Tuesday, June 19, 2012

Empire Ants

At night the pill bugs roam the cement-slab back porch like herds of bison across a vast mossy plain. The earwigs inexplicably take refuge on the backs of the white plastic chairs. The ants continue their highway transit, taking back roads through stucco cracks, up into the doorjamb gap, and between the cabinets, careful to remain out of sight throughout the majority of their pilgrimage. Many good men died for this information, they say through scent, but the strongest path, the road most traveled by, leads to a stockpile that will last for generations to come. The promised land is rich with milk and honey, papaya nectar and spiced rum, powdered chocolate, and pure sugar. When you arrive, you can eat your fill and still be left with more than you can carry home.

I stopped squishing the ants due in part to such mental narratives. Personifying them made me wary of becoming the sort of god I had stopped believing in out of sheer hope. I also didn't like my hands smelling like turpentine, as they would after I would intercept a few scouts, thinking that I could leave them as a deterrent to others, or prevent them from discharging a "target acquired" pheromone, or even just diminish their ranks enough to force the hive to relocate.

I eventually determined that the slaughter of individuals was futile, and perhaps even enabling. When an ant would approach a spot in which I had killed another, it would not turn around, but rather move faster. Its situation was clearly dire. It was doing what must be done. Nowhere but human houses is there such a stable collection of victuals. Outside, other groups explore new paths every day, praying for a wounded beetle or a fallen bird, but each day the trails wash away with the dew or lead to a treasure now gone. Why wander aimlessly for the hope of sustenance when you can find the promise of endless expansion? With the discovery of the kitchen door, these ants achieved an enlightenment.

Much of what they find, we would consider waste: A few grains of rice neglected from Chinese leftovers, a coffee slosh, kiblet dust or cricket corpses. A search through the forgotten depths of a pantry revealed a honey bear, its contents long since dried up and tunneled through; a two-year expired hot chocolate packet, with a single tiny hole, now empty. Countless generations have come and gone to this place, civilizations grew and collapsed around powdered Gatorade we forgot to drink half a decade ago. I once found a small outpost mining something from the inside of a toilet top. We obviously don't miss what little they take.

Yet when I sip from a glass I left just minutes ago and find a few on my tongue, or my cat is crying because they've swarmed her food bowl, or I pull the remains of the ambitious out of my toothpaste, I grow more than murderous; I grow genocidal. Then there is talk of poisoning the nest. I go back to sprinkling cinnamon in the cracks, to wiping my finger across the trail or displacing a spider web to a popular byway. I will stomp on a moth feast. I will dig up a damn hill and dump it on another, and they will blame each other. I will kill for peace. To simply have the luxury of not being forced to think about ants.

From outside the situation, my advice to the ants is to keep a low profile. If they are too successful, there are only two scenarios: a) they win; we are overtaken and destroyed or driven out, and the gravy train runs dry. They deplete their resources and must move on or die. b) We win, and they die a burning chemical death. But if they just slow their roll, they go virtually unnoticed, and may continue in comfort indefinitely. It's not that I would begrudge any creature success in the passion of its existence, but what can they hope to gain except more of themselves to feed? What more could they want, apart from continuing to be ants? They will acquire no transcendence. They will learn no secrets, for the secrets we keep available to them are not Laws, but perishables.

I do not wish for the end of all ants, nor even these ones. I only hope enough wayward explorers can happen upon wilderness discoveries to reignite interest in the wider world, and thin the inward stream to a trickle or a drip. After all, that is the only way they will truly thrive and spread.

And with that, I take the remaining sip of my papaya nectar and spiced rum and spray it sprinkler-style out into the yard, like sugar-beams facing the future. Suck on that.

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