The House Guests

Well, shoot, something must've been in the air, because yesterday we got our first ants AND our first raccoons of the year. The ants were rolling around snickering on the roof and the raccoons were marching in a purposeful little line from the back door. Or maybe it was the other way around.

I don't have a big quarrel with the raccoons. We can even go a few years without seeing any, although I suspect they're around even then. It's remarkable how elusive they manage to be whilst being so substantial. If a really large cat swallowed a basketball and it got hung up just at the rectum, it would look like a raccoon. Cats can't swallow basketballs, of course. You're thinking of Labrador Retrievers.

Dave did have a big quarrel with the raccoons once. He was peeing behind the tool shed, as one does, with his business well in hand, and turned to find a committee of raccoons watching him, and wondering if he had anything he wanted to share with the class. He did not. It was a bit of a standoff and obviously he negotiated an exit, but you know there had to be that moment in which he was reviewing just how much of a threat a raccoon is. They never seem to come after you directly, and you've never heard of anyone with personal raccoon damage, but there's something deeply untrustworthy about them. They just don't fear us enough. If I had my hand on a private portion of myself I was particularly fond of, I'd be alarmed.

I do keep a compost pile, and have yet to observe anything untoward rooting around in it, but that's probably because it's guarded by attack scrub jays. You'd have to be a complete idiot to take on a scrub jay, because they'll stab you in the head as soon as look at you. So I don't know where these large mammals are hanging out when they're not doing the moonlight dance on our roof. I do see their poop. It could be opossum poop, but raccoons are said to use latrines, and this poop tends to be all bunched up in the same place, under our grape arbor. If you spend any time online looking up raccoon poop, and who hasn't, you will find yourself strongly advised to remove your raccoon poop latrine, so as to avoid getting raccoon roundworms. I'm not real worried about that. You get raccoon roundworms, it says here, by ingesting raccoon poop, and that wasn't anything I was planning to do. You're thinking of Labrador Retrievers.

I'm doing the regular thing with the ants. I give them a couple squirts of ant poison in a sweet gel and they scarf it up and take it to their nests, in the form of themselves, and then drop dead, are briefly mourned by their colleagues and are, themselves, eaten. It seems disrespectful but it's tidy and efficient, I suppose. I should probably feel bad about my treatment of native fauna but I understand that there is no ant shortage.  In fact, there are more ants than there are anything else. Besides, they eat their dead. Who does that?

Labrador Retrievers, probably. They'll eat anything. Or they'd at least roll in it. Which is fine, as long as they don't do it on my roof.

Neener Neener

All right. Ants. I admit I didn't see you at first, but by the time the four-millionth of you marched through, I was on to you. Don't think for one moment I can't see you all lined up straight like a bunch of uniformed schoolchildren from some foreign country where they're freakishly obedient. Now. This was all very cute when you used to come in here in April and take off again in May, but it's been dragging on longer and longer, and The Management is no longer cool with this. And now it's freakin' February, for fuck's sake. There's going to have to be some changes. We're going to have to have some ground rules.

Number one. Stay on the ground. There's plenty of room in this house along the baseboards without everyone having to traipse off into the sugar drawer or the pantry or anything.

Number two. There'd better not be any number two.

Number three. As soon as you get all properly lined up on the ground, I'm going to spray your asses with Windex and wipe you up with a sponge. I can do this all day long: I literally have nothing better to do. Yes? Question?

neener

Speak up. You say that all of you together are more like part of one big body than a bunch of individuals, and that if I Windex all your asses, it will be like clipping a fingernail? Your point?

neener neener

Your point is that Big Mama has already laid more eggs than I've Windexed asses in the time it took to call this meeting together. Your point is that if you put all the humans on one side of a scale and all the ants on the other side of the scale, the scale wouldn't even tip. I'm fine with that. I wish you all the best, somewhere else.

Number four. Okay, here's how it's going to be. I am going to lay in a vat of Windex and have a spray bottle in every room. Five or six times a day I am going to spray your little asses--do you even have asses? I mean, not with cleavage or anything. If you do, I'll spray them. You won't like it.

Don't even think about going over to that cat dish. Don't. You know what will happen? The cat will come toward you and put her nose right on one of you. That's right. And then she'll back away fast and make noises for a long time, and believe you me, you don't want any part of that.

Number five. In about a month, I'm going to go online and tattle on you to all of Facebook. That's right. I'm going to harness the collective wisdom of the smartest species that ever lived. And all my friends are going to send me a bunch of advice involving Borax. Believe me, you don't want any of that. And then I'll start to hear from a trickle of my other friends who don't necessarily vote the way I do but they're my friends anyway. And they're going to recommend a protocol of poisons capable of dismantling the entire back yard ecosystem. I would watch my little fannies if I were you.

Number six. And then I'm going to keep with the Windex and the wiping clear into September. Questions? You in the back.

neener

Speak up.

neener neener neenie neen neen

Okay, yes, I see that the little fellow I referred to as "you in the back" is not actually in the back at all. In fact, there is an unbroken line of you behind him that goes through the dining room and around the corner. I see that now. All right, listen up. It's Windex and death to all of you for the next eight months right up to the day you decide to waltz off somewhere else. I'd think about that if I were you.

That's My Oviposition, And I'm Sticking To It

Julie, paying attention. Photo by Sharon Hull.

Most people want friends who are loyal, honest, and kind. I do too. I also put a high premium on friends who suddenly blurt out "ooh! Are you a Clouded Sulphur? Are you ovipositing? Are you ovipositing on a honeysuckle, or are you just cold?"

This is the sort of conversational Tourette's you can be privy to when you're walking down a country lane with Julie Zickefoose. The Clouded Sulphur in question would be a small butterfly fully twenty feet away from us that I couldn't have seen with a telescope and GPS coordinates. It goes without saying that I couldn't have told you if it was in the business of planting eggs on a honeysuckle.

The most fun people in the world are the ones that haven't quit paying attention to things. Most of us, if we're lucky, were pretty good at that when we were kids. For one thing, we were a lot closer to the ground, and that helps. But we also hadn't gotten our brains all webbed over by concern over how others see us, or cluttered up with tchotchkes like the Kardashians, whoever they are.

I wasn't a pure child, nature-wise. I flat-out didn't like mosquitoes and gnats until Daddy explained that they were frog food, which made them nobler. And although I was never cruel in any other way, I liked to spit on ants. Or more precisely, around ants. We had a brick patio that was constantly being mined for sand by ants and I'd sit out on it and watch them work. Out of boredom I'd try to moat one of them with a ring of spit just to see if it could get out. The ant was never in any danger. Nobody in the Washington, D.C. area had any spit in the summertime. All of our water went into the production of sweat, which trickled continuously into our shoes rather than evaporating as it might have in a more sensible climate. We had to dab our postage stamps on our foreheads first to get them to stick to an envelope.

But I probably spent hours watching ants. I didn't necessarily draw any correct conclusions. I thought ants lived in little pyramids that they erected themselves. Every time we'd hose the patio off, they'd get busy and build themselves more pyramids. I was a fully grown person before it occurred to me that the pyramids were just the debris pile from excavating their real homes. But right or wrong, I was enriched by watching ants. It calibrated my mind to the proper speed of life. The older we get, the more time we spend in the future and the past, and neither one is good for us. We're better off getting our pace to match the rest of the world's. You don't necessarily need a spiritual advisor, but you should never pass up a conversation with a good naturalist like Julie. That's how you can find out about spittlebugs, and nothing gets you over yourself faster than that.

Most of us have seen those little globs of what we will call spit hanging in the crotches of our garden plants. The spittlebug produces these, but not (precisely) by spitting. The spittlebug is the larval form of a bouncy little item called the froghopper, and it chews on its host plant for sap. From there, according to Wikipedia, the "filtered liquid" is transformed into a glob of comfy bubbles. Let's review. What is the liquid being filtered through? The spittlebug. That means the bug is blowing it out its tiny little ass. Our future froghopper is comfortably ensconced in a protective nest of wet farts. We can't do that on our best day.

We can only try.

A Logical Phallusy

We thought we'd taken care of the Spring Ant Influx a few months ago. The regular army showed up every day for about a month and we batted them back with Windex until they gave up and went home, clean and shiny. All was quiet on the Northwestern Front for a few weeks and then they got modern. No longer are they sending out a battalion and risking mass obliteration. A grain of oatmeal, a stray fruit smear, even swatted fly meat, each will accumulate a score of ants within fifteen minutes of deposition. Their communications technology is sophisticated. The little buggers are now dropping formic acid and forming flash mobs.

But I don't have any garden slugs. I've got a hosta buffet out there for them and no one has showed up. You're supposed to dispatch slugs with beer, but I don't like to share. Slugs and ants are pretty much the entire pest roster out here. We don't have many mosquitoes, gnats, ticks, Republicans, or black flies. And other people in town are complaining about the slugs, so I know they're around. So I got to thinking:

Whereas: We have ants.
Whereas: We don't have slugs.
Therefore: The ants must have creeped out the slugs.

I felt pretty confident about this conclusion. I do have a vestigial science degree and I understand how reasoning works, because I've seen it in the outside world. For instance:

Whereas: Barack Obama is black.
Whereas: I want to mine coal without regard to environmental or human health consequences.
Therefore: Voters should be required to show photo I.D. at the polls.

I can see no fallacy in this conclusion, unless you count the logical one. But when you're practicing home science, you need to be open to new evidence that may alter your conclusions. And that's what we found on a walk the other day. There was a large old tree in the parking strip. And it was covered with a foot-wide column of slime to a height of twelve feet, where the trunk tipped out over the sidewalk. I know what has happened here. A slug orgy has happened here. Our common garden slugs mate while suspended on a string of slime. They need to get high enough to be able to hang off something, and they're well hung. Each slug has his or her own giant diaphanous sky-blue penis which it wraps around its mate's and they remain in this position, twirling lasciviously, for hours. They are having way more fun than you ever thought of having. And the huge amount of slime on this tree indicates a multi-slug event, similar to what we used to call, in college, "spring break." I marveled at the amount of goo that each slug had to emit to reach those heights. "They're teenagers," Dave explained.

So because I now have new evidence, I have revised my conclusion. I now believe I don't have any slugs in my yard because the party is somewhere else this year, and the ants have nothing to do with it. Someone might also want to re-think the other conclusion, above.

Whereas: Barack Obama is president.
Whereas: I want to mine coal without regard to environmental or human health consequences.
Therefore: Gay marriage is a threat to the fabric of our civilization.

Thanks For Coming, We'll See You All Next Year!

The 2010 Ant Convention has been a roaring success, all members polled agreeing that the Brewster-Price kitchen is the perfect venue, with its variety of entertainments just steps away. Routine business was conducted as usual in the grains pantry, but things really got hoppin' in the sugar drawer, and satellite parties scouted out the jelly cabinet. Edith Pilaf and the Honey Dippers came back for an encore performance in the fruit basket, where the conga lines stretched over the counter. The screening of "Borax: Fatal Attraction" was not well attended, but all in all, satisfaction was rated at high and all involved agreed to meet again next year.

As one of the two managing proprietors, I am always a little amused to see my guests troop in every year, at least for the first five or six weeks--reaffirmation of the rhythms of life, and all that. Still, it gets me wondering. Why this time every year? Why spring? I'm just as likely to have counter schmutz all year long, but the ants show up only in spring. They're amazing. I can wipe down every surface and clean up the goo around the jar-tops and get the place sparkling, and see no ants for a day. None. And then suddenly they're all back. In spring, I can locate an avocado smudge the size of a nail clipping from across the room just by scouting the kitchen for ant eruptions. It's like how you can locate a teenager on Facebook by looking under the pile of exclamation points.

So I asked Dave: what is it about springtime that makes the ants show up? It's warm, there's plenty to eat outside, what's the deal? I don't expect him to have the answer; I'm just reaching out with random communications the way happily married people do. Of course, he will have an answer. It never occurs to him to say "I don't know." He's going to come up with something.

I've always wondered about things. I remember staring at ants a lot when I was a kid. We didn't have TV. We had a brick patio out back and the ants lived under it. I always assumed that ants lived in little sandy cones. They'd come out of the little hole in the center, each with a grain of sand, and drop them on the rim, until they were piled up with the perfection of the Pyramids. I was curious, but not a particularly logical thinker, or I would have also taken in the fact that I never saw an ant come from outside the hole and place a grain of sand on the cone. Obviously this was just the debris pile of their excavation process, but I thought the cones were their home, and they'd done a nice job of it.

At approximately the same age, I got in a heap of trouble for digging up the lawn in the back yard. I was looking for gravity, which I had visualized as a little layer of pebbles about a foot below the surface. I probably had conflated "gravity" and "gravel," and I explained the point of my exploration, but I got in trouble just the same. With that kind of support, it's amazing I ever pursued a science degree. On the other hand, my father had vocally despaired of my ever learning to write, so maybe it was the path of least discouragement.

Anyway, I'm still at it. I went ahead and asked Dave why ants just show up in the spring, and he waggled his eyebrows and made a lewd humpa-humpa gesture meant to serve as a complete explanation. When it comes right down to it, that's his explanation for a lot of things.

For whatever reason, with or without the placement of borax traps, the ants will pack up and leave soon enough. They have to. In June, we've got the place booked for the Fruit Fly Jamboree.

Note: If you didn't care for this year's ant post, you could try last year's ant post. Worth a shot.

The Ants Are Back

It's spring! You can tell. The cable company has popped up with their springtime for-no-particular-reason five-dollar rate hike. It seemed to come so soon after the Ides of March why-the-hell-not five-dollar rate hike, and the Presidents' Day because-we-can five-dollar rate hike, but that's spring for you: bam, suddenly there it is. Also, the ants are back. The ants come back every spring.

For most of the year we don't pay ants any mind, but that doesn't mean we're not important to them. For the ants, the inside of our house is Capistrano. One day, right around the same time every year, they just show up, all of them. You never see all of them at once, but they're there. What you see is just some little movement out of the periphery of your vision, like some random little astigmatism, and then it resolves itself into a batch of ants. This year they were all over the kitchen sink and cutting board. I'm pretty low-tech about ants. I mash-and-wipe with a hot sponge, repeating as necessary. I try to get to them before Dave does, because he loses his mind around insects. It's a good thing we live in Oregon, where we fling open our windows all summer without putting in screens. If he lived in Africa, or Florida, or really anywhere on the east coast, he'd flat perish from the willies.

If Dave sees the ants first, he will apply some sort of spray insecticide to the thickness of a paste all over. The ants will drown long before they have an opportunity to succumb to malathion poisoning. I hate this, but I've learned to accept that he cannot help himself. Since, every spring, he also gets a notion to clean all the windows in the house inside and out, I'm willing to overlook some of his other issues.

The thing is, I may be onto the ants before he is, but I never seem to get the big picture right away. I'll be mashing and wiping ants in about the same location for two, three days, and then on the fourth day I'll notice that they seem to be coming in from a little distance away, and I'll follow them backwards with the sponge, and eventually I'll look up and there will be a major vertical column of ants going up the wall, enough to make the walls look slimmer. The ant stripe is visible from the next room if you happen to be looking at the right spot, so it's hard to imagine how I had missed them before. It's as though you see something shiny, and you think, hmm: that almost looks like a claw, only way larger, and then you look up and discover you're crouching at the foot of a tyrannosaur. The ants have obviously been there all along, and you can trace them to a little bloop of raspberry jam on the second shelf of the cabinet. You can tidy that up and wipe down the ants and in any case they'd have been gone in another week, but it's still a heck of an operation they're running. No doubt one scout ant located the stash and alerted the whole platoon.

It's impressive. You can't even get ten humans in a sushi bar to figure out how to split the check.