The Four-Gated City
by Jo Rebeka on 08/01/11
Well, last week something kind of amazing happened. We finally started getting our summer rains (yeah!), which was great for all the gardens and yards and to cut down the persistent dustbowl effect.... but it also had some unexpected effects on our Fritizens. We've already talked about how the Gangsta's are handling the rain (grooving away in their underground recording studio and not paying too much attention to the outside world), but how have the Fritizens coped?
After all, the torrential rains hit immediately following the wild celebration of the new queen taking off on her honeymoon flight with her consort. With all the emotional upheaval and that raucous party-till-you-suddenly-burst-into-tears kind of energy, I had been a little concerned about how the nest would be affected by the exit of the virgin queen. Of course the Fritizens have their own beloved monarch to focus on, but you may remember she's been troubled by some strange dreams of late. I had good reason to be a little worried.
As usual, however, the presence of a real crisis clarifies things and gives extraordinary focus, and the the reigning Queen of Antioch soon got a royal distraction in the form of a storm that left the entire nest flattened. It rained and rained and rained for over three hours!
I was so worried about them, I confess to going out into the yard at 2 am with a flashlight to see how they were faring. To my horror, I found nothing at all... it was as if Antioch had never existed! The whole low mound had been dispersed over th eplains of New Persia... I couldn't find any sort of entrance to the city, and very little evidence of all the frit they had collected to build their own version of Mount Silpios. I was pretty upset, but as I stood there in my pj's in the rain, lower lip trembling and unable to believe my eyes, I did finally spot a tiny movement, completely off to the side of the nest, a good 6 or 7 inches from what had been the main entrance. To my tentative joy, there was one very soggy looking Fritizen, struggling to lift an equally soggy clump of dirt and actually finally opening a new entrance to the crypt-like city. As she staggered wearily forward into the cool night air, a whole crowd of Fritizens spilled out of the hole behind her like champagne from an uncorked bottle, many of them carrying little bits of this and that as they raced out. In fact they suddenly were so active that it seemed like a good idea for a slow moving human in bedroom slippers to get out of their way. I quietly took my leave of them, knowing they had a full night's work ahead of them and there was absolutely nothing I could do to help.
By the next morning, a truly amazing sight greeted my eyes. I admit that I have not paid a whole lot of attention to ants before recent weeks, but I don't remember ever seeing an anthill with multiple entrances. Perhaps this is common as dirt, but I prefer to see it as more evidence that our Fritizens are truly extraordinary.
The "emergency exit" that I had seen open in the wee hours appeared to have caved in again, but there was a hole further south, about 5 inches from where the main gate had been, and it was bustling with activity. The original main gate had been reopened as well, but instead of the gradual descent under the grand promenade of twigs, it was now little more than vertical drop with an army of ants crawling up and down at a frenetic pace. As I watched, a few brave souls popped up in a third location, fairly close to what I was thinking of as the emergency exit. I ran to get my camera, and by the time I returned they had reopened the emergency exit as well.
I suppose it could simply be a survival tactic, maybe every sodden anthill undergoes the same sort of transformation after a deluge, but I could not help but notice that the Fritizens did not stop until they had opened four new entrances. Not three, not five, but four.
Could it be our visionary queen was making a subtle ant-ipodean and wry homage to that comrade in arms, the radical author Doris Lessing, and her post apocalyptic novel "The Four-Gated City"? What better send-up of Lessing's fashionably post-modern despair and morosely analytical view of the uber-mechanized city than the survival of their own sacred communal society, where ants have triumphed for millenia following precepts that human beings just can't seem to make work?
And of course all four entrances were streaming with Fritizens, most of whom were carrying something.... a soggy mattress, a pebble, a bit of straw, and an awful lot of these round, flat white pellets. What in the heck were they?
After long consideration, I decided they might be the white bits from that garden soil additive (the name escapes me at the moment). Where Ant-ioch is may have once been part of the flower garden, before we owned the house. Whatever those little white things are, there are a whole lot of them, and the big storm was the Fritizens chance to do some spring cleaning, as it were.
Here you can see several Fritizens working to pass the flat white disks hand over hand up out of the tunnels. You can tell they are very light from the way they are being handled, in contrast to this photo below, which looks like it could be an outtake from Rocky, where one Fritizen carries an enormous pebble on her shoulder as she runs up the steps out of the city. Inspirational!
Can't you almost hear the theme music?
Here's a close up view of the remains of the orginal city gate, with the collapsed timbers.
and here's a wider view of the new entrance... as you can see it's just about vertical, but I feel sure they are going to keep working on it.
A monument to the vision of their extraordinary Queen!
Well, as always, there is more to tell about the adventures of the Fritizens, but I think that's just about story for one night.
Now go brush your teeth and sleep tight!
