to build on a cliff above the Sound ... I know there will be earthquakes, and I know that the summer is likely to be dry, dry, dry and the winter will be miserably wet.
I spent 7 years in Fairbanks, Alaska, and I know what happens when the Chena River freezes up, and what happens when it thaws. I know what -40 feels like when you're outside in it, and what a nightmare it is the one time every few winters or so that the wind decides to blow. I know about the ice fog, and apartments settling into the holes left by melting permafrost wouldn't surprise me. A moose in my yard would be no surprise, even if I went years without having one trapping me inside my house.
And yet, somehow 7 years in Oregon doesn't seem like long enough to understand it. Kind of strange.
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Cicadas, sure. But I lived there long enough to see many cycles of different cicadas. Almost every year my lawn would be full of inch-wide holes, and little brown shells clung to all the trees and the porch ironwork.
NY is blessedly free of frequent natural disasters. Hurricanes, terrorist attacks, nor'easters, ice storms, blackouts...all these we can deal with and recover from fairly quickly.
One of these days we might get a hurricane of more than category 1. One of these days we might get a tsunami when that volcano in the Canaries collapses. But really the only demonstrated Deep Time events here have been Ice Ages and diseases (smallpox, influenza).