"year of the locust"

Here is the beginning of an old essay about crying, believe it or not. Doesn't have much to do with crying, does it?

Princeton is perfect in summer. Rows of trees stand tall, branches sheltering pedestrians from the hot Jersey sun. Hedges are clipped, fences neatly divide neighbor from neighbor, and the Doric columns on the porches give the whole place an imperial feel. Every homeowner ruler of his own little kingdom. Every child knows which Ivy League she wants to go to. Every bike is shiny and new. Our neighbors in the pink Victorian once tried to install a window air-conditioning, and within a day, the Historical Society called to inform them that they would need to take it down.

Several forces invade the tranquility of this neighborhood. First, the ghosts. In one house owned by Princeton Seminary, the ghost of an ex-faculty wife rocks back and forth in her chair, weeping and muttering, wild in her grief. Another ghost hides out in the oldest house in Princeton, built in the seventeenth century. This ghost re-arranges the socks. The owner called in a priest to perform an exorcism, but it didn’t work. The ghost continues to have his way with her laundry.

Potholes are another force to be reckoned with. The roots of the trees run deep and break up the pavement. So all the Benzs and Audis pop hubcaps right and left as they drive. Some days, my sisters and I would find three or four in our yard in a single day. Property taxes are high, so the city can afford to re-pave the road often, but it doesn’t do much good. The roots are too unruly, and too deep down to tame.

Perhaps the two most disruptive influences are plagues of creatures. The first, cicadas, who every seventeen years, invade the town in great hordes. Individually, they are beautiful, with their amber carapaces and beady black eyes. Overall, their presence is fairly intense, actually alarming, like an Alfred Hitchcock movie. It is impossible to avoid stepping on them, and together, they hum loudly, a kind of eerie drone, a soundtrack to normal tasks like washing dishes. One never quite get used to it. Bob Dylan happened to be receiving an honorary doctorate from Princeton in a cicada year, and he was so shocked by their omminpresence, that he wrote a song about them. It’s called “Day of the Locust.”

And the locusts sang, well, it give me a chill,

Yeah, the locusts sang such a sweet melody.

And the locusts sang with a high whinin' trill,

Yeah, the locusts sang and they was singing for me . . .

The year of the locusts, my brother, who likes to buy crap off the Internet, made good use of his special-edition Lord of the Rings sword. He slayed his thousands upon thousands up in a tree. I like thinking about him up there, thrashing. “Yeah! Got one!” The boyish grin on his dirty, cherubic face, the bright sun catching his golden curls, and the insect blood and guts spurted everywhere.

The last, and the most disturbing plague, is the influx of deer. Deer are everywhere in Princeton. They chew flowers, they mar the lawns with their mangy rumps. They are skinny, ugly things, desperate for food. They are so weary and faint from hunger that they will walk out in front of cars without a second thought. In the second before you end their skinny lives, they look reproachfully at you with their large fawn eyes through the windshield, as if to say, “Why?”

In January of 2002, a State Superior Court judge blocked Princeton Township's deer-killing program, which included using high-powered rifles with silencers or catching deer with nets and firing bolts into their heads. Officials had hoped to use some 400 deer for food. Animal rights advocates asked for a restraining order on the grounds that these measures were dangerous and cruel.

Ghosts. Tree roots. Cicadas. Deer and their mournful brown eyes. In small ways, these disruptive visitors, thes inconviences reminded us that for all our money and authority, we were not all-powerful. That we could not control our lives. That chaos lurked underneath the semblance of order.