To Interfere, or to Ignore

I wonder: if I were to write an attempt at an Annie Dillard-style book devoted entirely to my musings on nature, on the little creatures we forget we interact with every day, would anyone read it? My generation’s attention span is shrinking. I rarely sit in front of the TV without a phone or video game in my face. Besides, who’s to say my voice is worth listening to at all? Did Dillard question this when she first began? Does she now? Does Robin Wall Kimmerer? Did Thoreau? 

I suppose I’ll never know if anyone will care about the words I write unless I put pen to paper. Though I doubt these words could capture our shrinking attention span, perhaps the slow-moving, natural world is the key to combatting our brain rot. After all, today I spent an hour watching ants crawl across the patio, phone set aside, without music or an audiobook or a TV show playing in the background. I could barely tear myself away for tacos. Tacos!

These ants, the ants of the Airbnb I’m staying in with my family in the south of Spain, don’t appear to be any different from the ants back home. I suppose it would take more research before I could confidently point out the species, but I’m more intent on simply observing their behavior.

On this day, I’m two weeks away from 21: an age, I fear, will come with even more existential crises than 20, or 18, or 13. I learned recently that by the time we’re seven, we’ve lived half of our perceived lives. Things are moving faster and faster and I need to know how to slow down. 

When I wake, I lie in bed for a few moments, scrolling through Instagram and feeling the sun spray its light through the window and play across the contours of my face. When my mom walks through the room on the way to her bathroom, I sit up and announce, “I found a poisonous spider in my crotch this morning. The worst part is I killed it accidentally.” My mom tells me that that is not something that a normal young woman would say. I’m curious as to which part she’s referring to. 

Outside, on the rental’s porch, we eat cheese on pieces of bread torn from baguettes and watch a helicopter dump buckets of water on a forest fire in the distant mountains. The rest of the day is spent exploring the nearest town, reading and writing, and swimming in the rental pool. I pretend to be a bird doing a mating dance in the water. When my sibling is fed up with my ridiculousness, and disappears into the house, I read half in, half out of the water, slowly slinking further onto the shore like a snake hoping to dry an inch of slithery skin at a time. When I reach the grass, I fall asleep, waking only when my dad sprays more sunscreen on my back. 

When my parents leave for an hour-long hike, I crawl around the raised perimeter of the pool, scooping out black bugs smaller than sugar crystals. They stick to my hands with the water, and I let the pool drain through my fingers like a sieve, then rest the bugs on the cement side. Some cling to my skin, stuck fast in the water’s cohesion, and I can feel them vibrating angrily in attempts to free themselves, wings still trapped tight against their backs. Some look like they’ve gone through a cycle in the washing machine, limbs all akimbo. There’s a bee, a fly, some sort of leaf bug, and something that makes me shriek when it moves suddenly. Sometimes, the helpless creatures are too far into the center of the pool for me to reach from the side. I stick my feet in and try to lift them with my toes. I paddle the water towards me until one’s within reach. It was just a dried-up flower. 

By the time my parents return, I’ve made it halfway around the perimeter of the pool. My efforts have begun to feel pointless, because I can see more bugs have begun to dot the water where I started. I find a bee left on the dry siding of the pool, long dead, legs stiff against its body in rigor mortis—its stinger is gone, and I feel worse for it than for whoever it stung. They came away with a bump that will fade, while here I’m watching the bee's insides ooze out of its body from the hole the stinger left. I pull at the organs—or whatever they are—with a blade of grass until I can see a small, translucent balloon that pops when it hits the ground, and a long line of white goo that seems to stretch to be much longer than what could fit inside the bee. 

“I’m never going to save another bee from the water,” my dad says behind me. “I tried and one stung me.”

I hate that some creatures die to feed another, while others die for no reason at all. If they must die, shouldn’t there be a purpose? Shouldn’t they contribute to another life? I consider finding a ladder and climbing to the rafters above to feed the dead bugs to the baby birds nesting there, but I’m afraid I’d scare the chicks to their deaths. And who would eat them? So, instead, I walk the perimeter of the pool and collect the bugs I came too late for—those I fished from the water and set aside to dry off and fly away, yet now they remain, still strewn in wet clumps of damaged legs or stiff with death. 

I begin with two hornets and the hollowed-out bee, carrying them carefully to the ant hill. We stayed at this same house seven years ago, and I remember lying on my stomach to watch the ants then. How long do ants live? How many generations has it been? And over fourteen years before that, my parents were newlyweds, staying at a house down the road. Somewhere, in a hotel in the nearest town, I was created. Could this colony be descended from a queen making her nuptial flight that very moment? Past the window of that hotel room?

I drop the bee and hornets as offerings to the ants, and kneel to watch what will come next, as the creatures discover the bounty that’s appeared at their doorstep. 

“Come!” I say to my dad. “It’s National Geographic!”

“There’s a lizard over here.”

“Cool,” I say, but I can’t tear myself from the ants. “Look at this, though!”

An army of small, red-brown ants is marching across the stone patio. Three bigger, black ants have infiltrated their forces. They twist in circles and grab the red ants between their heads and thoraxes, flipping like acrobats to try to keep the approaching soldier ants from climbing up their abdomens. 

“You’re missing a whole war!” I say. 

“Yeah?”

I sigh. “This is why I like preschoolers.”

“They’d watch the ants with you.”

Big Ant has the jaw of Small Ant locked around his leg. He spins and spins and tries to reach it like a dog scratching his neck, but Small Ant won’t budge. I can see his antennae twitching slightly, even though I’m fairly certain that Big Ant’s stomping must be slowly killing him. 

Another red soldier ant approaches, all oversized head and thick mandibles. He leaps at Big Ant, who twists and crushes his thin skeleton until his body is strewn on the ground and his head is detached, still wiggling. Somehow, he’s bound his jaws to another of Big Ant’s legs, like a bracelet. Or a handcuff. 

The little ants have begun to tug at the too-heavy body of the dead bee, hoping to drag it to their colony before the big ants notice and take it for themselves. They’re so small that it looks like the bee may have been semi-resurrected, now scooting across the patio sans footsteps or wing flaps or heartbeats. 

Big Ant hurries to join the fray. I’m so close that I can hear his crunching: his mandibles gnawing between the abdomen and thorax of the bee so he can separate it into pieces for easier transfer. He finally detaches the bulbous body from the rest of the bee, and hauls it along to the hot patio towards his home, one red ant still clinging on. 

“Come to dinner,” my mom says. 

“I can’t. This is live,” I say, like my sibling watching one of their favorite youtubers. 

One of the long-dead wasps vibrates slightly, and I scoop it up to move it away from the ravenous ants. Only then have I separated myself enough from the spectacle to go eat. 

Later, I decide I’ll sleep outside in the hammock on the patio. I wrap myself in its fabric, because the mosquitos are out for blood, and I tuck my threadbare baby blanket over my head so I can watch the sky through its disintegrating cloth. Every time I rock too hard, move the hammock an inch too far, the automatic light above me turns on. On the tiles below me, I notice another trail of ants. They’re struggling to force the detached leg of a cricket through a tiny hole in the mortar. The leg is beautiful—an iridescent green-purple—and I wish I could help them make it fit. How many ants would it feed, a leg of that size, that takes so many to carry and can’t even fit through the door of their home?

 

My roommate has a video of me saved to her Snapchat camera roll. She likes to show it to people when she goes back home from college breaks, and needs to explain just the kind of person she lives with. 

It’s from last year, back before we were roommates. We’re at lunch, on one of the old, wood tables they set up under a huge tent during the warmer months of our constantly-cold, upstate New York school years. My friends are crowded around one side of the table, laughing at me and huddled together in a mixture of amusement, disgust, and fear. 

I have one hand splayed out on the table in front of me, the other resting against the rim of my cup of lemonade, fingers dangling at the drink’s surface. Three wasps crawl across the hand on the table, and several more cling to the fingers of my other hand to save themselves from drowning in the lemonade they sought out for sugar. I don’t want to be stung. A few months before, I was collecting seeds from the blue indigo plant in my mom’s garden, and I accidentally disturbed a wasp’s nest. I came away with my first and second wasp stings. They hurt. But, I’m not worried that these wasps will sting me unless I do something to scare them. 

My roommate has sent that video to almost everyone from her hometown, everyone I don’t know. Her best friend calls me ‘Bee Girl.’ I don’t tell her they weren’t bees. 

 

My mom tells me that I have an infestation of crickets in my room. 

“I know,” I say. “They’re my friends.” I’m only putting on the bug-lover act a little. Obviously, they’re not my friends—they probably barely even notice me, and I can find their high-pitched screaming quite irritating.

“Well, when your uncle and aunt stayed in your room last time, they didn’t love having crickets falling on them in the night.”

“Humans have encroached on bugs’ space enough. I think we can handle a few crickets in our space.”

She laughs at my ridiculousness, but it’s true. I want them there, despite the way their trilling drills into me on migraine nights. It makes me feel a little bit better about all the space I take up. Still, I have no illusions that this makes me morally superior. Many times, in an attempt to save a creature, I’ve killed it instead. I’ve raised caterpillars to have them drown in the water I used to keep their milkweed fresh. I’ve carried bugs outside just to step on them. I’ve tried to catch a moth to release it, and ended up crushing it. I’ve closed my computer on the unsuspecting crickets in my room. 

But, every day, my walks with my dogs are experiments in self-control. That wooly caterpillar with the orange and black stripes across its fuzzy body; could I raise it to a moth? Would it survive better outside or in my hands? The escargatoire of amber snails I find when searching for monarch eggs; would one be happy to be plucked from its leaf and placed in my terrarium? My roommate has banned any more residents in our tiny double dorm. She already deals with the dog. And the snails, springtails, and isopods that I did put in my terrarium. And my plants. And worms on rainy days when I worry they’ll crawl on the pavement to dry up or be stepped on… And me. 

I tell my roommate about a toad I saw on my most recent dog walk. I managed not to steal it from its natural home, but I considered it. I know that toads live longer in captivity than they do in the wild. 

“Sure,” she says. “But, for an animal-lover, don’t you think you’re messing with their natural lives when you take snails or toads or whatever inside? Don’t you think they’d rather be free, roaming the world?” She’s probably right. I’m probably being selfish, and my own opinion changes from creature to creature, from day to day. But monarch caterpillars, for instance; sure, I’ve lost a couple over the years, but the rate of survival would be much worse in the wild. Besides, they basically only stick to their food source either way. The snails in my terrarium have had babies, and they adore the strawberry tops I feed them… I think. It’s hard to know for sure. And maybe I’ve grown, and I wouldn’t steal snails from their home again. Maybe I haven’t. Maybe I do make some creature’s lives worse, in my attempts to protect them. Probably. But maybe I give some creatures lives they wouldn’t have had otherwise. I hope. But I know a good deal of it does come from me being selfish. 

 

If I were religious, I think I would be a Jain. I remember learning about Jainism back in my tenth grade history class. They’re all about non-violence, even to the smallest living creature, and in a perfect world, that’s what I’d focus on. But I know that I don’t do a lot of the things I could. My memory is muddied by four years of cramming my brain full of schooling since then, but I think I remember learning that some Jains sweep the ground in front of them so as to not step on bugs, or wear masks so they don’t breathe them in. They don’t eat root vegetables, I think, though I’m not sure if that’s because picking the plant would kill the miniscule creatures living in the dirt around it, or because it would effectively kill the plant by pulling it out from the root, instead of just sharing some of its fruit. 

I kill bugs all the time. Mostly accidentally, but I admit that I’ve swatted my fair share of mosquitos when I’m fed-up with their whining and needling bites. I may be vegetarian, but I’m not vegan. Yet. And I love carrots. 

I’ve spent my whole life in the pursuit of a guiltless existence, but I’m a guilty person, and there will always be something I’m guilty of. I just have to pick and choose where guilt is outweighed by joy and empathy, and where I’m willing to accept a nugget of guilt nestled against my sternum. I’ll try to keep it there, to stop it from clambering up my throat and in front of my eyes like some sick, reversed, rose-colored glasses that make it impossible to exist. If I let it get that far, I’d be paralyzed, too afraid of doing something wrong to be able to act at all. 

I know that some of the things I do are silly. My parents and my friends scoff. I’m not making a difference to anyone’s world, except perhaps by being a nuisance with finicky, inconsequential moral views. My grandfather often commends me, but I’ve heard him say that kindness is a privilege afforded to the weak by those (like him) who have had to be strong. I know he pities me. I know he thinks I’m weak. But that’s not going to stop me from lying on my stomach in the summers, letting the patio bricks burn my skin, and watching ants retrieve crumbs from where I left them. Or from picking drowning bugs off the surface of the water. Or from refusing to spray ant-killer where the gray sand piles in hills between the bricks. And, still, some things I do will be more selfish than helpful.

I don’t know for certain that I really care about ants’ well-being. I think I do, but maybe it’s just guilt that drives me to protect them. Maybe it’s just guilt at the mistakes I’ve made, at the impact I’ve had, at the fact that I’m a human. Or maybe it’s just that they’re nice to watch, and I want to be able to keep watching them.