By Anne W. Semmes
The most amazing wonder of my week past was when my two and a half pound laptop computer was rolled over by my 3,000-plus pound Toyota Corolla, and my stories on deadline survived! The mouse had a broken back and the screen needed replacing, but a lifetime of writing refused to be obliterated!
Truth be told. On the go leaving a friend’s house I thought I put the computer in its canvas case in the back seat, but arriving home found no computer. My friend found it in her driveway. The case looked serene but turning it on there was that bloodied screen. My computer guy wasn’t hopeful. But a trip to Lighthouse Main Street brought the news the insides survived!
That day of forgetfulness began with a determination to clean out the inside of my car. Why not let the guys at Splash Cos Cob give it a good vacuum? “No car wash?” they asked. No thank you. But there it was getting washed! “Its on us,” they said, “and the vacuuming.” How wonderful is that! Where’s that tip box?
Such surprising kindness had come a few days before that on my daily walk when I happened upon that huge dog of wonderment with its flamboyant fluff of a tail in my Byram neighborhood. I’d seen it being walked and wondered what breed it was. “It’s a Tibetan Mastiff,” said owner Samantha Roina, who gave his name as Seeing my awe, she said, “I am so happy Mishka brings you joy! He makes us so happy to have him. He is typically our ‘Gentle Giant,’ but certainly can have an attitude when necessary!” “Mishka.”
Overseeing our conversation was Samantha’s aunt Shirley standing before her lush front garden of dahlias. Seeing my appreciation of the colorful blooms, Shirley offered, “Would you like a few?” And off I went, my arms bursting with a bouquet of technicolor dahlias.
Another wonder surely is that gift book that arrived written by a famous friend, E.O. Wilson, known the world over as “the ant man” who famously described ants as “the little things that rule the world.” We share southern seafaring ancestors caught up in the Civil War, but importantly, our love of nature. His gift, “Tales From the Ant World” was published last year. What’s especially wonderful is how he inscribed it to me and my nature photographer daughter Melissa Groo with two of his hand drawn ants!
The fascinating facts unfold. So, there are 15,000-plus ant species documented thus far of which 450 Ed’s described. But he suspects 25,000 species may exist. And they far outdate us on this earth – they originated 150 million years ago versus us homo sapiens one million years ago. Ed describes himself as “an ardent feminist in all things human” but notes, “that during the ants’ 150 million years of existence, “gender liberalism has run amok. Females are in total control.”
The “pathetic” male ants,” he writes are “built for the one-time act of mating.” He cites those females as “the most warlike of all animals, with colony pitted most violently against colony of the same species…Their clashes dwarf Waterloo and Gettysburg.” And “where humans send their young adults into battle, ants send their old ladies.”
Ed has a way of putting humans in their place, telling how humans are a million times larger than ants, and he guestimates “that all the living ants weigh about the same as all the living humans.” He also imagines if “every one of the 7.5 billion living people were log-stacked, the whole of humanity would fill a cubic mile of space, a mass that could be hidden in a remote section of the Grand Canyon.” Maybe it was these thoughts that fed his ambitious dream and movement to save half the earth.
Ed’s book, one of 30 he’s written (of which I have 17!), relates a number of his extraordinary ant explorations and discoveries, and much about his upbringing in the south. “My own life,” he writes, “is the result of an early blend of the two faiths, the first traditionally pious and the second scientific.”
But the line that most resonates is, “The love of Nature is a form of religion, and naturalists serve as its clergy…grant Nature eternity on this planet, and we as a species will gain eternity ourselves.”
