A Hitchcock Moment

About fifteen years ago, my wife and I noticed that the occasional visits from the neighborhood black carpenter ants, the big black ones that look like plump blackberries, were becoming more regular, especially in our kitchen. So we sprayed inside and dropped diazinon around the foundation, but still the ants came back every day. Then one day, we found them celebrating mass on a slop of spilled vanilla ice cream on the kitchen counter. There were fifty or sixty right there on the counter feasting and taking communion. I knew then that there had to be a nest.

So I started cleaning out all the cabinets. Nothing. Finally when I pulled out the refrigerator, I found lots of black ants scurrying around. They were especially thick along the ice maker water line that entered the room from the crawl space below.

Armed with that information, I went around to the other side of the house and entered the crawl space. This particular crawl space, underneath our traditional ranch style house, required me to wiggle myself across the length of the house with the floor above coming increasingly closer and closer to my head. Finally, I made it to the area where I had concluded the water line entered the kitchen above. I didn't see any sign of ants, so I reached up in the tight space and pulled down the section of insulation above me. As I pulled it away from the floor, hundreds...perhaps thousands...of huge, black carpenter ants fell on my face. reflexively I started swatting at my face futilely brushing and swinging. It must have looked like I was in a full-blown seizure. I wedged my way back out as quickly as humanly possible, spitting out ants as I went.

Horrible. horrible. ick.

Later, after I had recovered somewhat, I wiggled back under there. This time I was armed with a can of ant spay. I wedged my way right back there and saturated the area with the poisonous liquid. Rarely have I enjoyed killing as much as I did that afternoon.