I used to marvel at ants. They were such industrious little critters. Especially red headed ants. Now, I don’t know what their real species is, we just called them red headed ants because their heads were, well, red, while the rest of their bodies were black.
As a kid, things are that simple. We knew four different types of ants. Brown ants, black ants, carpenter ants and red headed ants. It was much simpler in Seattle than in Florida, where I came to discover a host of other ants, none of them pleasant, from sugar ants and ghost ants to the universally despised fire ants.
Red headed ants were fascinating. They would spend weeks, even months building their ant condo in the back yard. They would harvest all the dead needles from the pine trees and stack them up. Eventually, if you let the nest alone long enough, it would rise to two or three feet in height. Millions of red headed ants were living there by then, all tending to their singular queen.
As a kid, we would torture the ants now and then when we were bored with digging holes, playing army or building tree houses. For the most part it was harmless fun. All we had to do was take a stick and jam it into the nest. In a split millisecond all the ants would launch into a frenzy trying to figure out how they could protect the nest.
They were pretty good at it too. The farthest from the pile and nearest you would find you. If you were wearing sandals they would launch an attack on you. They aren’t fierce like fire ants, that spew poison into your system so you feel like you’re on fire (I guess they are appropriately named). Instead, red headed ants had pincers that could grab onto your skin, resulting in a slightly painful bite. If you tried to get the ant off of you by grabbing his backside, often his head would just pop off, pincers still embedded in you.
They are an industrious community, that’s for sure. As I toil away in my new skyscraper digs, I look down on the world below me. It looks a lot like that ant pile. Sure, we’ve gotten pretty neat and even innovative about how we stack all those twigs. There are some mighty tall ant nests downtown.
This only came to me as I was driving to work the other day. At the appointed our here, everyone pours onto the highways and byways of Seattle. They are all headed someplace to do their daily work. Cars move along the roads in unison, only stopping for an occasional traffic light.
When you set a twig in front of red headed ants marching in line, they will pause for a moment and then make their way around the obstacle. The commuter ants do the same thing. Presented with a detour, they simply find away around it. I wonder if red headed ants use the term “take alternate routes” too?
One of the wonders of Seattle right now is all the tunnels that are being bored under the city. The Metro bus tunnel started this mess, if you don’t count the railroad tunnel that was built under the city long ago. Now, there are tunnels going in everywhere, from the Viaduct replacement on the waterfront to the light rail tunnels under Capital Hill.
If you ever had an ant farm filled with ants, then you know how this looks, if you were to slice Seattle into a sliver and place glass around it. There would be the ants on the top, doing their jobs, and below, lots more ants, either building tunnels or flitting from one place to another in the ant farm, though I’m sure if we could ask them they would say they weren’t particularly thrilled with the transportation system, because every road seemed to lead to a dead end.
I guess you would feel the same if you lived on Maui. You would simply drive on and on, but really, you end up going nowhere. There’s no tunnel to another island. Just roads that circle around and others that dead end because you either reach the ocean or you run into a lava flow.
In Seattle, we don’t have these problems. You just drive on and on, wherever your travels take you. For commuter ants, the drive ends at the place of employment mostly. I can only surmise this because I’m not sure a sane person would jump into the fracas known as the morning commute just because they wanted to go for a drive.
Which makes me wonder. Do red headed ants have days off? And if they do, what do they do for fun? I doubt they do because I’ve never seen a couple of ants just wandering aimlessly around the yard, visiting the “national yard parks” on their day off. Perhaps they even brought along a picnic with them that the humans can spoil.
I bet a lawnmower really ruins their day. So would fire. Eventually us rambunctious younguns would get mischievous. We would get the mower’s gas can and pour an awful lot of gas on the ant pile. Ants still haven’t learned that dried needles are not a good material for building homes.
And yes, I still have a twinge of regret about that. After all, I commute to work now, just like the ants. They’re just doing what they are supposed to do, just like me. And now, I keep a watchful eye to the sky in my skyscraper, looking for a very large gas can, held by a very, very large person.
In the Emerald City, wondering if it’s really rain falling outside,
– Robb