The Great Ant Massacre of '13

While most Americans will recall this day as a watershed moment for marriage equality, I will remember it as The Great Ant Massacre of '13. At least, if I'm not fortunate enough to forget it all together once this icky feeling passes.

I realized a few years ago that living in Seattle has spoiled me for living in most places in terms of bugs. It isn't that we have no bugs (I killed a earwig in my bedroom last night), but the bugs we have (beyond fruit flies and moths) aren't really after our stuff.

Growing up in Minnesota, we had ants. Most of them kept outdoors where I like to think they belong. Then there were the carpenter ants--big, black ants that liked the bin in our kitchen that once housed flour or something, but which we used to keep things like my cookies. The day the baggie of cookies in my school lunch contained a carpenter ant was not a good day. Nor was the time while I was laying on my parent's floor talking on the phone with a cute boy who was asking me if I'd heard of some new group called The Go Gos and I turned my head to see a carpenter ant marching directly towards my face.

Living in Taiwan, I'd even encountered lines of ants, marching from somewhere in the floor of my room to somewhere in my ceiling. Not nearly as bad as the time I found the ants had gotten into the electric hot water urn, although happily I can't recall if that was before or after I drank any water. I suspect before, and yet I imagine I can almost remember the taste of steeped ants.

Living in my current apartment, I've seem very few ants, most of which I probably brought in with me. That's why I was surprised a few weeks ago when I saw my second ant in recent memory in the bathroom. And that was the morning after seeing a different type of ant in the living room. I'd killed all those ants, and then another in the hallway, and mentioned something to the apartment manager since it seemed unusual. She provided me with some ant poison stations. I put one in the bathroom, beyond the toilet as she suggested. That was a week and a half or so ago.

Since then, I've continued to see an ant or two wandering around my bathroom. I've not killed them but I also never saw them go near the poison, nor into or out of any part of the room. I would watch them intently hoping they would give a clue as to where they'd come from, but they just wandered. Aimless.

Until this morning. While the poison had done nothing to interest them, something in my bathroom trash can had caught their attention overnight and I was greeted to the site of ants crawling all over my garbage, my trash can, and the space between that and the crack between the wall, floor, and bathtub they were streaming out of. It was very much like if all of your Facebook friends showed up to help you move your stuff to its new location.

I dressed and then braced myself for the task at hand. I dumped the trash into a paper grocery bag and sealed it up as best I could while I put the trash can in the tub under running water. I spirited the bag out to the trash and tossed it before coming back to deal with the trash can. The ants still on the ground as it were hit the spot where they should climb and started hunting slowly around. The stream seemed to slow.

In the tub, most if not all of the ants were dead. I cleaned the trash can and drained the tub.I then started picking off any ants I could find: on the walls, on the floor, in the hallway.

For much of the day, I've thought at least part of my feeling of ickiness came from the mass killing of so many things. I don't have any qualms about killing an ant but killing about one for each Facebook friend seemed like a lot. But the more I think about it, the more I think I just feel violated. All those ants going after my stuff in my house.

It is hard not to feel like there are ants crawling on me, whether it is little ghost ants, or the fact they were here and I didn't want them to be.