Becky and I acknowledge we have an inconsistent attitude when it comes to insects in our house.
I try to maintain a generous live-and-let-live attitude toward some species and Becky generally goes along with that stance. For example, we tend to be gentle with spiders, scooping them up and releasing them outside. We give them a pass because we know spiders are helpful in keeping insect pests under control.
At the same time, I can be rather ruthless with certain creepy crawly bugs or flying, buzzing annoyances. House flies, mosquitos and roaches are shown no mercy. In such cases, casual killing comes quite easy, even to one who tries to live a life of peace. As I say, we are inconsistent depending on whether the interloper in question is one that can do us some good or if it is an annoying one we don’t want around. Such a typical human attitude.
I say this because we just spent a good part of a week trying to rid our house of ants. I guess you could say we declared war on the army of ants that were invading our territory. At first, we tried stomping and crushing underfoot the unending phalanxes of tiny, black crawlers. As anyone who undertakes a military campaign can tell you, it helps if you can depersonalize the enemy.
At one point, I thought I might have to get a copy of the 1954 movie “Them” to steel our resolve. “Them” is one of my favorite cheesy Sci-Fi thrillers from the early 1950s, so many of which exploited the public’s fears and anxieties of the new atomic age. According to the movie promo, it has a simple plot: The earliest atomic tests in New Mexico cause common ants to mutate into giant man-eating monsters that threaten civilization. I didn’t track down that particular cinematic masterpiece, but it occurred to me that with “Oppenheimer” just out, also set in New Mexico, these might work as a good movie night double-feature.
Our stomping and crushing didn’t halt the ants’ onslaught, so we decided to escalate. We added chemical warfare to our offensive arsenal. In past ant campaigns we had employed Terro T-200 Liquid Ant Killer, but our old bottle was empty so a military buildup would be necessary. According to “Wirecutter,” a New York Times product review website, the active ingredient in Terro ant-killing products is borax, which, I was assured, is “a relatively safe compound that can even work as a laundry detergent.” I felt comfortable knowing that borax probably would not turn our crawling nemeses into Giant Man-(or Woman)-Eating Monsters.
The word “borax” reminded me of Twenty-Mule Team Borax, a laundry detergent, which reminded me of “Death Valley Days,” a TV show that ran from 1952-1972. This was the same era as “Them,” and I read that as positive forces coming together in my scorched-earth ant campaign.
We squeezed a drop or two of Terro onto a small corner of stiff paper and place it in an out-of-the-way spot where ants were showing up. Almost immediately, drawn by the borax in its sweet syrupy liquid, the square of paper was black with them. We had placed Terro-soaked squares in other corners and they were working, too. We thought the problem was solved, victory was ours, but it turned out to be a bit more drawn out. Those ants were tenacious or, at least, numerous.
After maybe three days and a half bottle of Terro, we started noticing the ant population was getting smaller. This is because they take the Terro back home and infect the rest of the nest. At the end, only an occasional loner made its way across the battlefield that was our floor.
We celebrated only to the extent that we no longer had to put up with crawling ants. Life is precious, and war is not pretty. It should be avoided when possible. But sometimes, at least from a human perspective, it is necessary.
Norman Knight, a retired Clark-Pleasant Middle School teacher, writes this weekly column for the Daily Journal. Send comments to [email protected].
