cANTaclysm
How ’bout getting to picnic at Jazz on the Park yesterday with my cousins Steve & Eric, their wives Julie & Jen, and their collective FOUR kids? (I’ll send pics of that milestone when K. gets me the disc.) How ’bout how sweet and mellow it is tonight, with the beautiful light basking the neighborhood in happy green, and the cats lolling about outside (though I think I just saw three gang members meet up in the alley across the street)? Oh, and the fact that I’m done teaching undergrads for, um, SEVEN MONTHS while I’m on summer, then minisabbatical, then winter break. That’s what I’m talking about. Life’s feeling pretty sweet. I’ll put off the worrying about money and book and productivity until later. No use ruining the moment.
Given the onset of summer, recent travels, and the fact that I’ve been too busy to get my hands in the dirt until now, I plunged myself headfirst this weekend into the back-breaking and infinitely humbling experience of gardening. I transplanted five plants from my backyard to a side planter, added five more new plants, put in tomatoes and peppers at Katie’s and started shoveling out a veggie garden space in the corner of her yard. That meant digging, oh, THIRTEEN holes, loading up several heavy wheelbarrows full of sod and dirt, yanking a gazillion stubborn weeds, and maybe weeping a little about how much it hurt at the end of a session. The word “arthritis” is starting to present itself to my mind, as my hip feels like it’s grinding into my sacrum and my elbow is curiously sore. But banish the thought! Arthritis be damned; gardening is too darn rewarding to give in.
So, the good news is that pretty living things are taking root and will be bursting brightly forth in the coming weeks and months.
The bad news is that I wrought what can only be called a disaster of epic proportions on a colony of ants yesterday. And I’m feeling moral reverberations about it. I reflect not to justify, but to at least pause and consider what damage mine own hands have done.
See, there was what appeared to be an ideal strip of dirt along the south side of Katie’s house. South-facing and therefore bright as hell in the summer, it struck us both as the perfect home for peppers and tomatoes. Plus, it looked like it had perhaps served a similar function in the past, clearly carved as it was into a long rectangle, and barren of anything but a couple weeds. So I harnessed my hose, then my shovel and pitchfork, and began the process of turning over and fortifying the dirt.
All was proceeding nicely until I flipped over a shovelful of dirt and noticed that it was moving. Harriedly. Blackly. I squinted and they came into focus: ants, running every which way. Worker ants, ants with wings (ew), mommy ants (I can only suspect) carrying little whitish green dots that must have been eggs, big ‘ol queen ant (did I see two?), swarming collectively faster and faster as their carefully constructed caverns caved in around them. Oh shit; oops. My first reaction was to “save” them by dropping shovels full of them and the casings of their homes into a new pile several feet–perhaps territories, for them–away. I piled them, trying to avoid the fact that I was surely only creating more havoc (not to mention making a fresh mess for Katie in the form of this jerry-rigged anthill). But looking back at the dreaded hole of holocaust, where the intact were now tending to the wounded while other survivors searched out the missing, my stomach sunk at the futility of my efforts. I tried to shrug it off–just ants–and worked on continuing my efforts around the disaster area without disturbing it further. No dice; I hadn’t the heart. I then tried to get into the slaughter and follow through on the carnage–only ants, after all, and in my way!– but my snivelly conscience kept reminding me that I had blood on my hands. Then I just felt sad, so I walked away and tried to trust that the survivors would sort it out and build a new colony somewhere else. In short: I abandoned them in their time of need, after inducing their time of need.
Here comes the existential aftershock: They’re beings, we’re beings. They’re a lot more productive and efficient than we, a lot more Marxist, I suppose. Their worlds seem like gigantic kibbutzes. Maybe with the exception of those nasty red army ants in Africa that Barbara Kingsolver described in Poisonwood Bible, they don’t do nearly the damage to the earth as we do. They seem to take care of each other. They communicate through a complicated pheremone system, which strikes me as pretty badass, though they don’t technically have brains. (If you think I’m making this up, check out these incredible ant facts.) They’re amazing collectives. And, as I demonstrated with one fateful shovel placement, they experience disasters of epic proportions.
China being our most recent reminder, colonies of humans get destroyed, in earthquakes, in hurricanes, in tidal waves, in wars that we commit on each other. Pull back a mere couple hundred feet above the ground and we look no different from ants. (I’ll never forget seeing the human ants swarm from atop the World Trade Center when I visited six months before it fell; I kept thinking of that odd view from above during 9/11.) I saw the caverns those ants built; it was a giant underground city. An underground city where thousands are now buried. Pull forward a few feet and you’re watching a great tragedy unfold up close. We humans somehow fancy ourselves undeserving of these random acts of mass violence. How can nature betray us so? How unlucky we were to be living along the coastline when the storm hit! We didn’t know! Life as we knew it was over. We suffered, we suffer, not just as humans, but as beings. As do the ants, as beings. Perhaps when we’re on the other end, our hearts can find compassion for both species.
Flies, on the other hand, I’d be happy to slaughter en masse. Flies are nasty. Fly Armaggeddon I am happy to lead.
