The Genius of Man

A Clash of Civilizations

By Daniel Graham Timp

             The queen paced the length of her throne room.  She had every cause for worry.  Her hunters, being furthest from the community, were first alerted to the presence of a monster.  Quickening their paces, they entered the commons and raised the general alarm so that measures may be taken for the safety of the group, and above all, the queen.  Thus alerted the sentinels moved into position to guard the entrances and exits while all work ceased. 

             The monster, who would surely be offended by the use of the term, was mowing the thick grass of his lawn.  Loping along, he thought about his house and all the work he planned to do as the summer progressed.  Within his head he began to compose a list: “clean the gutters, finish the basement walls and ceiling, build a darkroom in the old coal chute.…” As he passed the mower along the side of the house, the man noticed the extensive ant nest situated a bit too near his home.  Instead of passing with the mower a single time, the man passed over the colony of ants again and again, sometimes letting the mower hover above it for several seconds. 

             Within the colony the confusion was immediate.  The sentinels--highly sensitive to the vibrations that issued forth--watched as the sky darkened and a swiftly swinging blade rotated above their heads, forming a vacuum that threatened to pull them from their posts.  Fortunately for the little creatures, the cruel monster’s attack was largely ineffectual.  A handful of soldiers had been hurled away from the nest, but these were scarcely wounded and were already returning to resume their duty.  The attack lasted for a mere minute and then the man and his machine moved on to torment the grass, leaving the colony to temporary peace.  The workers quickly cleared out the entryways and resumed the expansion of their labyrinthine tunnels.  

             After depositing the mower in its place in the garage, the man picked up a spaded shovel and walked to the ant colony.  For awhile he observed the ants, large and black; they had clear abdomens with black stripes.  “Carpenters,” he thought.  “better kill them; they could damage my property.”  First, the man unearthed the colony with his shovel, digging down into the lawn and piling the infested soil nearby.  Then he retrieved an old bottle of insecticide.  Attempting to spray the bottle, the nozzle broke off, so the man poured the entire bottle over the upturned ant nest.  The man, assuming the ants were decimated by the poison, replaced the dirt within the hole and retired to his living room to watch television and relax for the evening. 

             Meanwhile, the ants began building anew.  The insecticide in the ground was designed to kill beetles, so the fortunate ants were unaffected.  The loosened soil of the colony site was much easier to dig, shape and move than it had been before the intervention of the man and his machines.  So by the time the civilized monster returned to revel in his manufactured devastation, the colony of ants had exceeded its previous size.

             “Okay,” thought the man, “what was that poison?”  He checked the discarded bottle—scanning the label, he noticed that ants were omitted from the insecticide’s targets.  So, from below the kitchen sink, he retrieved a bottle of ant poison that was sweetened to attract the six-legged pests.  This poison he poured copiously onto laminated cardboard squares, an inch in diameter, and distributed them around the beleaguered ground the ants claimed.  This poison he employed successfully in years past and was sure of his its continued utility.  But this plan, too, failed.  He placed the ants on the splotches of poison so they might drink some and, more quickly, lead their fellows to it.  But these ants were not sweet-eaters; they took no notice.  The man, frustratedly noted that borax was the active ingredient of the ant poison, a substance he used for cleaning.  Forming a new plan, he went inside for the borax. 

             The worker ants were now penetrating the wood of the outer wall to the man’s home, and soon they would move the queen, bringing her safely within the two-by-four frame of the house.  Once accomplished, the man would not be able to destroy the ant civilization without destroying his own property. 

             The man returned to the colony with a solution of borax dissolved in hot water.  He applied this in gushes to the increasingly barren, ant-infested earth.  The ants began to scramble and die.  The man laughed to himself, thinking he had finally gained his difficult but inevitable victory against these lowly life forms.  The sun was setting, and so the man, too, retired. 

             The next day, after returning home from work, the man found that he had been naïve to declare himself the winner.  Although the upturned soil that once housed the colony was nothing more than scorched earth now, the house itself had become the high ground and final refuge of the ants still clinging to their right to life.  Frustrated and seething, the man finally spoke to his diminutive adversaries, “You don’t want to die, but you will!  I will burn you out, you little bastards!”  He went to his garage and fetched the gasoline for his mower just as it began to rain.  He carried it to the field of ant Armageddon and, without ceremony, began to slosh the gasoline upon the rain-damped earth.  Satisfied with this preparation, he pulled a lighter from his pocket, and, eyes glistening, flicked the wheel to summon a flame.  He lowered this flame slowly toward the gas-soaked earth.  With a roar, the gas vapor erupted in a giant fireball.  The man watched enraptured by the ant hell of his creation.  But his enthusiasm at his success quickly turned to fear.  “Too much gas!” he screamed.  The side of his house was aflame.  He started kicking at the fire near the base of the wall, but the burning mud merely stuck to his boot, causing his foot to ignite.  As he worked to put himself out, the wall of his house began to blacken.  Quickly, he hurried to the garage where he kept a fire extinguisher. 

             By the time he returned to the scene of his arson, the fire was dimming, having consumed the bulk of the combustible fluid.    Employing the extinguisher, the man was able to easily put out the remaining flames scattered around his house and yard.  Thinking to himself on his lapse in foresight, “Now I have a lot more work to do this summer.”  The battle had truly been hard-fought, but the queen lay dead.   

             The several scavenger and worker ants that had been outside the nest abandoned their home.  Without a queen there was not a colony.  Yet the ants despaired not, today marked the coronation of a new queen.  They regrouped by the man’s garage to select a new ruler and establish a new colony in a new pile of dirt and another wooden wall.