Leg Music

For all the photos I took on this year’s KVR bicycle trip, it wouldn’t be fully described without inclusion of one particular auditory component; the insects. And mercifully I don’t mean mosquitoes or black flies, or even wasps. Two extraordinary audible components were the buzzsaw cacophony of the grasshoppers and the soothing chirp-song of the crickets.

Every once in a while I hear a line in a song or read a sentence in a book that really sticks with me. There’s a band called The National that released a song recently with a really memorable and abstract line. I can’t remember the name of the song, but the line that resonated with me is, “I was carried to Ohio in a swarm of bees.” The quirkiness and seeming unconnectiveness (is that even a word?) of the idea is what I find attractive.

My opening two paragraphs blend in that a friend and I have just returned from bicycling 160 km over 2 days along a section of the Kettle Valley Railroad trail from Myra Canyon to Midway. One of the highlights was what I refer to as “I was carried to Midway in a swarm of grasshoppers.” That song by The National was playing repeatedly in my head for much of the southern portion of our trip, probably starting at about Zamora and continuing to Midway. I was often riding in front, thus trailblazing in a sense, because a large portion of the KVR trail crosses grassy farmers’ fields. In many cases the trail is quite literally a 2-rut trail through tall grass (sometimes even 1-rut) populated by an uncountable number of grasshopppers sitting in the grass.  The disturbance of my mountain bike tires had them swarming up to about waist level on many occasions. Reasonably frequently I had to brush one off my leg as I rode. I know they don’t bite, but I can’t help but feel a bit creeped out by such a big insect landing on my bare skin.

Being city-raised I’ve never had occasion to traverse sizeable open meadows in the hot summer months. Urbanization generally confines many of us to a more sheltered environment. It’s an eye-opening (and ear-opening) experience to ride through a dry grass field to the audibly buzzy accompaniment of thousands and thousands of grasshoppers. I had no idea that a large volume of them could generate such an all-encompassing wall of sound. Considering “awesome” is such an over-used word recently, I still must say that the experience was definitely awe-inspiring. I just can’t adequately describe the sound. It wasn’t deafening, but it was certainly as loud as being surrounded by traffic noise.

Similarly, in the camper van at our Midway campsite, prior to drifting off to sleep, the crickets ramped up their volume. Their strength of numbers increased their chirp-song to the point where it almost drowned out the sound of a fan motor on a neighbouring warehouse. (Wouldn’t ya know it? We go to all the trouble of traveling to southeast BC to camp in the great-wide-open and end up a stone’s throw from a warehouse with a squeaky fan motor.) Fortunately it was quite easy to focus on the crickets.