A true tale of magic, hubris, and one man's mad struggle against the might of Gaia's Army....
First Contact
"Hi! This is the Bay Area Earth First! hotline. We are people just like you. We like trees, fresh air, and clean water. But we don't spray the ants...."
The ants came in March. It was just the typical assortment: the trail to the garbage, the pile in any food left out, the scouts wandering about looking for more food. Annoying, but nothing to get alarmed about. My wife Karen and I would wipe up the trails each day and hope that they would go away.
If you mention ants, people will always tell you: "If you have ants, you should clean your kitchen better!" Always. Clearly, these people have never had a serious problem with ants. After a week or two, it started to get annoying. We cleaned the kitchen spotlessly. We never left any food out. Still, the ants would not go away. Every morning, no matter how much we cleaned, there would be a new trail going to the garbage. There is nothing you can do about garbage. If you live, you make garbage, and the ants will find it.
Ants leave scent trails; that is how they find their way around. Scouts go out, leaving a path behind them. If they find something good, they backtrack their old trail leaving a new "go this way" scent for the other ants. Karen figured that if we wiped up all of the scent trails, and maybe sprayed some perfume around, the ants would get lost and leave. We cleaned the kitchen spotless. We cleaned the counters and cupboards, even the walls. Our kitchen had never been so clean. The ants still came, but now the number of wandering scout ants had tripled.
The Cinnamon War
April came. The ants were still there. As much as I wanted to, I could not go buy a can of Raid or Black Flag and kill them all. I'm an environmental activist. I know all about the evils of pesticides and other chemical deterrents. There it was, on the hotline of my own group. "We are just like you, but we don't spray the ants!" It was literally a defining characteristic of Bay Area Earth First! Okay, what then to do?
I went to one of the other activists, the one who had written and recorded the "don't spray" message. "Okay," I asked him, "if we don't spray the ants, what do we do to them?" "Cinnamon," he told me. It turns out that ants are so small that the hot taste of cinnamon we enjoy actually burns the ants. If you put out a line of cinnamon, they won't cross it.
Sounds good. Cinnamon, the all-natural, environmentally friendly substitute for the ant powder sold in stores with the skull-and-crossbones on it. I put cinnamon in the holes in the kitchen that they came in through. The ants went away. A few days later, they came in a new hole. More cinnamon. After one more hole, the ants gave up. Cinnamon is great stuff.
Hunting ants seems easy. To find the ant holes, we just followed the ant trail, back from the garbage to where ever they were coming in. Then the ants got tricky. About a week later, they were back. This time, they came in from the living room. I could trace the trail back to the living room rug, but then I lost it. There were dozens of ants in the rug, none of them going anywhere in any particular order. They had found a way to hide the hole and I was helpless against it.
The ants escalated their efforts. What had been a trail or two was now a road. Three or four ants would walk abreast, instead of the normal one-at-a-time routine. It was only good fortune that saved us. I dropped a book near a wall in the living room and I saw them. They were getting onto the carpet at the spot where it met the wall. More cinnamon, no ants. Then they moved a few inches down the wall. More cinnamon. Within a week, the entire wall had a line of cinnamon at its base. I was buying it in bulk now. A visiting friend saw it and thought termites were eating the wall. But we got rid of the ants.
The Ring of Fire
It took them four more days to beat the cinnamon. The ants discovered that, by coming in though upside down holes, they could avoid the cinnamon. They came in through the roof of a cupboard. There was no place to put the cinnamon, upside down. A few aborted attempts at cinnamon paste convinced me I needed a new solution.
Hot pepper oil, also called fire oil, was the one I found. I figured that I could smear the oil around the hole and the ants wouldn't be able to come out. If cinnamon burned them, so would the pepper oil. And it would stick to vertical or upside down surfaces.
I was mad now. The ants had been harassing me for months, and I wanted to teach them a lesson. I put out a saucer of jelly, their favorite food. Then I waited. Sure enough, by the next morning there was an ant superhighway going to the jelly. I wiped up the trail and put a ring of hot pepper oil, about 18 inches across and three inches wide around the jelly. The ants on the jelly were trapped in the ring of fire. I watched them go up to the oil, touch it, and back away. The trail formation vanished, and they spread out in all directions looking for the nonexistent way out.
I am not a cruel man. I catch spiders and flies and free them, rather than killing them. I went to bed that night, planning to release the trapped ants in the morning. Besides, I figured that, this way, when the ants got back to the nest, they might tell their hive mind that my apartment was not a good place for ants. I was wrong.
When I went to free them the next morning, the ants were gone. Gone, vacant, disappeared, not there. There had been several hundred ants trapped in that ring. There was not a single ant left. Everyone I have told this story to says the same thing: "Ants make bridges over things with the dead bodies of other ants." The problem was that there were no bodies. So now, for this scheme to work, the ants would have had to make this "bridge" over the oil, cross it, fish the dead, oil-covered bodies out of the fire oil and carry them away with them. Bodies covered in what was, basically, ant napalm. I don't think so. I think it was magick.
The battle resumed. The ants came in greater and greater numbers. They found new holes; I smeared them with oil. The scent of chilies sunk into the kitchen walls. After a while, the ants discovered that the oil wore off after about a week. It took a new cinnamon-fire oil paste to get the better of them.
Deep Freeze
There wasn't much food for the ants. I wiped up thousands. They couldn't have been getting much out of our battle, but they still kept coming. Why? I later realized that they had but one goal, to drive me insane. After their night in the ring of fire, they decided that vengeance was more important than food.
It was Sunday morning in mid-May. I thought I had won. I hadn't seen an ant for three days. There must not be any holes left, I figured. I walked out to the kitchen and made my now habitual checks for ants. None. I smiled. I would make some bagels and cream cheese, and go back and have breakfast in bed with my wife.
The bagels were in the freezer. I opened the freezer and screamed in horror. The freezer was full of ants. Dead ants. The inside of the freezer was literally black with their bodies. Every bit of frozen food was covered. What horror was this? Why had millions of ants committed mass suicide in my freezer? Did one scout find the ice cream and somehow escape the cold to tell the tale? I picture thousands of ants marching in there for the last three days. Marching to their deaths with only one purpose in mind: to drive me, personally, in- sane.
The Dying God
After the freezer incident, the ants abandoned stealth. They attacked in numbers and force. They began using simultaneous multiple entry holes. At the same time, they began coming in across the living room rug again. This time, however, there were no lucky accidents to help me find the entry points. Worse, they expanded their activities from the kitchen. Scouts could be seen in the living room, the bedroom, and even the bathroom. Always scouts, not an easily backtracked trail. Nowhere was safe.
Their visits to the bathroom were particularly strange. There might have been a little food in the kitchen garbage, but there was nothing whatsoever for them in the bathroom. They knew, somehow, that people were most vulnerable on the toilet and wanted to take advantage of it. There is little that is as disturbing as the feeling of something crawling up the back of your leg when you are going to the bathroom.
Late May. I got up in the middle of the night to do my duty. It was dark, of course, and I didn't turn on the lights because I knew where everything was. I walked into the bathroom and my bare foot stepped on something. I heard a crunch and it felt like a snail had joined the circle of life. I went to the bathroom and went back to bed.
In the bathroom, I hadn't turned on the light, because I really didn't want to know what the crunch was. Once I was back in bed, however, curiosity gnawed at me. I had to know. I went back to the bathroom and turned on the light. There, on the floor, was the crushed body of an ant, a big ant. This ant must have been one inch long in life. About two dozen small ants had formed a ring around the body. They seemed to be dancing around it, waving their little feelers back and forth in some kind of necromantic rite. Where had they found this uber-ant? It must have been a god to them. What had they been planning? And what, in Gaia's name, were they doing with its dead body now?
I rushed back to the bedroom and woke Karen. She wouldn't believe it until she saw it for herself. Then we went back and hid together in bed. Not that the bed was safe. The occasional ant had been crawling across our faces in bed for some time now. As I lay in bed, a phrase kept passing through my mind: "Bug Bomb, Bug Bomb." In the morning, the ring and parts of the body were gone. I cleaned up the rest.
The Final Conflict
It was June, and the ants were winning. I couldn't gas them, and they wouldn't go away. They ran the apartment now; no place was safe from them. I tried appeasement. I would leave out choice jelly with no pepper oil in hopes they would just take that and leave the rest of the apartment alone. No such luck. We tried to ignore them, but they would not be ignored. They redoubled their efforts. We stayed out late a lot.
It was when we were out that I snapped. We had grown accustomed to their crawling over us at random intervals at home. We went to a movie to escape them. In the theater, as I ate my popcorn, I felt one of them. They had followed us. I wasn't even at home, and there was one crawling up my cheek. They made their point. We can leave the apartment, but no place, anywhere, was safe from them.
We left the movie. Damn my pride, and damn my morals; this could not go on. I bought a bug bomb on the way home. Forget the pollution and the toxins, I wasn't going to let these animals beat me. We reached the apartment, packed, and set off the bomb. Then we went away for the weekend.
On Sunday night, the ants were gone. It had cost me my pride and a piece of my soul, but I had gotten rid of the ants. I had won. Or had I? When the ants returned the following spring, we moved. You can't fight Mother Nature. She always wins. And, most of all, never, never try to teach Gaia or Her armies a lesson.
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