I discovered an ant infestation in my peppermint last summer and decided I needed to do a real cleansing of the pot. As I ripped out their colony, I destroyed their hallways, nurseries, pantries and the queen’s rooms with a thumb over the hose. I know what’s supposed to be in there from watching nature programs at my grandma’s when I was a kid. Even after blasting them full-strength, they still came crawling out in waves from the ruined nest. It made me think of how empires fall and those same questions I had when I was a kid about whether we think animals don’t have the same social structures we do because we can’t communicate with them. This may be partly because my mom had a book about the secret life of plants that claimed plants had emotional reactions because the author had hooked electrodes up to some philodendrons and detected a pulse of neutrons. I wondered if the ants had any sense that they were about to be uprooted, whether they thought everything would go on the same forever. Whether they heard the hard spray of water in the distance and just thought it was part of the variations in the weather lately. I couldn’t help watching the ant soldiers and rooting for them. They would survive another day. They would go on to mutate another queen and found a new ant society away from my herbs where I could be happy for them instead of wanting to kill them. I ended up leaving the pot for several days before going after it with the hose again, to give them more time for their getaway. The same summer, I found these mysterious poles in a field off I-5 with a gold eagle at the top of one just like the Masonic symbols I saw all over Prague, left over from the former Czech empire.
