Once More Unto the Sugar Bowl
The ants came early this year. Or seemed to. I remember coming home late one night in June and turning on the light in the kitchen. There they were. Two dark columns moving out of the trash and disappearing into the woodwork. So many little creatures, so many moving parts.
I stared at them, admiring their orderly ranks. I wondered if they were passing ant messages back and forth. Did they see me? Were they warning each other?
Probably. They knew, and I knew, what was coming. I would wipe out their army, and a couple of days later new battalions would return. First I would see the scouts, poking delicately around the kitchen, then the shock troops would come. Wave after wave.
“It’s only June,” I said to them. “You sure you want to start this now?”
They did.
The summer offensive was on.
Once, long ago, the people of Southern California defined themselves--in part, at least--by their happy association with many odd wonders of nature. Postcards used to show tomato vines growing 19 feet into the air. Flowers were advertised as being so bright the color would rub off in your hand.
Los Angeles was a place where nature seemed turned upside down. The rats lived in trees here and squirrels made their home in the ground. Nothing behaved as it should, and people reveled in it.
These days, much of that sense of wonder has faded. Our lemon trees drop their fruit on the ground as we promenade by, unaware. The neon blue of the jacaranda flirts for our attention, but fails.
Maybe we’ve grown weary of these things. But let me make the case that the Southern California ants should be the exception, and should get some notice. They do not behave like ants anywhere else. They are strange in the way that L.A. is strange, and their demonic ways can actually be threatening. Certainly, they have little in common with the ants of Chicago or Atlanta.
What I’m talking about here is the aforementioned summer offensive of our ants. In cities back east, you might get a couple of raids into the garbage pail, but nothing like the attacks mounted in Southern California. What we see here is the sudden, violent uprising of an entire ant population that is normally quiescent.
When the fever hits, nothing will stop them. They lay siege to houses, often attacking on several fronts at once. You kill thousands of them in the kitchen and turn around to find a second army pouring into the bathroom.
These attacks have a desperate quality. A piece of leftover toast with a little jelly will drive them wild. If you shut off one entry point, they will find another within hours. Huge losses on the battlefield seem to mean nothing.
I have noticed, in the summertime, that dinner party conversation in L.A. tends to gravitate towards ant stories. I’m not sure what this says about our dinner parties, but give some credit to the ants. They are on people’s minds.
People actually compete with their ant stories. I remember one young woman beginning her story with the usual, “You won’t believe this . . . ,” and then proceeding to describe how she opened her freezer and found thousands of ant corpses inside, all freeze-dried and crinkly. The ant battalion had been going for something in the freezer--she didn’t know what--and had died trying. The whole crowd.
And the remarkable thing was, at this dinner party, the story fell flat. Everyone else already knew about freeze-dried ants. They had found them in their own freezers.
Like many creatures here, the ants are something of a puzzle. It turns out they are a variety common throughout the United States known as the Argentine ant. But this species does not conduct summer offensives elsewhere. Somehow, Southern California has changed their behavior.
Out at UC Riverside, the scientists have an explanation. During the summer, they say, Argentine colonies explode in size even as our hot and dry weather is diminishing their food supply. So the ants are forced to take desperate chances, eventually challenging man for his food and water.
That’s what the scientists say. I have a friend who believes the ants are demented from the sun, like Charlie Manson. And I once heard an actress say she thinks the ants are like everyone else in L.A., simply trying to get a little attention.
Who knows? Maybe the important thing is to know they’re there. And to realize, during the next summer offensive, that these creatures are not just any obnoxious, blind-charging, maniacal ants. They’re our obnoxious, blind-charging, maniacal ants.
