Series Six: 07. Red Black White

The bugs are gonna win.

Story

Last Winter when it was wet outside the ants came inside, like they do every year. This time they clustered in three colonies: the bathtub, the car, and a succulent.

The succulent came first. For months my daughter had been tending a string-of-pearls in a tiny ceramic planter shaped like a hedgehog that she had convinced me to let her buy at the grocery store. We kept noticing little clumps of dirt falling out around it, until one day we saw the trail: ants streaming back and forth from the floorboards up the wall and into the planter. A closer look revealed almost no soil left at all in that hedgehog, mostly a writhing mass of ants.

Acting on instinct, I submerged the whole planter in a big bowl filled with water. The ants clamored up the vines of the succulent to the surface of the water only to find nowhere to go. Then something else started floating up, little white blobs that looked like those perlite specks that come in potting soil. We watched the ants frantically rolling them together into bigger balls. Oh my god, those balls are their eggs. The ants were trying to save their young. They struggled busily for almost an hour before succumbing to the water.

Drowning an entire ant colony was at first empowering, then fascinating, then awful. Have you ever watched ants work together, marveling at how they coordinate, how they all seem to know exactly what to do? Now imagine that same synchronized labor as a frantic, slow-motion attempt to avert their fate, all while you watch their tiny civilization collapse from above like a merciless god, or some kind of cruel dictator.

Then came Valentine’s Day. That morning we saw the bathtub ants marching like they do often, finding many entry points along the rim of failing caulk. That day they seemed to be coming in from the drain overflow, so I simply turned on the faucet. Immediately ants began streaming out thicker and faster, escaping the water. Then she appeared, larger than the rest with a huge thorax. The queen.

I squashed her with a square of toilet paper.

It was so quick and easy, like suddenly winning a game of chess I’d been playing for months.

Not an hour later, we found another one. The kids and I were getting in the car for a short hike and when we opened the door the ants seemed more active than usual. I turned around to get something.

“Mom, there is another queen!” D shouted before smashing her.

In all my years of ant mitigation I have never seen one, and this Valentine’s Day there were two. Queens of Hearts.

We drove to Strawberry Canyon buzzing, feeling charmed and triumphant, and only a little guilty. We fantasized about being able to bring food and drinks into the car again without getting swarmed by ants. We were still excited as we hiked. Rains meant the creek was high, tuning us into the small details all around us.

D noticed a ladybug and the three of us squatted to watch it slowly cross our path. Then we noticed another one. And another. Turning our heads we saw a whole swarm of ladybugs, thousands of them huddled in piles next to the trail.

Before I could tell him not to, E started picking up the ladybugs in clumps, letting them teem and drop off his hands. Is that okay to do? It was all so novel that soon D scooped up a handful of ladybugs and I did too. We stood by the side of the trail holding bigger and bigger clumps of ladybugs, shocking ourselves and each other, revelling in the miracle of nature.

Then it struck me. Why hold ladybugs and not ants? This was our third awe-inspiring nature encounter of the morning, and the first that we didn’t respond to with murder. We didn’t let the queen ants crawl all over our hands or any of the other thousands of ants we’d been stomping for years. Is it because ladybugs are somehow cute? Beneficial? Because they are outside?

In Summer we visited New York City. Living in Northern California we had braced ourselves for heat and concrete, so the shaded boulders in Central Park surprised us. Making our way to the Metropolitan Museum of Art we couldn’t help but stop, climbing up and down and running back and forth across the rocks, stopping to examine the lichen. That’s where we noticed it—the most beautiful bug we had ever seen. It was bright red with black squiggles and white spots. I pulled out my phone to identify it, but multiple species names flashed across the screen before settling on nothing. One particularly poetic name stuck in my mind: Spotted Lanternfly. I repeated it to myself a few times so I could confirm it later.

That day we saw nearly every artifact at the museum, immersing ourselves in the talents of mankind while the children mostly complained. Sitting down on the bus afterwards, we remembered the beautiful bug and finally had a chance to look it up. I typed “Spotted Lanternfly” into Google.

That was it, the bug we had seen! This one was apparently in its late nymph stage. Then I read the description.

“If you see a spotted lanternfly, you should kill it on sight.”

Wait, what? WHAT? Why? Why would I kill this beautiful bug? We encountered nature in Manhattan of all places and had somehow messed up by NOT killing it? The kids couldn’t believe it either. “How can it be hurting nature? It is nature!”

Ah, but the spotted lanternfly is an invasive species. Apparently indigenous to China and Vietnam, it has made its way to the United States where it has no natural predators. They prefer to live on another invasive species with a beautiful name, the Tree of Heaven, but unchecked they feed and poop on all sorts of other ornamental plants and crops, destroying them and millions of dollars.

A creature left to its own devices outside of its natural habitat becomes a pest.

Next we visited the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, explaining to the kids how their own ancestors and so many more came through there to the United States in search of a better life. We talked about how essential immigration is to this country, discussed why it’s so dangerous to punish someone just because they aren’t from here.

We saw more spotted lanternflies. Reluctantly, we stomped on them.

Three species seemed like the right number for a bug story: ants, ladybugs, lanternflies. I set myself a deadline of the autumn equinox for my next Rainbow Squared piece, which coincided neatly with a solar eclipse and Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. A week ahead of schedule I finished painstakingly tracing more than a hundred ladybugs and considered myself a success.

That night, tucked in to read James and the Giant Peach (a book about giant bugs), E told us again that his head was itchy. I had checked his scalp a couple of days prior and saw nothing, dismissing the itch as a consequence of the haircut I had just given him. But this time it was unmistakable.

The moment you first spot lice is eerie. After your eyes adjust to the close-up view of hair follicles, you find a dot out of place and think, well, maybe that’s just some kind of fleck. Then the fleck moves.

So you comb every strand with a nit comb, strip all the beds, wash everything that can be washed, and bag up everything that can’t. I may have felt ambivalent about the ants, the ladybugs, and the lanternflies. I was clear about the lice.

You find and destroy them and their eggs, one by one.

Divinatory Meaning

Red is life and body, inhabiting a physical form, as transient as it is. We don’t know what happens after we die but we can be pretty sure it is different from the fleshy, timebound experience of a meat suit.

Black White is the other end of the deal. It is transcendence and interconnectedness. It is spirit, the part of our experience that perhaps transcends the body. The part that might remain after we die, slip into other timelines, rejoin some cosmic oneness, or simply poof, disappear, leaving the meat suit as just that.

Paired together, Red Black White points to being here on Earth, now, in this lifetime. Human. Humans can be considered a keystone species, having an outsized impact on the entire ecosystem. Outsized control, and outsized responsibility.

There is a prayer in the Jewish High Holiday liturgy called Unetaneh Tokef. Its origin story is gory, but the legend tells that it came from the dying words of an 11th-century rabbi on Rosh Hashanah. It also inspired this Leonard Cohen song:

And who by fire, who by water
Who in the sunshine, who in the night time
Who by high ordeal, who by common trial
Who in your merry merry month of May
Who by very slow decay
And who shall I say is calling?

Humans hold the power to decide who lives and who dies. Pest control may be the realm where most people experience this directly, extinguishing lives with our own hands. Does that make us gods?

Bugs can show us how we value certain lives over others. How some are considered precious while others can be discarded in the name of safety. How revenge, even genocide, can be justified as self-defense.

If Red Black White shows up in a reading, think about how you could shift perspective entirely. To a bug, what we see as a flat line may be a walkable surface with a circumference. Where might shifting scale shift your understanding? Look at it in micro like a bug, or pulled out from above in macro like a god.

What is bothering you? A bug in the machine, a bug in the software, something that disrupts your sense of the normal operating procedure. What could you accomplish if you embraced it instead of eradicating it? What you perceive as an invasion may be a message.

Or maybe there is something you secretly relish in being bothered by. What do you get out of harboring that annoyance? Perhaps there is even something that you wish bothered you enough to actually do something about.

Shifting perspective further reveals another truth: we may have godlike powers over bugs now, but they’ll have the last laugh. They were here long before us, they will probably be here after. Remembering your place in the greater whole is also remembering your place in time. Act with humility, curiosity, and care.