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SHOW NOTES

In this week’s episode I talk about an infestation of carpenter ants in my home a few years ago that made me respect this unique and incredible force of nature.

TRANSCRIPT

A few years ago, my home was invaded.

We were under attack. Every day was a battle in a war that we were desperately losing. We were on the verge of giving up hope and succumbing to our new overlords forever…

And no, I’m not talking about an invasion by people.

My home was invaded by an army of carpenter ants.

It’s the only time as a homeowner that I had to fight for my house. Never in my life have I experienced anything like the incredible force of carpenter ants.

I won the war, but they ultimately won my respect in the end, and it was obvious to me why ants have been such an influence on fiction.

The army of carpenter ants is the subject of my sketchbook today.

***

Hello, and welcome to episode 31, the story of how an army of carpenter ants nearly gave me a mental breakdown.

My wife and I bought a house a few years ago, and the house sits on a big lot that has a lot of trees. A lot of trees. When you’re a homeowner, the number of trees on your property directly correlates to the number of problems you’ll have with the home.

For example, we had tree roots break our pipes. Trees are home to a family of possums in our backyard. A tree was growing up against our porch and we cut it down, but it already did tremendous damage because the previous homeowner did nothing about it. Every autumn, I have to do a lot of work to rake and mulch leaves in my yard—usually takes me two weekends to get all of the leaves. The trees shade my property, so we don’t get much sunlight in our yard, making it hard to grow things. A pine tree in my backyard sheds its needles directly into my gutter. A family of deer lived behind my garage, hidden for days by trees. My backyard has been home to owls, to hawks, to groundhogs using tree stumps to grind their teeth on.

So yes, as much as I love trees, they are nothing but trouble for a homeowner.

Which brings me to my carpenter ant story.

***

The summer started off like any other. Hot. Sunny. Lawn mowers humming every evening, and crickets singing every night. Just another season in our Midwest house, life going on as normal.

One day, my wife noticed an ant in the kitchen. She squashed it and didn’t think anything of it.

Another day, I saw an ant in the bathroom. I crushed it with some tissue and moved on.

Another day, we both noticed an ant traveling along a baseboard. I crouched to inspect it, and noticed it for the first time—a stocky black ant. Compared to other ants I’d seen, this one was built like a boxer. It could beat the crap out of a field ant.

Again, we squashed it, talked for a minute about how it might have gotten in the house, and went on with our day.

And then, the next morning, ants were everywhere. They were on the walls, on the floor, in every room. They invaded our food. They invaded our daughter’s toys and bit her while she played.

They attacked me in the shower.

My home had been thoroughly besieged.

***

We tried to fight the ants with bug spray and ant traps. We killed maybe a hundred a day, caught hundreds more. But still, they kept coming.

I patrolled the perimeter of my house, tried to find where they were getting in. There were no holes, no openings, nothing.

It only took two days before we were completely defeated. I called a local pest control service. I couldn’t have been happier when a black pickup truck rolled into my driveway. A fat guy in a t-shirt and jeans climbed out, smiling and whistling as he strapped on a utility belt. He greeted me jovially, frowning at a trail of ants on my sidewalk.

We walked around the house, and he inspected the same spots I did. No openings.

“Hmm,” he said, bending over a little too far, and revealing more behind than I wanted to see.

Then we went into the house, and he observed more ants on the wall.

“Talk about trouble,” he said.

As we moved through the house, he kept whistling, shining a flashlight behind all the furniture, into the attic.

“You’ve got a serious case of carpenter ants,” he said.

At that point, I had no idea what carpenter ants were. He then told me that they were a big problem, and if I didn’t do something, they’d undermine the structure of the house. I gulped.

Two hundred dollars later, he armed the house with more baits and traps. He told me that if I saw the nest, to call him right away.

They didn’t work.

In fact, the ants seemed to multiply.

***

I was desperate. I was willing to do anything to get rid of these damn ants.

At this point they had already bitten my infant daughter multiple times, and we couldn’t keep letting this happen. They were getting meaner and bolder too, too, openly attacking me when I was writing my novels, climbing over our food as we were eating it. And their bites stung.

One day, when my mom was visiting, she picked up a fallen tree branch in my yard and told me she noticed something strange in a dead cherry tree in the back of my property.

I inspected it, and sure enough, there was a river of ants flowing in and out of a hole in the tree.

I measured the distance between the tree and my house, and it was a good one hundred to one hundred and fifty feet. Probably the equivalent of a day’s journey for an ant.

I called the pest control guy and he was there the next day.

“Yep,” he said, putting his hands on his hips. “I’ll be damned. I’ve never seen anything like this. They’re traveling pretty far.”

He threw some kind of bomb into the hole, and ants spilled out of the tree. Hundreds of thousands of them. I never saw anything like it in my life.

Later that night, the grass was covered in dead carpenter ants, and my lawn was filled with birds who were feasting on them.

Slowly but surely, the ants disappeared.

We still saw them in the house, but in fewer numbers. After a few days, they disappeared completely.

We had the tree cut down and taken away.

We had won the war.

But in the end, the ants won my respect.

They were a true force of nature.

***

Hope you liked that one.

Like I said, those ants were inspiring.

Since, I’ve learned to think of my books like carpenter ants. They’re journeying out into the world to find readers and bring money. The more books I have, the more people will pay attention. And every day they bring back money to me, the mother colony. I know it’s a little cheesy, but the analogy works in my head.

Anyway, the moral of this story is, if you ever see ants in your house, just call somebody. My wife and I still talk to this very day how quickly they multiplied. I know it sounds like I dramatized it in this podcast, but I’m serious about how quickly they multiplied. I wasn’t exaggerating.

And I wasn’t kidding about trees, either. That cherry tree was the cause of our troubles. So if you own a home, do yourself a favor and inspect your trees. You’ll be glad you did.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK

When you have seen one ant, one bird, one tree, you have not seen them all.” E. O. Wilson

 

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