When is something more than that thing? Plenty of times… Lots of times in fact. It is, I guess, my definition of religion.

Rhetorically; is casting fly line in the fading yellow rush of pre-dusk more than light reacting with molecules in the air? Is the wash of love you’re struck with as you look down at your first born more than endorphins? Is the ancient metallic chatter of millions of insects that have lived in the ground for 17 years, adhering to an invisible clock just a…”hatch”?

I was far too young when my father died. I say father because “dad” reminds me of the things he meant to me and the hole his departure left. When I moved to Missoula, Montana in 2006, there’s a good chance I was running from something. At that time, the last big emergence of Cicadas in Maryland, the place I was born, raised, and college educated, had popped off in 2004, the year I learned to fly fish. I remember the endless noise they made in the lush Appalachian woods. I remember going out to a big oak tree at night with a flashlight and watching a single-file line of the nymphs crawling up the tree like zombies. My high school friends and I even fried some up. Dipped in chocolate, some drowned in Old Bay, they weren’t that bad. But at that time, I had no earthly reason to wonder if trout ate them.

In 2021 I got to find out that they do in fact. They don’t just eat them. They pine for them, they go off script to chase them down and inhale them. They become drunk with them, finding the protein intoxicating. And as luck would have it, the national spotlight shines on this peculiar insect once again. As we celebrate this once in generations "double brood" emergence, one a 13 and one a 17-year brood, across the midwest and southeast, a specific hatch event that hasn't occurred since 1803, that's right...1803.

Learn more about this deeply personal pilgrimage in the film, “Cicada: 17” from filmmaker Matt Devlin.