Like so many others, I have all but abandoned the romance of an open wood fire for the more efficient, if more prosaic, heat of an airtight stove. Unlike many, however, my stove has its own separate flue, so that the hearth is still available for guests and holidays, taking the place of caviar and champagne. On New Year’s Eve some pop a cork. We strike a match.
By late spring, however, when the stove begins to sit cold for days at a time and the wood supply is running low, I usually treat myself to a few last extravagant fires in the evening, the way a man will sometimes blow his last ten dollars of the month on a steak. My fires are more like soybean hamburgers, however, for what I usually have left by then are soggy, half-rotted, dead limbs gleaned from the spring woods.
Whenever one stores wood inside for any length of time before burning it, there is a good chance of releasing insects into the house. This is particularly true of dead wood or wood that has been left outside to age through an entire summer. Last summer we had in our kitchen an infestation of strange worms, which even the county entymologist could not identify. I suspect they immigrated inside a log.
One day last February, after splitting some old pitch pine, I brought in some logs. The bark had fallen off during the chopping, and their outer surfaces were decorated with the elaborate radiating patterns of bark beetle larvae as well as numerous little oval depressions about three-eighths of an inch long. In each depression a larva had hatched and bored itself out of a little nest, piling up the shredded wood around and over itself. Most of the nests were empty, but I found a few curled, segmented grubs that were covered with white ice crystals and appeared utterly frozen. Yet later that evening, as I was about to put one of these logs into the stove, a small, brown, mothlike creature emerged from one of the nests. Leaving its empty shell behind, the insect crawled out onto the end of the log where it fluttered off on drab wings up into the thin night of the ceiling beams.
Last Saturday night I stayed up late reading. The rest of the family had gone to bed. For company I built a fire in the fireplace, the first one in months. The damp wood took some coaxing and blowing but finally caught, and I sat happily beside it absorbed in my book while it sputtered and wheezed like an old asthmatic dog.
After a while I looked up and saw a group of small insects crawling around on the end of the log nearest me. They were ants. Undoubtedly they had made their winter home inside this piece of rotten wood and had now been evicted from it by the heat of the fire. For a few minutes the ants mulled about on the end of the log, which leaned up against a large stone I was using as a hob for the teakettle. I wondered why they did not simply crawl down over the stone and across the hearth to safety. Then I realized that the fire, which had been burning for some time, had heated the stone enough to keep the kettle steaming. The ants were trapped with no negotiable way out.
What struck me about their plight was that they did not panic and scatter as, say, sowbugs or people might have done in a similar situation. In fact, while remaining in almost constant motion, the ants nevertheless stayed calm and orderly. They continually touched each other’s antennae, communicating, literally scratching one another’s heads to find some way out. I think it was this apparent calmness in the face of disaster that initially restrained me from helping them out of their jam. Industrious and resourceful creatures that they are, they had me convinced they would find a solution, and I was coldly curious to see what it might be.
One individual crawled into a crevice at the end of the log, but a moment later it scuttled back out just ahead of a spurt of steam. Immediately the ant ran back and began vigorously touching antennae with its fellows, as though saying, ‘No way out there!’
After that the ants, about thirty or so, remained together, occasionally running to and fro on hairlike, hunched-up legs, but gradually massing into a tighter and tighter group. Still they showed no sign of panic, unless there was a hint of increased rapidity in their uninterrupted antennae touching as they continued to discuss the situation, repeatedly, interminably, committee-like, while the fire gradually consumed the log.
In the end it was not flame but water that drove them off. The heat of the fire continued to push the internal moisture out the end of the log. It darkened the end-grain of the wood with a thick bubbling mixture, spitting and spewing steam and hot gobbets of sap back onto the gathered ants. I stood hypnotized, fascinated, as incapable of action as if the fire had been a television screen showing me a disaster movie rather than a true-life drama.
Ministers, sociologists and talk-show hosts endlessly discuss the ‘non-involvement’ of modern man: of citizens who pass by crimes being committed in broad daylight, of neighbors who resolutely ignore the cries of victims they know being stabbed to death in the night, of pilots who bum and bomb entire villages and their inhabitants while chatting about basketball scores. Too easily, I think, we chalk up such phenomena to cowardice or cultural narcissism or (that great catch-all phrase of our century) ‘alienation.’ Ants, it is true, may exist on the outer edges of human sympathy. But their plight and my reaction to it made me wonder if our noninvolvement, or at least a part of it, is the result of a carefully nurtured consumer mentality for which television has been the most effective evangelist, though by no means the only one. Have we been trained, in other words, to feel that life and death are things to be observed and consumed, rather than to be participated in?
At last one of the ants cracked. As though flung off a pin-wheel, it broke violently from the group, racing off the log and down onto the glowing coals. A moment later I heard its small, hard body crackle. Then a few more took off, almost in spite of themselves, down across the hob stone. They had been right at first. The stone proved hot beyond their endurance, and they crumpled up and sizzled into black specks of soot halfway across its dry, deadly surface. Others panicked and followed the first ant directly down into the heart of the inferno. Where, I wondered, was blue-eyed Paul Newman, putting out the fire, escaping the volcano, saving the children?
Yet, though panicked, they still moved with admirable deliberateness, as though they had decided, ‘It’s hopeless – let’s end it fast.’ Even to the end a small stable core remained intact, a body of concerned citizens of a complex insect society rooted in natural law and order, capable of amazing feats of engineering and organization. Even as the flames drew nearer they continued to talk and discuss with one another, touching antennae as though in more communication and more information lay salvation itself. Even as the searing heat finally curled and crinkled their antennae, riving forever all further communication, they seemed to continue thinking in blind isolation and growing darkness of the flame, continuing to believe, even as it engulfed them, that there must, must be some civil and orderly way out of this.