Ants

A young man stands in a spotlight, pantomiming splitting wood. The Narrator strolls in casually, and begins speaking: Splitting wood on a cold February afternoon, the light gone silver in the clouds, the maul sucks heat from the bones of my hands. I stand in the middle of a pile, oak, birch, and maple, none of it big logs with straight grain. Coat, sweatshirt, gloves in a pile by the coffee thermos (long empty), I am down to boots, jeans, and an undershirt. The air stings at 20 degrees. Sweat chills on my back, under the brim of my hat.

The young man pauses, wipes sweat from his brow.

Splitting wood, I can use all my strength, can raise the maul a foot, the narrator helps the young man act out the swing in slow motion, let it drop toward the ground, step back with my left leg, pulling the maul around in a full circle over my head and then step forward with my right leg, bending the knee to bring the maul and my whole body to the level of the chopping block. I don’t aim for the log, but for the heart of the block itself, and I grunt at the impact. Sometimes the maul rips through the frozen, twisted logs, blasting them open to reveal pitchy hearts. I am using all my anger, all my desire to break something. I ache in my fingers, my wrists, my forearms, my shoulders, my back, my legs. When the log splits, the crack of it echoes out for an instant, and for an instant longer, I hear the iron of the maul ring a little victory cry.

I reach for another log, blemished with fungus on the bark. It leaps in my hand, lighter than I expected. I am still wondering at that lightness when I swing back and around and down. The log explodes. Shattered fragments fly to either side of the maul, the largest tumbling end over end through the air to land in the bushes across the driveway. On the block, a shining black mass of ants.

The young man steps away from the block, then as the narrator describes the ants, comes in close to stare, childlike at them.

They are still clinging to one another in postures of helplessness. Oval eggs the color of clotted cream have spilled around their glossy bodies. Dust is still clogging the air when they begin to move in the weak light as the sun dips below the clouds. Each ant is about an inch in length, carpenters, chewing tunnels through rotten wood, eking out a spot for a colony, surrounding their queen and young sisters in a ball to protect them from the extremes of temperature the winter brings. My sweat is icy on my skin while I watch them, and the light fades all around.

The narrator becomes impassioned here, tries to convey his fascination.

In this moment, I go from angry adolescent to fascinated child, a transformation that I still experience when I turn over a rock, or lift up a log to find a tiny alien civilization scrambling in patterns, paths and dances I can almost, but not quite, see. They pick up eggs and young instars in their mandibles to run for safety. Lean in close and their antennas, brushing, waving, tapping gently, become visible. Their language is tactile and olfactory—they smell and feel the signifiers. They are sisters, all of them, and form a fierce Amazonian sorority to protect their mother, the queen. Each individual is capable of extraordinary feats of strength, persistence, and resolve. I watched them for hours as a child, and when no-one is watching me, I still do.

The young man gets younger, turns into a six year old and watches in awe, as the Narrator, playing the role of the older brother acts out the scene he describes.

Thoureau enters and looks on disapprovingly.

I was six when my older brother put a garden snail the size of a walnut on top of two foot anthill to see what would happen. Henry David Thoreau arranged such contests too, and wrote about them using constant reference to the Homeric hymns, but my brother’s intentions were more purely experimental. He just wanted to see what would happen. We were at a camp on the Oregon coast, and the anthill, beneath the sparse branches of a shore pine, was all brown pine needles and grains of quartz. The snail, its shell a streaked swirl of yellow and green, tasted the breeze with glistening feelers. My brother held it between thumb and forefinger, rushed in quickly and dropped it atop the hill. Nothing much happened. It took a long time for the ants to start swarming over it, but when one closed its mandibles into the snail’s wet skin, it pulled back into the shell but a snap. Bored, my brother was poking at the hill with a long stick. The snail stayed closed. From somewhere, my brother produced a lighter and a scrap of paper, and lit a tiny fire on top of the hill.

The Narrator lights a scrap of paper on fire, and the boy leans in close. Thoreau looks concerned.

We’d seen this before, but it was always exciting to observe the frenzy, the foaming, and the rapid extinguishing of the flame. If we’d had a gallon of gasoline, we’d have set flaming ditches, erected burning wicker ants, anything to combine violence, flame, and the observation of natural defenses, but all we had was this snail, stubbornly refusing to be eaten by a ravening horde of ants.

During Thoreau ‘s lines, he and the narrator speak in unison. The narrator and the boy begin to wrestle with exaggerated movements as the battle is described.

“ They fought with more pertinacity than bulldogs,” Thoreau says. When a lone red ant enters the fray he describes her as “some Achilles, who had nourished his wrath apart, and had now come to avenge or rescue his Patroclus. He saw this unequal combat from afar — for the blacks were nearly twice the size of the red — he drew near with rapid pace till he stood on his guard within half an inch of the combatants; then, watching his opportunity, he sprang upon the black warrior, and commenced his operations near the root of his right fore leg.” The narrator is a bit out of breath here: He goes on to imagine that the rival ants “had their respective musical bands stationed” nearby, “playing their national airs the while, to excite the slow and cheer the dying combatants.” A march plays softly from here until curtain.

We were running out of patience. The boys open pocket knives. My brother and I got our pocket knives and went to work digging the snail out of his shell, half mutilating him to mush to make him vulnerable. We bent forward to watch again.

A beat of silence. The Narrator turns toward the audience.

Thoreau, watching the ants rip each other apart, writes

Thoreau alone: “I was myself excited somewhat even as if they had been men. The more you think of it, the less the difference.”