A moment for a nightmare

I learned something new today and I need to share it.

Did you know that ants (carpenter, acrobat, etc.) can all grow wings when the colony’s nest is mature? At a certain point, the strongest, most fertile inhabitants of a nest that will soon be outgrown, grow wings and then take flight in a swarm so that they may search for a new nesting location. They are also in charge of reproducing very rapidly so that when the new site is found, they can populate and build it very quickly. For very large and mature colonies, the amount of ants in a swarm can be as many as many as hundreds of thousands. Some swarms are so large that they can appear on weather radar, mistaken for rain.

I am sharing this because today I thought I had been hit with my own personal plague and the apocalypse had come to take me. It may seem like I am being dramatic, but I am worried I won’t be able to sleep tonight and may forever feel a thousand bugs crawling on my skin. Sometime in the afternoon, I was reading my book underneath my car’s attached awning. Sitting in my little camping chair with my water bottle and hat on top of a camping table. About 20 ants descended onto my surroundings. A few landed on me, one on my book, and about 15 onto the table. I found this to be normal, but didn’t want to deal, so I began to pack up my things so that I could move myself and TIkvah into my car. As I start to open the door to put my things inside, I begin to see a couple hundred ants flying around the air and landing on my car. I decide I better get inside quick, so I start to take down the table and the chair. As I am closing the backdoor of my car, I look up and onto the horizon and can no longer see the valley below of the mesas that I am connected to. I see a wall, a black throbbing wall, moving towards me. All of a sudden a big gust of wind comes and lifts the awning up off the ground, I reach out for a pole to anchor, but I can no longer see. All of a sudden the awning flips over the car, and the screeching sounds of metal breaking can barely be heard over the buzzing that fills my hears and my heart beat understanding that I need to start running. So, I run. At first, in little circles flapping my arms around my face, then fast and far away, hoping that Tikvah is safe underneath my Subaru. About 50 feet away, the ants that were on me are still crawling, but I now there are not more coming. I turn around and look back at what feels like a horrible daydream. My tan awning is now a dark boiling red, undulating to the wind. Wispy gray clouds hover around my windows and doors.

There are ants crawling in and out of my shirt and shorts. They clutch to tendrils of my hair and crawl around my scalp, trapped by my bun. All I know is that I need to get Tikvah inside, but to do that I need to get the poles of the awning put away. The poles are now swinging through the air like anvils from a cartoon, waiting to crush someones skull. I won’t be much use to my cat if I am concussed or dead. As I approached the car again, I realize that I need to hold my breath and squint my eyes in order to get within reach of the poles and the place they need to be secured to. Even holding my breath, multiple fly into my nose or ears. The ants begin to settle onto the awning that is now draped over my car, so I pull Tikvah from underneath and sling her into the door that seems to have the least ants hovering around it. All of this takes place over about 20 minutes and is filled with me running into and out of the swarm, sometimes giving up halfway through a march because the ants invade my airways or my eyesight.

Eventually, I take stock of what I have and what I need. I need to drive. It seems like the only way to get rid of the swarm. I have my phone which I use to call my mom and tell her that I will be driving the 4 hours to Steamboat if I can make it into my car. In order to make it into my car, I need to roll up the awning, the red awning that is meant to be tan. The next 15 minutes are filled once more with missions of running in and running out of the swarm. About halfway through I find a tissue of unknown origin and unknown use stuffed in my short’s pocket. I use it to stuff my nostrils, so that the only thing I have to worry about is keeping them out of my eyes. The moment that I flipped the awning back over the car and the moment that I began to roll it, the sun was darkened by their wings.

With the awning secured as well as I could, I ran once down the road, still hoping that if I ran fast enough I would be rid of them. I turned back to figure out the last step. Getting into the car. Without the awning open, the ants were in chaos, tumbling in writhing balls around the roof and onto the ground in front of the driver’s door. They clutched to the mesh screen on the side of the car with the open back seat. Calling my mother intermittently and reassuring that I was in fact not okay, I decided that if I was going to make it into the car, I would need to swan dive into the side where my bed lay and then quickly turn around to close the door. The result was the opposite of graceful and let about 70-100 ants inside the car, but I was in. I began to take down all of my window covers and shove them away from places I would need to see out of to drive. I lost my keys halfway through and had a small-ish breakdown while sweating from the heat and the adrenaline. I found my keys and started driving. I didn’t stop until I reached Steamboat where I have decided to stay at least the night, maybe indefinitely, or at least long enough to clean out my car and shower enough times that I can scrub my skin raw.

Right now, I have not had time to process this or what it means for the rest of the trip. I am sorry that this is the update, but today reality didn’t seem real. I probably need to go talk to a priest, a rabbi, and an Imam because what does it mean when the plague of locusts comes in modern times to your Subaru Outback… I am open to suggestions.