ants in harmony

Today I declared war on the ants.

They started scouting out my apartment a few days ago. I have to admire their efficiency; only a few days ago they were just an itinerant worker here and there, wandering around my honey jar or my sugar bowl. I killed all the ones I saw, crushing them with a paper towel without remorse or sympathy for their fate. When my conscience rebelled, I told myself firmly that killing worker ants is not murder; they are extensions of the queen, without individual lives or genes, and killing them is little different from trimming one’s fingernails. I had Orson Scott Card to back me up. And if I still felt a qualm of conscience, I repressed it firmly, determined to maintain the cleanliness of my house. I had a guest coming this weekend, and I didn’t want her to think that my house was an unclean and messy home for ants and cockroaches, even if that was the truth.

But my efforts were in vain, and the ants arrived in force on the same day that my guest did. Ginna came on Friday night, and on Saturday morning when I woke up, the ants were marching in organized columns of war, like soldiers in the early days of the American Revolution, before guerrilla warfare took hold. They had laid out a path from the corner of the kitchen above my fridge, where there seemed to be a crack in the sealing, all around the edge of the cabinets—they neatly avoided the dishes, which gesture I appreciated, even in an enemy—over the top of the door to the laundry room and to the food cabinet, where they had deftly discovered the unsealed bag of potato chips I had carelessly left there. I had already put the honey pot and the sugar bowl inside my fridge as a preventative measure, but apparently ants like protein and fat as well as sugar, and the potato chips, if not their first choice, were still sufficient attraction.

I was horrified. It’s bad enough to find an individual ant wandering on your counter, but this—this was something else entirely. They had declared war on my kitchen, without even attempting negotiation. There was no precedent for such a move. And they had arrived on the same day as my guest, right when I was weakest, almost as if they knew.

It was clear that there could be no mercy in a situation like this. I pulled out all my guns and faced them down.

Or rather, I called my fiancé over, pointed out to him the terrible line of doom, that thin reddish line that moved creepily and inexorably around the edges of my kitchen, and begged him to do something—anything. He assured me that he would, and I got out of the house, unable to bear the sight of hideous crawling things wandering at will through my kitchen.

Three hours later, I came home to find the line of warfare undisturbed and Matt standing complacently on a chair, carefully studying the enemy. I realize that study can be a tactic of war, but if that was his intention, it didn’t look like he was making very good use of it.

“Look at this,” he said, without turning, when I entered. “They greet each other. Every time two of them meet when they’re going the opposite direction, they stop and greet each other before they move on.”

I couldn’t see how this was going to help me get them out of my kitchen and away from my food and my dishes, but I was feeling better after a break away from the battle scene, so I humored him. I joined him on the chair and studied the creatures marching in full view across my cabinets, only inches away from my cereal boxes.

It took me a minute to see what he meant. But it was true. Two ants, coming from opposite directions, pause when they come face to face. They wave their antennae at each other, politely, like guests at a party shaking hands before they continue on their respective walks around the room.

But this party was at my expense. I was not to be drawn in. They’re only workers, not queens, I reminded myself, thinking of Ender’s Game. I drew a breath. “That’s very nice, dear,” I agreed. “But how are we going to get rid of them?”

He glanced at me with something like pride and turned to point out what he seemed to view as his successful efforts. “I’ve been researching ants online,” he began, by way of explanation. Online research is Matt’s cure for everything. “First I tried soap,” he continued, pointing out the container of hand soap that was now sitting on top of the refrigerator. “But that didn’t seem to work so well.” He rotated to face the other wall, the one by the laundry room, where an uninterrupted line of ants continued to march undisturbed toward my food cabinets. “Then I tried lemon juice, because it said they don’t like that, but that didn’t work too well either, although you can see that their line is a little messed up—they don’t like to cross it.” I couldn’t really see what he meant, but I believed him. But I was also starting to doubt the effectiveness of his war methods. He concluded with some pride: “But you see, they really don’t like cinnamon. See where I sprinkled cinnamon above the door? They won’t walk there now at all.”

It was true. The marching line of my little enemies had originally been laid precisely above the door frame. He had sprinkled cinnamon along the top of the frame, like a row of trenches, and the enemy had retreated. Their line now marched about two inches above the frame, directly on the wall.

But I didn’t see what good gaining ground would do, when the ants still had a clear and uninterrupted supply line all the way to my potato chips. Although he had also sprinkled cinnamon in the cabinets, which seemed to be deterring them from the food. But it evidently hadn’t taken them long to find a secondary pathway along the wall, and I wasn’t about to bet on the cabinets.

I gritted my teeth, thanked my fiancé for his help, and called my apartment manager.

Of course, the office was closed, so I left a desperate message (“My apartment is being overrun by ants! I can’t use my kitchen! Help!”) and went to bed, trying to ignore the creepy feeling that ants were crawling all over my body, even after my shower.

My apartment manager called me at ten o’clock on Monday morning. “The exterminator usually comes on Friday,” she said cheerily, “so we’ll be sure he comes to visit your apartment as well.”

I groaned. “No,” I protested. “You don’t understand. I can’t use my kitchen. There are ants everywhere. They’re all over everything. I can’t wait until Friday. You’ve got to help me.”

My manager was sympathetic but unoptimistic. “We’ll call the exterminators and see if they can come earlier,” she said. “In the meantime, don’t use any chemicals, because they might interact with the chemicals the exterminator uses.” Great—just what I needed. No reinforcements for a week, and I was forbidden to use any significant weapons. My house was under invasion, and no one was going to help. And I had more guests coming on Friday.

“Oh,” she added, “but you might try Windex. I’ve heard that works pretty well.”

I hung up the phone, rolled up my sleeves, and decided to try everything. I would pull out any weapon I was licensed to use. I sprinkled cinnamon everywhere; I spread lemon juice on the walls, and I sprayed Windex on everything that moved. To my surprise, the Windex was pretty effective. All the ants that came under direct fire stopped moving immediately. A few of them, after a few minutes, began to crawl again half-heartedly, like dying soldiers struggling to drag themselves off the battle lines. But I was merciless. I crushed them with paper towels and threw them in the trash can, and then I sprayed the walls again with Windex in the hopes that it would prevent any further invasions.

My fiancé was slightly disappointed, I think, by my aggressive guerrilla tactics, as well as by my compromising methods of using chemical weapons rather than organic ones. He cited my dislike of living in harmony with nature, and my war against my six-legged brothers, as evidence of my American consumerism and proof that I would never be able to live in true poverty. But I stuck to my guns. There are certain circumstances under which one is happy to live in harmony with nature, such as when one is living as a missionary in a South American jungle, or when one is camping, or living in self-chosen poverty in a cabin with a dirt floor in the mountains of West Virginia. There are other circumstances under which nature—particularly in the form of six-legged brothers—would do well to keep her distance, such as when one is living in an creaky apartment for which one pays a rent of $680 dollars a month. Particularly if the cost of an exterminator is included in the cost of that rent. Even the most tree-hugging fiancé surely can’t blame me for my determination to get my money’s worth.

Actually, the truth is that I’ve always like ants. As a kid, I used to love watching educational television about any kind of bugs, but particularly bees and ants. Their widespread efficiency and community harmony has always amazed me. Now that I realize the absolute inexistence of the individual that is the key to their perfect unity, I find them less fascinating. It was T.H. White’s treatment of them in The Once and Future King, when the young King Arthur experiences an afternoon as an ant worker, that first made me doubt my youthful admiration of their camaraderie and loyalty, and Orson Scott Card finished off the job with Ender’s Game and his description of workers as mere fingernail clippings, expendable pieces of a body connected by communication rather than physical unity. Still, it fascinates me how they communicate, how they exist as a single being spread out in all directions from its heart and mind and yet somehow still one entity. Real ants, of course, do not communicate so instantaneously as the buggers of science fiction, but they do communicate. And the individual is utterly, even joyfully, effaced in the life of the whole, the life of the colony, the life of the queen.

It’s hard to imagine a life between the two extremes: a life in which both the individual and the community is truly, deeply valued. I’m not sure it has ever existed. Humans have tried both extremes; communism, for instance, was an experiment in the value of the state over the individual; capitalism is an experiment in the value of the individual over all. One has failed; the other is failing. Community is the life that values both, and cares for both, but it is a balancing act as delicate and difficult as a trapeze artist, as endangered as the ants in my kitchen once I declared my war against them.

For there are a thousand guerrilla enemies that go to war with any attempt at community, and they attack with fair and unfair weapons on both sides, on the side of the individual and the side of the state. Selfishness, anger, desires weigh in on the side of the individual, and we draw our guns for number one, determined to keep our rights at any cost. Then fear, outsiders, politics draw their guns on the side of the state, and we eagerly give our rights away, never even bothering to ask what happened to them. And yet—. The Bible draws a picture of a world in which the lion lies down with the lamb, a world in which the good of the one and the good of the many could kiss each other, could live not just in coexistence but in harmony. And harmony is not the unity of one note; it is the beauty of two disparate notes that find enough in common to not only exist in the same space but to blend, to become something greater and more beautiful, together, than they ever could have been alone.