THE VIEW FROM THE END OF
BLUE ROOSTER ROAD
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FIRE ANTS
Copyright ©2004 Robert P. Herbst. All rights reserved.

By

Robert P. Herbst
Here's a sample chapter from the book.
I have never been so happy with a move as I have been with this one. Perry
is a great place to bring up kids, there is room to move around and for kids
to do things without bumping into too many people or breaking too many
rules. About the only thing I have found in this sub-tropical paradise that I
was not prepared for was the Fire Ant.

According to the government we are dealing with the "Imported Fire Ant"
here in Perry, the native Florida Fire Ant not being recognized as any real
threat. The Imported Fire Ant, however, is a thing to be reckoned with.
They come in two sizes, the major and the minor, the major being about
3/16" long and the minor being about 1/16" long, both of whom have the
ability to inflict a serious and painful bite.
They live in mounds that they can build up in an extremely short period of
time, like overnight, and the main core of the mound can go as deep as three
feet into the ground. When the mound is disturbed the entire colony is very
apt to move to a new location in less than twenty-four hours. This makes
control a very difficult task.
The Government recommends a poison that has a very slow kill so that it
can be used as a bait, taken into the mound and then fed to the Queen Ant. It
is interesting to note that the Queen Fire Ant is the only ant in the mound
that can eat solid food, the other ants being on a liquid -only diet.
It is the fluid that the ants have in their mouths to reduce solid food to
liquid that makes their bite/sting so painful. Essentially the bite is an
attempt, on the part of the ant, to turn the victim into a liquid and this, in
part, is achieved because the center of the bite will form a hard core which
at a later date must be removed.
The hard core is the liquid forming enzyme and the victim's flesh which is,
at least, in part now a liquid that has dried out. Once the Queen is killed,
the mound can no longer produce young ants or eggs so the mound
essentially dies of old age in about a three-week period.
Of course  some of the adult ants begin converting the bait to liquid and
eating it and this kills them in short order. Within about two to three weeks
the mound is dead and there are piles of dead ants all around it. If one is
patient enough to watch for the whole period, it is very interesting to see
the activity in the mound drop off and finally stop.

I, unfortunately, lack this kind of patience. When I first moved into the
house I did some landscape planting that had to be watered. Everyone
knows that the best time to water is at night when the sun is down and not
around to dry the water up as fast as it comes out of the hose, so night time
was when I watered.
It was at night that I really learned about Fire ants. For instance, I bet you
didn't know that they could communicate with each other. Well, it sure
seems like they can. I had just bought a fine specimen of Ginko Bilboa, a
type of tree that was thought to be extinct until it was found growing in
Japan some years back. Up till that time only fossilized remains of the
leaves were found in prehistoric rock strata.
I liked my Ginko and I was taking good care of it. I had no idea that, as I
watered my tree, my big bare feet were planted squarely in a Fire Ant
mound.
Now mind you, being a reasonable man, a simple bite on the toe would
have caused me to look down and see that I was the source of great
consternation to these little critters and I would have moved my feet
immediately. But no, these little beggars had to attack in force.
As I stood there innocently watering my tree they crept in large numbers up
both my legs and over my feet and then as if orchestrated by a master
tactician the attacking army all chomped at once. At first I didn't know what
was happening, it was dark and I couldn't see the little things, but that made
no difference to them at all. The force of this unexpected attack on my
person was devastating as well as painful.
I jumped up and down to dislodge them and I flushed my legs with water to
wash them off but the damage had been done. I even had to run the hose into
the fly of my trousers to get a few of the little stinkers that had reached the
forbidden zone and were attacking my masculinity.
This sudden and unprovoked attack by a horde of flesh-eating insects left
me with no choice but to declare war.
Later that night the itching began. It was awful. The itching was worst in all
the wrong places. I took a shower to try to relieve my plight to no avail.
My legs looked like I had terminal acne from the knees down, above the
knees I will reveal to no one but my mirror. I had been wearing my shower
clogs at the time and the tops of my feet, being tender from years of
wearing protective shoes, took an awful plastering and, to make matters
worse, they had begun to swell.
I spent a sleepless night tossing and turning trying to find a spot that didn't
hurt and by morning the swelling was so bad that there was no way that my
shoes would fit on my feet. Even my stretch socks, which were supposed to
fit feet four sizes larger than mine, would not fit.
I sat there on the edge of my bed looking at my swollen and misshapen feet
with a feeling of absolute hatred in my heart for Fire Ants. As I slipped on
my shower clogs I found to my horror that the little stinkers had even gotten
between my toes.
At this point I was still deluding myself that the swelling would go down in
a day or so like a mosquito bite. Unfortunately this, like many things I had
yet to learn about Florida, was not to be the case four days later I was still
looking at swollen and painful feet and legs.
Hatred was now an all consuming passion. I lived for the day when I could
again show myself in public and get to a hardware store where the
implements of war could be purchased.
During this time of waiting I researched the many ways there were to kill
ants in general and in particular Fire Ants. I wanted it to be slow and
painful, but not too slow, I wanted to be able to watch them suffer.

My first day out I delighted in running the car over some mounds that were
within easy striking distance from the road. I suppose my neighbors thought
I had had a little too much sun as they watched me run the car forward then
back over the mounds then open the car door and watched the ants scurry
around then close the door and drive back and forth over the spot again.
War is hell!
The trip to the hardware store was not all that I had hoped for. Nuclear
devices small enough to use on individual Fire Ant Mounds were simply
not available to the general public.
Artillery and other heavy weapons were out of the question because of the
short range involved. I was afraid to use high explosives for fear of causing
my house to slide into the sinkhole out back and bulk nerve gas was too
difficult for me to handle and there was the danger of drift. I felt that the
neighbors might feel badly toward me if the stuff drifted onto their property
and wiped out a household or two.
I felt it was a little shortsighted of them but, then again, this is Perry,
Florida and the values are somewhat different from up north. They seem to
put a high value on the rights of the individual down here, it is a totally
unique experience.
Obviously my war would have to be fought on more conventional terms,
thus I returned home laden with poisons and baits of various descriptions.
My first objective would be to make an ant-free perimeter around the house
and especially the areas where I had planted my ever-loving trees.
Within the "dead zone" I marked each ant hill I found with the yellow bait,
which I had been told would be most effective at this time of year, and I
even went to the trouble of disturbing the mound slightly, just so I could
watch the little beggars carry the bait into the mound. Then, wishing them a
good appetite, I moved to the next mound.
The next day I was up at the crack of dawn and at first light I stepped
carefully out into the field of battle and went looking for bodies. There
were none. I had been cheated! I stormed back into the house casting dark
dispersions on the good folks at the local seed and feed store.
Then it occurred to me that I should follow the number one rule I had
learned after "Murphy's Law" back at Engineering School, "When All Else
Fails, Read The Directions!"
There it was in red and white right in plain sight on the bag. This was a
slow-acting poison that would take several days to show any effect. Boy!
Was I glad I had read the directions before I went roaring down to the store
to make a complete ass of myself and justify all those whispered comments
about, "Yankee Carpet Baggers".
It was time to turn to some of the quicker methods of eradication. There
was a liquid that came highly recommended by the good people at the local
seed and feed. This time I took the time to read the directions carefully
before I advanced on the enemy.
Thus armed, I moved out to do battle on the second day. The sun was now
quite high and there was some activity around the mounds. The yellow
granules I had poured out yesterday lay wasted on the ground.
According to the directions, anything left overnight was no good anymore.
Still, some of the stuff had been carried into the mound. I decided to make a
test. I stepped out of my "Dead Zone" and found a nice bag mound by one
of my pine trees.
This I treated with the liquid and, to my delight, it really nailed the little
stinkers to the ground. They squirmed a few seconds and died-but would
the whole mound die? That was the question that haunted me through the
night. I had erotic dreams about Fire Ants stuck on fly-paper, being slowly
fed through a roller press. Fire Ants staked out over freshly cut bamboo
groves and the like.
I even had one particularly gratifying dream about little mushroom clouds
over each mound and the entire area becoming a radioactive wasteland
with millions of little Fire Ants running around glowing in the dark. I
awoke in the morning refreshed and eager to press on toward the ultimate
goal of a Fire Ant free lawn. I now felt that victory was within my grasp.
After coffee I took a refreshing stroll around my lawn, looking with
pleasure at the small piles of dead ants forming around each mound I had
treated with the yellow bait. The bait was working better than I had ever
hoped. Here was visual proof that the slow-acting poison was indeed the
best way.
Next, I checked the mound I had used the liquid on. This, too, had a pile of
ants around the base. I was totally disappointed with most of the other
poisons, as the ants just seemed to tunnel out from under the affected area
and build a new mound somewhere else, but here in the liquid and in the
bait form I had found the ultimate weapon.
A second trip to the seed and feed store yielded enough of the materials of
war to launch a wholesale attack outside the "Dead Zone". My campaign
was systematic and effective as I laid waste to one section after another of
my lawn.
At last I had treated all the mounds I could find in my patterned mode of
attack and I began a search and destroy mode of ultimate devastation and
liquidation. For the next week I spent morning, noon, and evening wiping
out the last vestiges of resistance. Any ant mound that showed even the
most feeble sign of life was doused with more of the liquid and a fresh
pattern of bait was spread around the area.
After two weeks I was able to proclaim the lawn "Fire Ant Free!" I had
won. Victory was mine! I looked down at my scarred feet and thought to
myself, "At last you are avenged! How sweet it is." But now a new feeling
came over me. I was consumed with an urge to kill but there were no more
Fire Ants to wage war with. How could I now quench my urge to kill?
I began to think of hideous things like luring Fire Ants onto my property so
that I could destroy them. I began to sneak out under the cover of darkness
and treat Fire Ant Mounds on State Property. I would sneak over the fence
into the field in back of my house to search out and destroy Fire Ant
Mounds over there on property that I didn't even own.
At one time I even considered breeding Fire Ants to let go in my lawn just
so that I would have ants to search out and kill. I hired out to strangers to
kill their Fire Ants without regard to the morality of the act.
To this end I had made up a utility belt with a holster for a water gun that
was loaded, not with water but with liquid Fire Ant Killer, and loops that
held plastic 35mm film containers full of poison Fire Ant bait. I practiced
the quick draw, then practiced squirting from the hip. I found a way to
remove the tops of the plastic containers with my teeth. Then I would throw
them onto mounds several feet away with deadly accuracy.
I had become a self-made killing machine. It was no longer the thrill of
battle or the sweet taste of victory that drove me. I had become a
cold-blooded killer and I would hire out to anyone with the price, no
matter what their motives. All that mattered was that I would have Fire
Ants to kill! How could I explain this to my children?
I needed help and with a heavy heart I turned into The Perry Drive-in
Liquor Store & Lounge and the sympathy of Linda the beautiful bar-keeper
there. Of course there was also drink to numb the desire to kill.
I had started with 7UP but switched to Club Soda as I found that I needed a
stronger tonic. It was the friendship of the lovely Linda that helped me the
most. She would take my trembling hands in hers and give me the
willpower to cast off my all-consuming desire to kill Fire Ants.
In the end it was her support that gave me the strength to hang up my utility
belt for the last time and return to a normal life in the community. Now I
can walk down the street with my head held high and I don't have to worry
about people I have never met offering me money to kill ever again.
Someday the light of my new life will accept my offer of marriage and
together we will settle down on a small piece of land here in Perry, build a
cottage for two, and live happily ever after. There is, however, one secret
that I must guard very carefully lest I be found out.
Whenever I find a Fire Ant Mound near the walk or road where I am
walking, I will pause by it till I am sure no one is watching, then, when the
coast is clear, I will jump up and down on the mound a few times and
flatten it to the ground then bound back to where I had been standing before
any one can catch me.
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The View from the end of BLUE ROOSTER
ROAD was my first effort at writing and was
published back around 1990. It's all light
hearted fun reading.
It contains a series of short stories about how
I viewed life in a small Southern Town after
moving here from the North.
I came down here with my two minor children
after a very difficult five year long divorce.
Bringing up minor children as a single male
parent was no mean task.
I took up writing to preserve my sanity. Many
say, after reading this book, I completely failed.
I had a grand time writing the book and I hope
those of you who buy it have a grand time
reading my work.