I had another strange encounter with an anthill. This particular encounter was at the ant megalopolis outside of my house in the big yard looking thing. When observing an ant colony, I always first orient myself by looking at the size and colors of the ants. The colony that seems to live at this particular megalopolis is made up of pretty large ants (as far as ants go), black in the back, and reddish in the front.

Color me surprised when I saw some smallish black ants scurrying around the megalopolis, and color me even more surprised when I saw one of the red ants seemingly in some kind of quarrel with one of the black ants. They were really just, like, going at it, so it seemed. I don’t know how to describe it in a defamiliarized way. My western mind could only see the encounter as a fight. Heads colliding, bodies moving around as a unit in erratic circles.

Somewhere along the way, I lost track of the two fighting ants—maybe they went their separate ways for a moment or something—and I got caught up looking at the actual hill around which the ants seem to gravitate. It’s a rather large hill with a sort of cliff’s edge at the top of it, which the ants can sort of crawl under to get into the hole. It seems like right away the hill hole bifurcates into two sub-holes that go down to god only fucking knows where. It’s in moments like that when I wish I could shrink down to the size of an ant, or maybe a little bigger so I don’t get caught up in (what a human might view as) a fight.

Anyway, I digress. But one further point I’ll make in that digression that actually does relate to the observed experience is that when I crouch for a minute, or even just a few seconds, my legs protest and tell me to stand up. Something about the blood flow? Compressing nerves? Something in my legs doesn’t like me being crouched, and it’s a real damn shame, because I want to be able to watch these events for as long as I please. But I suppose there’s something about the scarcity of observations that makes each observation feel all the more monumental. Also, vision plays a role in the discomfort. With my glasses on, it feels sort of straining to my eyes to look down. But then it’s like, okay, do I set my glasses down on the ground? Do I take them off and put them somewhere else? No pockets on my shorts today. Anyway, it doesn’t matter, because it’s not as much of a limiting factor as the legs thing. So, I would really like to come up with some method of crouching down without hurting my legs. A more sustainable position. Not to mention my spine, which is not really interested in being as kyphotic as it needs to be to bend over the anthill and observe. So you see how my body is not particularly well-suited to observing ants on the ground. Not only is it a problem of legs, but of eyes and of spines.

My eyes eventually once again stumbled upon the two ants (possibly) fighting again. This time I saw the black ant climbing up a blade of grass, as if to escape the jabs of the red ant. I had never seen this kind of vertical warfare before, but it was pretty cool and elegant. The ants must be pretty smart if they can employ tactics like that. (Actually, I guess, come to think of it, the grass blade tactics happened in the observation prior, the one I mentioned before I digressed and made it about me and my own body and my own comfort.)

In my second observation of the ostensibly duelling ants, I noticed that the black ant had grabbed one of the red ant’s six legs and was dragging the ant far away from the megalopolis. This was particularly disturbing to me as I had assumed that the anthill belonged to the red ants. This is when I started to question the frame that I had brought to my observations; I realized quite quickly that it was an overly dualistic one. Who am I to attempt to use my own feeble english language to describe the events going on atop an anthill? Who’s to say that the ants were really fighting at all, and who’s to say that the anthill really “belongs” to any one color of ant? Who’s even to say that the black ants and the red ants are “different” in any way that is meaningful to the ants themselves? It didn’t seem to be much of a problem for the other ants. I may have expected the red ants to team up and assist in the fight, to tip the balance toward the red ant, to try to scare off the black ant and take the red ant back in…. Instead, it seemed like the other ants were entirely unconcerned with the entanglement, even when the action was taking place right on top of the anthill itself, in the epicenter of the ant megalopolis.

Eventually, the black ant dragged the red ant pretty far out, but that’s when the red ant evaded the grasp somehow and darted back to the megalopolis. When it got back across the event horizon of the megalopolis, it started scurrying around seemingly in all directions, with no intention, seemingly. It seemed like it was just sort of freaking out. And when I looked back over to the black ant, the dragger, I saw it perched at the top of a blade of grass, as if lying in wait……

This was, again, an observation that was limited by my own legs’ ability to keep me in a position close to the ground. I was only able to sit there for about a minute—maybe two minutes—but then, time spent observing ants is dilated in ways that I can’t quite understand. Who’s to say whether I was crouched down for one minute or five. It was somewhere in that range, and I’ll leave it at that.

In conclusion, I really have no idea what is going on in the antworld, in large part because I’m not the size of an ant, and because I don’t have the same nervous system as the ants, and not the same culture, and, in addition, because of how limited the amount of time I’m able to spend in observation of the ants is. In time, I hope I will find some method of sitting down that doesn’t disrupt the ants’ lives. You may have already thought of the idea of perhaps just sitting on the ground criss-cross-apple-sauce. But then my big ass would sit on some of the peripheral ant colonies and possibly even kill some of the ant banlieusards. So that’s not an option for me, I’m afraid. I want to be an observer who causes as little destruction as possible, and what I’m quickly realizing is that the act of observation might necessarily be a destructive one. Please, if anyone has any ideas, I would love to hear them. Until then, I will continue stealing minutes at a time to observe the happenings at the ant megalopolis.