When I was young I used to enjoy watching the ants around the yard. Not the entire yard. There there small red ants along the sandy driveway. These would make what I am sure were lavish tunnels below surface, bringing up the grains of sand one at a time and piling them around their little escape holes. The uniformity of the mounds they created was beautiful. Occasionally, there would be a two- or three-level place. In a very short time there would be dozens of this little mounds spread across that portion of the yard where grass just refused to grow.
As the giant in their world I felt compelled to inflict tornadoes and rain upon them. Having no control of the real weather I would use the hose for rain and an inverted hoe or rake for the tornado. Undaunted by my cruelty, the ants returned to work and rebuilt their little city time and again.
My behavior reminded me of a Charlie Brown (Peanuts) comic I once read. Lucy is talking to Charlie Brown. She describes the work of ants and how they built this incredible structure. Then, in a moment, it was gone. Aghast, Charlie Brown asks what happened. Lucy replies, "I kicked it over." Yeah. That's what kids do.
In the back yard some larger ants had made their nest in the side of a large oak, where Daddyhad hung the tire swing. There were red ants here, too, but mostly black ants. These ants were harder to annoy as they had built their home in a tree. No self-made tornado was going to bother them. And rain didn't go much into that hole they had made. But they took their lives in their hands (feet) every time they crossed the space below the tire swing. We didn't pay any attention and I'm sure more than a few lost their lives crossing that grassless plain. Why they just didn't go around I'll never know.
There was a third place where ants had built a home in our yard. It was in an area we didn't go to much, although it was close to the house. A large tree had once stood on this spot, but at some point in time, for some reason, somebody had cut it down with a chainsaw. In, and around, this stump was a monstrous colony of giant black ants. There had to have been thousands upon thousands of them, constantly milling about like the churning of a bubbling hot spring. The activity was so immense it looked random and aimless. Yet the colony could not have survived such a long time without each ant having a purpose in its work.
Disrupting this mass was easy to do, but hard to notice effect-wise. The whole pile was just a disgusting, churning mess anyway. Occasionally, we would toss in leaves and things like that, just to see what the ants would do with them. If an object was small enough, the ants would remove it. But some twigs were just too large for a single ant to move, and they didn't collaborate in this regard, so larger sticks (two or three inches long) remained.
I suppose watching ants back then was kind of like having an aquarium, or living beside a deep flowing river. The endlessness of activity was hypnotic, and I would periodically find myself going to the hideous mass of black and just watch without intruding. Once, Ranger, my idiot part shepherd part lab mutt dog, found the ant pile and dug in it for a bit. Then I got to see the giant white eggs being hauled back to safety. I suppose Ranger thought it must be interesting since I was staring at it but, finding nothing on his own, he left it alone after that.
After the house burned the ants were gone. I doubt they were all destroyed, but where they had maintained their houses was just as gone as ours. The heat from the house destroyed the grass through the roots for a nearly fifty foot radius. This may have eliminated the little red ants. They were too close. The ants in the tree probably survived the fire's direct impact, but their tree was killed, and it was pulled down by a large piece of demolition equipment and pushed out to the back field and buried. Maybe they survived that. Maybe they didn't.
The ants in the giant mass simply left. As far as I could tell their home had not been directly affected by the fire. But after The Old House was gone, so were the giant black ants. It's like they were somehow connected. Don't know where they went.
The New House always seemed sterile to me. There was no place where nature could find its way in without using a door or window, such as been true with The Old House. Insects, snakes, rodents. The Old House was a safe harbor for all of them.
There were still red and black ants about the yard, but not like before. And the giant ants were gone completely. As was the lush yard we had maintained. (It was lush on three sides of the house. On the north side the grass just didn't want to grow.) It seems ironic now, looking back. The only things we ever did to maintain the yard was mow it ever other week in spring, summer, and fall, and burn it off once a year to remove thatch. That made it the finest yard within miles. Then, fire destroyed it. Too much fire lasting too long with too much heat. The root system was gone. Like the giant ants.
I had occasion to return to the site a couple of months ago. The yard never did come back. It still looks thin and weedy, although the property looks less sterile now. Trees and shrubs have filled in a lot in the past thirty years. But apart from the plants it all looks like decaying junk. It hasn't been kept up well.
I wonder if the giant ants ever came back.
No comments:
Post a Comment