Overkill

I’ve had ant problems before. Somehow, someway, maybe in a previous lifetime, I must have deeply offended someone, because I’ve been plagued with ants twice now, in ways that make me think there’s something like karma going on. 

In my apartment in Louisville the ants were in my kitchen and on the shelves of my pantry. Those of you who knew me during this time know that these ants were the bane of my existence. I’d clean the kitchen every day, hoping that the ants would disappear…and as long as the counters were completely free of crumbs, I didn’t have a lot of problems. But if I left so much as a speck of food out, the ants would swarm. I tried everything to get rid of them. First I bought the little ant traps that are supposed to attract the ants in with some kind of delicious smell…then the ants eat something, take it back to their colony, and poison themselves and all the other ants…sort of like tiny suicide bombers. 

Unfortunately, the ants proved too crafty for this and went about their business, conveniently ignoring my traps. So I set about looking for alternative methods. At a party, somebody told me that baby powder, as long as it was the kind with talc in it, would be sure to kill the bugs. All I had to do was sprinkle it around all the corners of the room in question, maybe along the baseboards and in the affected areas. Somehow the talc would kill the ants. So I gave it a shot. What the heck, I figured. Baby power is cheap. So I bought the baby powder and sprinkled it all over my kitchen. Why stop with just the corners? I had a serious ant problem, I thought. So I dumped it along every single baseboard, along all the cracks and corners of my kitchen—anywhere an ant might go. 

Yet again, though, the ants prevailed. This taught me a very valuable lesson about not listening to extremely drunk people at late night parties, but that’s neither here nor there. The ants loved that stuff. They relished in it. I swear I saw them rolling around bathing in it…luxuriating in the fine, filmy white powder. I might as well have poured sugar all over my kitchen floor. It didn’t work and my kitchen was left dusty and smelling vaguely of a baby’s bottom.   

Yet another well-wishing person suggested borax, a naturally occurring mineral compound that is apparently quite toxic, especially to ants. My friend even gave me a bottle with the borax powder she’d had left over last time she went on an insect-murdering spree. She suggested that I make “borax balls”—little balls created with different foodstuff and a hefty sprinkle of borax powder. I looked up a little information online and read that combining borax with peanut butter was likely to do the trick. So I went to town. I made all kinds of little borax balls and I left them all over my kitchen. The ants loved it. I could see them smearing their little paws in the stuff, wiping it all over their stupid little mouths…but it didn’t seem to kill them. In fact, I think it only made them stronger. 

Completely fed up, I decided to revert back to the traditional methods I’d first attempted with twice as much vigor. I bought approximately 17 ant traps, removed all the food from my pantry, and lined my shelves with ant traps. I had one on each side of my kitchen sink, four on the floors, and at least two per shelf. A friend told me that maybe this was overkill. Overkill was fine with me. It certainly beat the pants off of underkill. 

Overkill proved to be the best method of ant murder, and I lived out the rest of my days in the apartment without any ant problems to speak of. I had a few other problems with that apartment, but it was an old house and those kinds of things come with the territory. 

And so when I moved to Ukraine, I certainly expected that at some point I’d encounter insect issues again. I figured I’d probably end up living in a slightly older building of some sort, and regardless of the condition you keep your house in, sometimes bugs just happen. 

But you can imagine my dismay when the ants reappeared in my life, here all the way on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. They appeared first in a bowl I left on my computer table on what was one of the first days of nice, warm weather. I’d left an orange peel in the bowl and when I came home from school, I found the bowl crawling with ants.

That was fair enough. I couldn’t blame the ants. And it was my own fault for leaving an orange peel out like bait. So I cleaned up and hoped they wouldn’t come back. It turned out, however, that they were there to stay for a while. Soon they started crawling around on my bathroom floor, then on my spare bed, then on the floor around my computer and on my computer table, if I didn’t keep it super clean. 

I cleaned my room thoroughly, once the weather was nice enough that I could take my rugs outside and beat them, and the ants disappeared for a while. They returned a few weeks later, though, with a bloodthirst that nothing could quench. 

They were everywhere. All over the sheets of my spare bed, all over my computer table, anywhere I left crumbs, on the bathroom floor, on the windowsill. And then they invaded the bed I sleep in. I woke up one morning with an ant crawling on my arm and when I lifted the sheets of the bed, I found my mattress covered with ants. 

I had a very small panic attack, stripped the sheets from the bed, put them in the washer, and marched off to the bazaar, where I tried to explain what it was I was looking for. “I have ants,” I would explain to the vendors. “And I don’t want them anymore. I want to…” and then I’d make a cut-throat motion, hoping that this meant “immediate death” in Ukraine as well as it does in America. “Ah….” the vendors would nod. A few of them said they understood what it was I was looking for, but that they didn’t sell the poison I was looking for. They sent me to a hardware store, where a shopkeeper sent me around the corner to a kiosk that sells beauty products, soaps, detergents, and apparently, ant poison. I explained once again that I was looking for something to murder ants and the shopkeeper kindly sold me a spray bottle of Raid and some sort of powder that I could presumably sprinkle outside near the ants’ colony. 

I went home, explained to the desk ladies that I had a small problem with ants and would need to have the handy-man come by to help me open my windows (which were caulked shut) so that I could spray the Raid. They cheerfully agreed to have him come by the next day, so in the meantime, I cleaned up again, brushed all the ants off my bed, and slept in the other bed for the night. The next day, the handyman came by with a screwdriver and pried my windows open.

I sprayed the Raid in all the corners and in the places where I suspected the ants were coming in (thanks to the small piles of sawdust these carpenter ants are leaving in their wake), hoping that for now this would do the trick. 

Things seemed to be working, although I started noticing more and more ants near and inside my wardrobe. This didn’t seem too out of the ordinary, considering the fact that they had already invaded almost every other surface in my room. So I sprayed the Raid around the wardrobe, hoping again in vain that this would help for the time being. 

Then last night, I was organizing my shelves and putting away clothes while talking with my site-mate Shelby, who was sitting at my computer desk. I was absent-mindedly folding my coats and preparing to stuff them into the big, rolling suitcase that I keep on top of my wardrobe. I stepped onto a chair and asked Shelby to hand me one of the coats. Once at this vantage point, I noticed (no surprise) ants crawling around on top of the wardrobe. I sighed and decided to move the suitcase so I could wipe the ants off the wardrobe, not at all expecting what I was about to find. I lifted the suitcase and hit the motherload. Ants everywhere. Ant larvae everywhere. Clumps of a reddish brown dirt-like substance everywhere. The ants started running around in crazy circles and I almost fell off my chair. I screamed to Shelby, who came running. I put the suitcase down, hopped off the chair, and we stood, hearts pounding, trying to understand the scope of the situation and trying to figure out what to do next. 

Quite obviously I knew I had a mess on my hands to clean up, but what was the extent of the ant invasion? Where were they coming from? Were they coming from the wall behind the wardrobe? What would happen when I moved the wardrobe? What would I find there?? Could it possibly be worse? We opted to go tell the ladies at the front desk, so that they would at least understand that the ant problem was something I probably wouldn’t be able to deal with on my own anymore, and then…well, then I’d have to clean everything up.  

 

(ants and their larvae, on top of my wardrobe)

So I did. And while I was cleaning, when I wasn’t trying to stop myself from gagging and vomiting, I was harkening back to those days when my biggest problem with the ants was that I hadn’t gotten rid of them completely and my kitchen smelled of baby powder. It was kind of like looking back at old photos and seeing how thin I really was when I remember thinking at the time that I was as big as a linebacker. If only I’d known! 

They’re gone for now. I did move the wardrobe away from the wall, and they were indeed more ants there. When I moved the other things from the top of the wardrobe (there was a suitcase, a purse, a duffel bag, and a backpack up there), I found that the ants had created some kind of nest inside the purse and they were going nuts inside there, so I promptly threw the purse into the hallway and hosed it down with Raid. Fortunately they don’t appear to have destroyed anything other than my ability to get a good night’s sleep ever again. I already had incredibly realistic recurring nightmares about insects crawling on me in my bed…long before this whole circus ever began. Now there’s really no hope. If I understood the desk lady correctly (and there’s a very real possibility that I didn’t), somebody will come tomorrow and spray for insects. Here’s to hoping I don’t come back to my room tomorrow after class to find borax balls in the corner and baby powder lining the cracks. I’m hoping they pull out the big guns for this one. I’m keeping my fingers crossed for some serious overkill.