Learning to Lean Back

One bright summer day, Locust burrowed out of his home deep in the ground and crawled up the sunny branches of a nearby piñon pine tree, where he began to sing and play his flute. Out making mischief, wandering Coyote stopped to listen to the haunting melody.

"How lovely you play your flute! Pray, teach me your song so I can sing it for my children," said Coyote.

Flattered, Locust agreed and sang his song again and again-a shrill piping. Finally Coyote headed for home, repeating the song until he tripped head over tail on Gopher's hole. Startled, Coyote forgot Locust's song, so he headed back to have Locust sing it for him again.

Although annoyed at the interruption, Locust sang his song once more. After Coyote trotted off, Locust decided that the foolish Coyote would continue to plague him, and so Locust decided to play a trick. He split his skin, placed a piece of white quartz in the hollow shell and sealed it up with a little bit of pitch before flying off in search of another sunny tree limb from which he could play his flute without interruption.

Soon, Coyote lost the song once again. But when he returned to visit Locust, he found the tree strangely silent. Four times Coyote demanded the song until in anger he snapped at the empty skin and broke his teeth on the hard stone hidden within. Coyote's descendants inherited this broken grin, and to this day Locust's descendants still avoid attention by shedding their skins, leaving the counterfeits in their place.

A Zuni Indian folk tale This charming Zuni tale represents just one of the many stories told about Arizona's loudest insect-more commonly known as the cicada. Cicadas appear throughout history in many cultures.

While they have often been labeled as locusts or grasshoppers, these noisy troubadours of summer are actually more closely related to aphids, stink bugs and leaf hoppers-all members of the order Hemiptera. Labeled as the "true bugs" of the insect world, cicadas sport "half wings," composed of a pair of thick front wings paired with a thinner set of back wings, and piercing and sucking mouthparts used to feed on fluids from either plants or animals.

Humans have revered cicadas for thousands of years because of their uninhibited vocalization, mysterious feeding habits and sudden appearance in the hot-test days of summer. Immortalized in myth as a symbol of rebirth, the cicada has sung, piped and drummed its way into the human imagination.

A Navajo story credits the valiant cicada with burrowing from a "lower world" into this one to provide an escape from rising floodwaters.

The archetypal First Man and First Woman asked Hawk and a succession of birds to break through the hard blue dome overhead. Finally, they turned to Locust, who flew up and worked at the crack made by the birds' earlier attempts. He finally broke through the dome and made a tunnel through the soft mud of the next world, creating a shaft in the mud much like cicadas make today.

These shafts are a common sight when cicadas emerge in July, raising a din in the heat of summer that has garnered the attention of many cultures. Cicadas take their cue from the "dog days" of summer-the 20 days before and after the conjunction of the sun and Sirius, the "dog star."

Nearly 2,000 species of cicadas sing in summer in the warmly temperate and tropical habitats of the world, includ-ing 180 species in North America. That includes the magicicada, perhaps the longest-lived insect in the world, which emerges from the earth in 13or 17-year cycles.

Arizona's 22 species include the common, low-elevation Apache cicada (Diceroprocta apache), with its wide, blunt head, protruding eyes and two pairs of membranous wings. The 2-inch-long insect spends most of its life as an underground nymph sucking fluids out of plant roots. The juvenile nymphs molt periodically as they grow, burrow-ing deeper and deeper underground in search of larger and juicer roots. After three years, the Apache cicada starts working its way back up to the earth's surface.

Generally around Father's Day, the nymphs emerge and climb trees, fences and buildings to complete their final molt. Adult cicadas leave behind dry husks. Within minutes, their skin changes from creamy white to a dark brown and the wings dry and unfold. For the next few weeks, the male insects lure females by bombarding sultry afternoons with their frenetic, high-pitched chorus, produced with muscles called tymbals-drumlike membranes found on the abdomens of the loquacious lotharios. Unlike the pulsing call of other species, Apache cicadas produce a continuous droning buzz that rattles the air at 107 decibels, making them among the loudest insects in the world.

The males die soon after mating, and that's when their ladyloves take over. Using a serrated abdominal appendage called an ovipositor, the females cut nests into twigs where they deposit as many as 600 eggs in up to 50 separate nests. Days later, the newborn nymphs drop to the ground and burrow deeply into the soil where they will live until it's time for them to emerge as adults.

Apache and Hopi stories dwell on the link between the cicada's "fluting" and the art of seduction. In fact, the Hopi image of Kokopelli-the humpbacked flute player-connects to both cicadas and fertility, according to folklorist Ekkehart Malotki. The humped back of Kokopelli, which is also occasionally portrayed with antennae, carries the world's seeds.

Taoist, Italian and Hindu cultures preserve tales of the cicada. The insect shows up in the mosaics of doomed Pompeii, in jade carvings found inside 3,000-year-old Chinese tombs, and on kites at Japanese New Year festivals.

Sometimes, the cicada provokes envy. As the ancient Greek writer Xenophon mused, "Blessed are the cicadas, for they have voiceless wives." Al

OUTDOORS WOMAN CAMP IN THE BRADSHAWS REVEALS THE BENEFITS OF FEAR BY LORI K. BAKER PHOTOGRAPHS BY RICHARD MAACK

IT TOOK ALL MY NERVE to stand backward on a ledge that dropped off a sheer granite rock face deep within the nearly 8,000-foot-high Bradshaw Mountains, my heels teetering over the edge.

“You've got to lean back, take a step back,” my rappelling instructor, Jeff Sorensen, coaxed like a patient mule handler. I listened to his words as my legs quivered and my mind raced: How did I ever wind up here? I've always been terrified of heights-I even hate ladders! Why did I ever sign up for a Becoming an Outdoors Woman camp?

EIGHTY OF THESE WEEKEND-LONG CAMPS, called BOW for short, are held across North America each year, including this one at Friendly Pines Camp outside Prescott in central Arizona. BOW teaches women outdoors skills and a heady sense of self-confidence in the process. Beneath cobalt-blue skies, the air heavy with the fragrance of ponderosa pine, BOW seemed like an easy entrée into the excitement of rugged outdoor adventure-even for a woman like me, who's never pitched a tent, cooked by campfire, caught a fish or rappelled.

Then came the literal cliffhanger. How would I summon the courage to take my first bold step backward-into the thin air? Rappelling was the ultimate metaphor-a complete education in trust, bravery and taking the plunge.

My only hope for making it through this SWAT-team stunt without broken bones, a concussion, dying or even worsepermanent disfigurement, came from a harness cinched like a 19th-century corset around my waist that left me struggling to breathe. Or maybe it was just panic that clamped my diaphragm like a vice. My leather-gloved hands formed a death grip on the static line-my lifeline-I would use to rappel down this cliff. In theory, there was really nothing to it.

At least that's what Sorensen told me. He'd rappelled for the last 25 years despite his own fear of heights, and he was mighty confident that he'd be able to talk me off this ledge. After all, that's one skill all rappelling instructors must master to stay in business. And so far, Sorensen told me, he had a 99 percent success rate in his eight years at BOW. Only one of his students decided rappelling just wasn't for her. Talk about peer pressure. “But I don't want to push you,” Sorensen said with a smile beneath his broad-brimmed black cowboy hat. “No pun intended.” After what seemed like hours, I finally gave in and reluctantly leaned back into space, my baptism into fearlessness. I felt the thrill of the static line slipping through my guiding hand-I was actually moving now-and took one reluctant step backward, as wobbly and tentative as a baby taking a first step. My belay team member below, holding a static line so I wouldn't fall, shouted instructions: “Don't look down, only look where your foot will be stepping.” As I rappelled down the cliff face, stepping wide and trying to keep my body perpendicular to the rock, my emotions shifted-from feeling utterly inadequate to exhilarated and powerful, like Lara Croft in Tomb Raider. After I reached the bottom, I squealed, “I made it!” After this exhausting afternoon of rappelling, nighttime seemed like a welcome reprieve. But that's only because I had never actually tried to fall asleep in a rustic cabin deep in the wilderness.

As I lay in the pitch blackness in my tiny bunk with a 2-inchthick mattress atop plywood, I tossed and turned, my nylon sleeping bag forever slipping and sliding. Then I spotted her-my cabin mate sleeping soundly on her billowy air mattress. Oh, the nerve.

Somehow, I managed to slip in and out of sleep, which made the whole night dreamlike: At 11 P.M. I woke up with an icy-cold foot stuck out of my sleepingbag. Tucking my foot back into my sleeping bag, I dozed off. At midnight I woke up with a headache. As I fumbled around in the darkness, lit only by starlight streaming in from the window, I managed to swill three Advils and a swig of water without waking my three cabin mates, who were lost to their night stupors, one snoring soundly. At last, I could sleepuntil 4 A.M., when my eyes flew open after a startling sound. A coyote's howl pierced the night's stillness (other than the snoring), and a choir of dozens more coyotes joined in, in Dolby Surroundsound.

Now jolted wide awake, I started obsessing about the day ahead, namely my afternoon class on the ropes challenge course, which looked like a cross between an obstacle course and a circus high-wire act. With towering utility poles or trees strung together with wire rope up to 50 feet in the air and attached to belay cables, caribiners and harnesses for safety, these courses are loads of fun for U.S. military commandos. According to one estimate, there are 7,500 ropes challenge courses in the United States and one of them was awaiting me right there at Friendly Pines Camp.

The morning brought an idyllic day and the aroma of breakfast-scrambled eggs, thick French toast, bacon and sausage-sizzling on the dining hall's grill. After breakfast, 78 of my fellow campers, ranging in age from 18 to 69, ventured off to classes-archery, kayaking, rifle marksmanship, fishing, backpacking, horsemanship, outdoor photography or Global Positioning System (GPS) navigation, to name a few-with a