Ants

After watching a particularly buggy episode of Lost last night, I had a dream that I kept stepping on and getting bit by these tiny harmless scorpions. The source of this dream material probably has more to do with the tiny but kind of slow ants that have found a home right next to my bathtub through a crack in the sealant. The other day one of them nibbled on my toe a little bit (he died). And I'm concerned about them (the landlady is sending over an exterminator) but in a very kind of lazy and un-panicked way that I don't usually experience when I'm thinking about bugs. But I actually really like ants.

My parents took me to the zoo for the first time when I was two and I spent all my time looking at the ants in the sidewalk cracks, probably equally fascinated by both sidewalk and ants. Because I'm sure we had ants at home, but they just don't stand out really until you have a proper background against which they can be observed. Given the lack of sidewalks in my childhood I wonder if perhaps that trip to the zoo was the first time I'd had a good occasion to notice them?

The ants in my bathtub also remind me of a green wet morning in Laos when it was pouring and pouring, raining so hard. I waited for Sarah to arrive on her scooter after the rain eased, and when she did I took her to the bedroom where I had noticed an unusual number of ants. They were hard to see because the smooth hardwood floors were quite dark, but they were moving fast, along a virtual ant highway. Where I had first noticed them the highway was wide, diffuse, and confused, to the point that it looked directionless. But she found the trail and soon we could see that it narrowed to an efficient stream no less than 10-20 ants thick. And they were carrying eggs. "Oooh" she breathed "Look, they've been rained out of their nest and they're finding a new one." Sure enough, she pointed to the wall, where the highway snaked vertically up to the side of the window to a crack to the outside. It did not take us long to figure out their destination either: a small crack in the tiles near the bathtub. Then we found the queen at the thickest part of the highway. We crouched on either side and watched, our faces close to the floor, in silence for a few moments. Sarah closed the door to the bedroom, "if the Mai-ban finds us she will kill all of them." In that moment I could not think of any worse thing than that.

But the hardwood floor was as dark as the ants and I could not see them well. I grabbed my head lamp for a closer look, but all movement on the highway stopped when I shined it on them. Sarah grabbed the light away from me, "Stop!" she said, "You're confusing them!" And indeed, it was as if I had sliced the colony in two with the light beam. Half continued on with eggs to the bathroom, and the others stopped while the pool of ants coming from the window side grew larger and larger. They were having a serious conference and apparently second thoughts about the way to their new home. Within moments the pool of ants was 4 inches in diameter. They conferenced for a few moments more before heading back towards the window.

"You've just changed their history," she said. "They will remember the great divide of the tribe, perhaps." We stayed to watch the bathroom ants carry the last of their eggs into the crack. Sarah told me that in her house (in everyone's house) there are many colonies. You get to know them, just like neighborhoods. She said she and her roommates once spent an entire day tracking the ants and making a map of the territories because someone had left a mango or two out and the entire house of ants knew about it. But in every day life the Mai-ban comes and cleans up the mango and wipes away the ants for a few hours.

But here the ants are not an inevitable part of our home culture. So the landlady is informed, an exterminator is called, and the contractor wants to know if the ants are indicative of plumbing problems deep within the wall. The ants illustrate that somewhere in this building the seal between the inside and outside world is broken.

My friend did not share in the rebirth of my childhood fascination when I told him the story of the morning. "You let a colony of ants move into my bathroom? Thanks for that."

"Well, only half a colony."