Ants

CN Railroad Crossing | Brookhaven, MS

The summer after freshman year was spent in Chicagoland as part of the summer railroader’s program with Canadian National Railway. I’d been sent off with well-wishes from professors and friends, who also went to their own summer employment, and with apprehension and warning from my parents. Chicagoland, was not Indianapolis, or Terre Haute, or even somewhere familiar like Fort Wayne. It was dangerous at worst, illinoying at best. The worry of my elders, coupled with the unreasonable premonition that showing up six minutes late would cost me my internship, blurred each day into a strained period of AutoCAD and silence.

Yet, even though I lunched in my car, my coworkers still knew I existed, and my boss shipped another intern and I south to walk track with the supervisors. There was an afternoon subdivision conference call, where I sat with a Mississippi track inspector in his truck and listened in. Since I was the only female on site that day, for most of the days we were there, I hadn’t figured out if it was considered okay for me to pee in the woods, was too embarrassed to ask, and having not urinated since 6:30 am, the urge was by now considerably strong.

There really wasn’t much to say, so I looked around the truck, which was, a complete pit. There was the usual trash, spray paint cans and some construction tape, old track log sheets covered with Little Debbie dust and those cheap plastic pens that never write nicely. An empty styrofoam Polar Pop sat in the dash cup-holder, the straw chewed, the lid cracked and bent. Three little black ants crawled up the blue straw and back down inside, sniffing around on their continual quest for high fructose corn syrup.

Then I saw the all the other ants, sitting in the Zebra Cakes package, meandering in little lines across the dashboard, coming out of my grandparents’ mouth when they hinted I was fat, spilling out of the keyboard when I’d sent that email with the out of place exclamation point . They blended in with the black plastic work truck door handle hiding, obliviously creeping at a regular pace, so you couldn’t tell, really, where they were until you concentrated on a single point for a singular period of time. The track inspector followed my gaze, “They won’t hurt anything, they’s jes the little black kind”. And they were, the type you weren’t actually sure if it was an ant, until you saw it move.

He changed the subject, wandering away from the conference call’s routine discussion of tie replacements and slow orders, to impart wisdom as older persons are wont to do;

“I got married, had a kid at 19. You don’t do that. You, focus on you. Whatever it is you need, you let someone know. You follow your career. Don’t do like I did, have kids at 19.”

All I could say, all I did say, for the entire, hour and a half long conference call, was “I have to go to the bathroom”.

Between the massive hydrostatic pressure in my bladder and the prevalent presence of little black ants, I was agitated, but not astonished. They were, after all, small ants, but in a truck? Trucks moved. They travelled from home to the rail yard, to the gas station and Popeye’s, and back to home again. Did the ants live here? Just crawl around, sucking up high fructose corn syrup, until bloated and dizzy, they were unable to find their way home and died? Was there a queen somewhere in the back cushions, someone who did him in, taking this life, this truck, this world he lived in from something basic to uncomfortable confines?

I guess, sometimes, it’s the little guys, following us everywhere, that are always there, but ain’t such a problem as they seem. Maybe I should just stop looking so close.

When the call was over, I peed in the woods.