Ants, unicorns, mothers and other dream helpers

(No. 153)

May 12, 2024

Harvester ants coming and going from mound entrance built against concrete roadform

The harvester ants have been busy as usual this season. They often build their nests along the the paths we make, at the edges of highways, roads, sidewalks and gravel trails, an adaptation that takes advantage of the weird world we have made for them—a species that, like us, is obsessed with the collection of surplus grain, and has its workers make elaborate networks of pathways for that purpose. Our concrete jungle seems to suit them, as does the fact that in Texas, our post-colonial destruction of habitat has decimated the population of Pogonomyrmex’s main regional predator, the horny toad.

I’ve written here before about the trippy revelation that harvester ants regulate the coming and going of their foragers with a method that is algorithmically identical to TCP/IP, the packet switching protocol that underlies the movement of data on the Internet. I have a section of my forthcoming book that digs deeper into that story, and the Anthropocene ecology of these prodigious urban neighbors of ours. This week I learned a trippier thing about the species, thanks to a short video that appeared in my feed from the remarkable Austin-based ethnobotanist and paleoforaging evangelist Cyrus Harp.

There was a huge harvester ant colony at the center of our lot when we bought it back in 2009, built up against the steel walls of the valve box the workers had used to access the petroleum pipeline that had diagonally bisected the property until it was shut down in the 90s thanks the work of East Austin environment justice activists I would later get to work with. The colony somehow survived both the pipeline removal and the construction of our home, and as we re-established a prairie ecology around the house, every once in a while working in the yard I would learn just how painful is the bite of those big mandibles.

It only happened once or twice, as the harvester ants are not aggressive, and mark their territory very clearly so you can avoid it, in contrast to the invasive fire ants who seem to prefer the preemptive first strike. The harvester ants may assume you know, as most vertebrate predators have learned over the millennia, but I only really learned this week, that their venom is the most toxic of all the insects in the world. As one scholar noted, “Pogonomyrmex stings are exceptionally intense and piercing—often maintaining this high level for several hours—and have been characterized as approximating ‘ripping muscles or tendons’ or ‘turning a screw in the flesh around the sting site.’” A truth I can attest to, and one which made me surprised to learn that some humans figured out ways to get high off it.

Unsurprisingly, they were Californians.

Recently enough that ethnographers were able to collect stories from living practitioners at the beginning of the twentieth century, the Shoshonean groups along the southeastern area of South Central California, including the Kitanemuk, Kawaiisu and the Hokan-speak Chumash, used harvester ants to take their youth into vision quests designed to enable them to attain shamanic power. The “ant doctor,” a post-menopausal woman, would take the boys to a place outside the encampment, after they had already fasted for 3-4 days. She would have them lay on the ground, and then force them to eat moistened clumps of eagle down crawling with ants, and dare them to take more, until, ideally, they would have ingested 300-400 ants who would mostly now be crawling around alive in their stomach. She would then walk off, making them think she had left. And when they seemed relaxed, she would sneak back up and startle them with a poke or tickle to the ribs, causing the ants to start biting their insides. She would then watch for the signs that the youth had entered into the near-catatonic state such a massive amount of venom would induce.

In that state, over a period of hours, the boys would have dream encounters with animals, and other supernatural visions—experiences designed to provide them unique powers to navigate the adult lives to come. And when they awakened, they would be given hot water to induce vomiting, and the ants would come back out, mostly still alive.

I joked to my wife and adult son that we should try this as an enhancement of the intermittent fasting we have been exploring. They didn’t seem down for it—especially Hugo, who already had plenty of his own harvester ant encounters as a youth—but I found myself excited by the revelation that these commonplace creatures have the power to help us enter different realms of perception. I wonder what the animals around us would tell us today, if we had the courage to go to the place where we could communicate with them on a different plane of consciousness.

Unicorn rainbow projection — Tuesday night on our ceiling

Our daughter turned 5 this week, and the best present Agustina got her was something that feels slightly tuned in to a similar energy: a tiny flashlight that mimics Mom’s slide projector with a quarter-sized carousel that casts trippy images of rainbow unicorns on the walls of a darkened room. You can tell Octavia feels empowered by this magical means of doing work just like her sculptor and light artist mother. Now I am wondering what post-Power Point ritual we might invent for her, to help her navigate the broken world we have bequeathed her generation, one in which there are more animals that have disappeared into myth and memory over the course of my own lifetime than are now alive. It won’t involve ant venom, but it will surely rely on the aid of the magical animals we are still lucky to have around, in the pockets of nature we have allowed to exist in the margins of our planetary sprawl.

Of course, as I was reminded exploring our rewilded yard and its inhabitants with the kids who came over for Saturday’s bday celebration, our children are the ones who teach us about the wonders of nature and its lessons for living, having not yet been ruined by the things we will later teach them about how to live in the mirror world of human self-absorption. Whether they will have the stuff to save us from our future, I don’t know, but I have some hope we will at least be able to give them the tools to make one (or many) that works for them.

Analog spring close-ups

Macro film photo of head and antenna of variegated fritillary

My own vision quest this spring has been to experiment with analog film photography of the native life that surrounds us here in the East Austin edgelands, using the Canon F1 I liberated from my dad’s basement a few years ago, and the accompanying macro lens he used to take pictures of people’s teeth in the 1970s. The best time to catch wildlife around here is early morning, which is also a tricky time for film photography, as the light is not yet bright, and especially challenging for microscopic close-ups. So I’ve been playing with tungsten film designed for low light—Cinestill 800T the folks at Austin Camera hooked me up with. The latest roll came back with some cool exposures, including a bunch of butterflies who stayed still for me as they pigged out en masse around a riparian mulberry tree.

For an especially photogenic pair, here are the male and female checkered whites I found mating on the rock beach behind us, a rewilded old gravel dredge on the banks of the urban Colorado:

Checkered white butterflies mating on river rock

A close-up of the blue sage I found growing behind a shipping container, with a surprise green spider hiding there on the right:

And another variegated fritillary, showing some of the signs of life lived and almost lost I wrote about last week. Not the most extravagantly painted of our lepidoptera, but I think its beauty comes out with vivid life in this dead media.

A Mother’s Day story

We went to South Padre Island last weekend, for a short three nights by the surf. My sister-in-law, who has spent most of her life working on reproductive justice issues, had an unusual work event that Saturday: a workshop to teach local activists how to edit Spanish-language wiki pages about women’s health, which has become the best free source of such information. So we decided to tag along and give my recently widowed mother-in-law and her three grandkids a beach weekend.

It’s a long drive from Austin to South Padre, around 5 1/2 hours. It’s crazy pretty in stretches, especially between Luling and Kenedy, where the two-lane highway follows a rolling old route through a landscape of giant oaks and abundant wildflowers that feels a little bit like time travel. South of Corpus Christi, the last two hour stretch passes through the famed King Ranch—an insanely expansive stretch of private property. And on this trip the police presence was unusually thick. Partly because there was road construction, but also because of the efforts by our state government to take on the task of border enforcement constitutionally entrusted to the feds, which includes pulling over any vehicle they can justify a lawful reason to do so, and seeing if they can find someone they might be able to deport.

Beach buggy black VW Beetle — Another way to outrun the deputies. $6500 OBO

That stretch between the Nueces and the Rio Grande was long-disputed even after the Texas Revolution, as to which country “owned” it and had the right to exclude others. And when you travel through the region, you are always reminded of how much the border is really a fiction that runs through a zone of bicultural diversity layered on top of a deep history that precedes European settlement, which you can still see in the land and its inhabitants if you pay attention. When you drive back north, you see the plastic water barrels left out for travelers on foot. Until you arrive at the inland checkpoint where all traffic is diverted for a citizenship spot check under the eyes of dozens of cameras that look like they were borrowed from Terry Gilliam’s propmaster, armed and badged interrogators, and uniformed dogs that encourage you to stay in the car.

In my 25 years living in Texas, I’ve gotten to know many people who made their way through that landscape without visas that certify their right to do so under our laws, laws founded not on the aura of justice they get dressed up with, but on the seizure by force that Chief Justice Marshall famously and almost embarrassedly explained by acknowledging “Conquest confers a title which the courts of the conqueror cannot deny.” We saw one of those people Saturday night, at the celebration she and her husband had of their daughter’s graduation from college—the first in the family, and one of the hardest-working young people it has ever been my privilege to know.

As we enjoyed the beautiful yard maintained by a landscape professional dad who told me “trees are life,” the amazing food, and the live Norteño, our friend the mom came around showing off the academic caps their daughter had made for her parents, each adorned with a message. On one, it read Para Mis Padres. Llegaron Sin Nada y Me Lo Dieron Todo. “For my parents: They came here with nothing, and gave me everything.”

Call me sappy, but I didn’t read it until I saw it on the photo later, and when I did, I choked up. Not just for the intrinsic power of the condensed novel of their lives it encoded, but also for the way it reminded me of my own mother’s sacrifices—even as it hammered home the privilege we enjoy as the beneficiaries of conquest, and the distance we have to travel to find our way to a more just world.

Field Notes

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