Losing Your Sanity Over Ant Infestation

I’ve got ants in my pants, and I want to do the boogie dance.

This is a little jingle that one of my son’s pals used to sing when he was about 4. I repeat it today not for the sake of nostalgia, but because I actually do have ants in my pants, and I want to do the etc., etc.

My house is full of carpenter ants. Actually, “full” is misleading. “Infested” is the word I’m looking for. They are in my walls, in my ceilings, in my bedroom, and, yes, occasionally in my trousers.

I do not enjoy living in the world’s largest Ant Farm. Think, for a moment, about how this would make you feel. Your home, the place where you feel safest, is being invaded by hordes of relentless, brainless creatures. They hide in the walls, where you can’t get at them. They bore holes in the wood, threatening your home’s very structure. They crawl across your dining room table. They crawl across your bathtub. You can hear them in your walls, tap-taptapping, like Poe’s “Raven.” You seal off one entryway, and the next day, they have found another. They are unstoppable. They are inexorable. They are evil.

Maybe not actually evil, but satanic. Definitely satanic.

I first noticed them last summer, marching up the outside of my house and disappearing into a gap in the siding. It was difficult not to notice them. Carpenter ants are the biggest ants you ever saw. The small ones are the size of a Jujy Fruit; the bigger ones are the size of Chihuahuas.

I sealed off the spot where they entered, proud of myself for handling the problem promptly. Then, two days later, I noticed a line of ants marching in on the other side of the house.

So I spent all of last summer tracking and killing ants. I became obsessed with them. The low point came on a Saturday afternoon, when I spent three hours on my hands and knees, creeping slowly and intently around my front yard, my nose five inches off the grass. Had I finally cracked? No, I was following an ant. I knew that the main ant nest must be outdoors, so I came up with a foolproof plan. I would kill a fly, give it to an ant and then follow it as it carried it to the location of its …

I do sound genuinely demented, don’t I? It’s true. Ants, for me, have taken on a mythical symbolism. They are like an implacable disease, a plague, something that invades the core of our being, something primitive and mysterious, something that swarms and grows, something difficult to eradicate.

I’m sorry. Do I sound too much like Job? Well, Job was lucky; he didn’t have carpenter ants. Because, let me tell you, getting rid of them would have cost Job some major bucks.

I tried my cheap homemade remedies (squashing, mostly) for almost a year. I thought I had them beat. But then this spring, as soon as the weather warmed up, I realized that my ants had been hunkered down, biding their time, waiting. My first hint came when I looked up at my bathroom doorframe and noticed a chorus line of 40 or 50 ants, kicking up their little creepy legs and giving each other high-fives with their antennae.

At that point, I surrendered. I called the Orkin man, mainly because the TV ads showed the Orkin man dressed like the Terminator, stomping through a house killing carpenter ants with death rays.

This appealed to me.

Still, I agonized over whether to use an exterminator, because, frankly, I didn’t want my family to breathe pesticides. But the Orkin man said he’d put the chemicals inside the walls, via little drill holes, which I hope is smarter than spraying Raid wildly around the house. In any case, I didn’t think I had a choice. I could either exterminate the ants or sign over my home’s title to them.

So the Orkin man came in and did the job while we were on vacation. The first thing we noticed when we came back were dead ants. The second thing we noticed were live ants.

Oh well. The Orkin man told us it would take months to get rid of them all. He has to come back and repeat the process every month for 12 months.

Meanwhile, please excuse me. I have this very odd feeling in my nether regions. The urge to jump up and do the boogie dance is overwhelming.

xxxx

The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Jim Kershner The Spokesman-Review