The Problem With Ants... (Draft)

I remember being a kid and not understanding the science of our world. It was impossible for my young brain to understand the explanations behind everyday occurrences. Something as simple as a light turning on by the flip of a switch baffled and fascinated me. When you are an infant, you are oblivious to such a cause and effect. As you grow up some, you are more interested in the cause than the effect. And then you hit a certain age, and you find yourself curious about the process of the cause. For instance, my sister and I would play in our backyard with the basic principles of physics, and not even know it. We used to take a bucket of dirt, swing it over our heads, and not a speck would fall out. I couldn’t comprehend an explanation, other than magic, that kept that dirt in the open bucket—upside-down. But I knew I wanted more of an explanation than fantasy.

I spent my elementary school years living in Monument, Colorado. We lived on an acre of land up the side of a hill. Our driveway up to our house was a quarter of a mile long. In the summers, my sister and I would play outside in the dirt. We would fill buckets with water from the hose and then add dirt and weeds until we created our own special “soup.” We’d map out spaces between the trees where our houses were, and we’d play neighbors. The yard around our house was natural. It wasn’t a perfectly cut lawn, or neatly manicured shrubbery, which made it an optimal playground for little kids. Anything could happen in that forest. One day we’d be mothers, the next explorers. On the weekends, we’d hear my dad up and behind our house planting trees.

One memorable morning when I was seven, my sister and I were playing with our buckets. The bucket I was using was from the past Halloween. A smiling orange face would whiz over my head, and laugh with me. Every swing, every successful attempt, filled me with an odd sense of accomplishment. We’d test our experiment out on different soils, we’d add grass and weeds, and (if we were feeling really daring) we’d even add water.

Running up the hill from me, I heard my sister call out, “Over here, Lindsey! This dirt is practically sand. Do you think it will still stay in?”

I went up the hill to meet her. And she was right, a new type of soil to test! Would these heavier grains of sand stay in as well? Or would the magic not work for this shiner, slippery dirt? I sat and pondered the ground before me, as my sister began scooping some into her little mermaid bucket. Holding very still, I watched as my sister stood up straight, secured her grip on the handle, and gracefully swung the bucket in a perfect arc over her head. And not a grain of sand fell out. Another successful attempt! I was about to leap for joy, when I felt something crawling up my leg.

I looked down, and was frozen in horror. As I had stood still with anticipation and watched my sister, I had been standing on an ant hill. The ants, angry at the intrusion, began crawling up my legs. My legs looked black from all the ants crawling on them.

Regaining my sense of self, I helplessly looked to my sister. “Erin! I’m covered in ants! Get them off, get them off, get them OFF!” I pleaded, and screamed.

My sister—my loving, beautiful, caring sister—was forever an indoor girl. It took hours of pleading some days just to get her out of the house with me. And here, in my moment of need, she clearly gave me a look the said “you want me to do what?!?”

Now all I felt was panic. The ants were crawling up and down my legs, and I couldn’t do anything about it. I certainly was not going to touch them. So I needed someone else’s help. And then I remembered: my dad.

I took off running up the hill, in absolute terror. He heard me coming and turned around to see a very small, hysterical girl tearing through the woods to meet him. I had difficulty explaining to him what the situation was. Initially, I wasn’t able to talk to him because of how hard I was crying. But I finally exclaimed, “Daddy, my legs are covered in ants. Please! Get them off of me!” Now understanding the problem, my father bent down to brush the insects of my legs.

But there were no ants left.

Ironically, the act of me running up the hill to my father knocked all the pesky ants off my legs. I had helped myself, complete unaware of what I was achieving. In that moment, I realized that there was more than one way to solve a problem. My mind was opened to a completely different way of thinking. In this situation, I saw ants on my legs, and my only solution was to have a third party brush them off. I didn’t see the other solution that had ended up working.

It took a few years, and a lot of classrooms, before I learned what kept the sand in those buckets time and time again: centripetal force. The force keeping the dirt in those buckets was not magic, the only solution I could see at the time, but a natural scientific occurrence.

My seven year old brain was suddenly enlightened to a new analytical way of thinking. My eyes were opened to millions of possibilities beyond what was everyday apparent. Every conundrum I now face, I see a web of solutions beyond what is intrinsically obvious. Without the help of that ant community, and even my sister, I may have never learned to always keep an open, unbiased mind when faced with a problem. And, of course, I learned never to stand on ant hills.