Infestivities

Tritown critters respect no one's personal space

by Sally Cragin

Illustration by Lennie Peterson

In Tritown, good fences make good neighbors, or sometimes just neighbors. The desire to demarcate property lines is strong here and ancient, too. For every pole of stockade fence rising skyward, a mile of stone wall snakes through a secondary-growth forest. Personal space is crucial to Tritownies, as well as to New Englanders in general, though you wouldn't know it from the way they'll yak your ear off if you let 'em, thinks Hollis the Mountain Man, who is trapped once again on his way to the post office.

His ear is being bent, even twisted, by his oldest surviving relative, great-aunt Winnie (short for Winnipesaukee, though she still can't swim). He is hoping to fit in a visit to Happy's Coffee and Qwik-Stop (30 kinds of doughnuts, 20 kinds of lottery tickets, one kind of coffee) to persuade Happy to start serving iced coffee again. But he's stuck here, listening to his aunt's voice quiver with impatience.

"I need you to come cut down the butternut," she declares. "I've left a message at your mother's, but it's a good thing I ran into you today."

"Good for who," Hollis thinks, while maintaining a neutral expression. "What's wrong with the butternut," he asks.

"Nothing," she replies. "It's those damn squirrels. They're filling up the house with nuts."

Hollis snorts, and then catches himself. Then he feels the cold hand of fear descend on his shoulder. His aunt is getting on in years -- the youngest in the brood that produced his great-uncle Wilton, and his own grandfather. Until now, she's shown commendable self-sufficiency.

"So," he begins carefully. "You want to fix the squirrel problem by getting rid of the nuts?"

"It's the only way," she huffs. "I've got a chainsaw -- I just need you to hold the ladder. Now, I'll expect you first thing tomorrow."

She pats Hollis kindly on the arm, and then sweeps off to the vestry of All Faiths for the monthly Grange meeting. (As Tritown grew, the smaller parishes began collapsing and combining -- like a black hole, grumbled a more disgruntled member. The congregation used to be known as "the Presby-Congo-Metho-Baps" until the Unitarians and a small Episcopal crowd joined. Now, the hymns are all-inclusive on every fourth Sunday, the communion bread is homemade rye, and the communion wine is two percent alcohol, but only every third week. The service lasts anywhere from 45 minutes to three hours, depending on which sect is in the ascendency.)

Winnie is clutching a tin of cookies and looking forward to the Grange meeting as there is a particularly juicy conflict brewing over the forthcoming fair. Some newcomers (those living in Tritown for less than a quarter-century) want a new site for the century-old event. Well, see how far that gets them, thinks Winnie. She plunges her hand into her skirt pocket and pulls out a sticky nut. "Damn," she swears, flinging the nut into the scrub brush. "If I didn't know better, I'd think the squirrels were trying to drive me crazy."

As she walks across the center of Tritown, she passes by, but does not see, Delia Ellis Bell, the Partial Yankee (there was a questionable great-great-grandmother) who is transfixed by a group of tent caterpillars just beginning to encircle a maple branch with strands of shiny silk. Hollis buys his stamps and soon joins her.

"I don't think Yves St. Laurent could fling thread around as quickly as that and come up with something," she marvels.

Hollis agrees. "You should see the Mountain Lair," he says. "Inchworms, fireflies, weird-looking crickets with big heads. It's an invasion, this year. It's El Niño's revenge -- mild winter, wet spring."

"Oh yeah?" says Delia. "Hey, is your aunt okay? I saw her throwing nuts into the bushes."

"Squirrels," says Hollis. "Guess they packed her attic full of nuts, including in the shoe boxes and Christmas tree ornament cartons." He explains her request and adds "she thinks she can fix the problem by cutting off the supply line."

Delia laughs. "Wouldn't it make more sense to get an exterminator in and get rid of the squirrels?"

"You'd think," Hollis sighs, and then swats a mosquito that had crawled under his cap. "There's no respect anymore. We've removed too much animal habitat, and now they want ours. And they're winning. I wake up covered in welts, whether from black flies or mosquitos, who knows. They always manage to get in under the covers, under the waistband of my pajamas, the middle of my back -- places where I can't even scratch -- "

"Enough!" says Delia. "You're making me itch. You think that's bad? Felix the Urban Naturalist hardly lives in the middle of nature, but recently he's been driven off his back porch by mosquitos, bumblebees, and flying ants."

"Flying ants!" says Hollis. "I've got them too, except I thought it was science fiction come to life."

"No, it's real. C'mon, I'll show you in the library."

The Tritown Regional Library isn't far from the post office, and Delia and Hollis are grateful for the air-conditioned cool when they push open the swinging doors. As they expect, Ozzie the Wiz (Tritown's resident sage and reference librarian) is on duty.

"Ozzie," says Delia, leaning forward on the desk. "Two words. Flying ants. How long do they live?"

"Oh!" says Ozzie. "Is that what those are? I thought I imagined it. My study was invaded the other night. I thought they were oversize 'skeetahs."

"With tuxedos," supplies Hollis. "Those ants are large and black."

Ozzie looks off in the distance, calculating. "Hmmm, ants, insects, entomology, study of, ants, mid-500s catalogue number. Upstairs, three shelves in, fourth from the bottom."

Delia and Hollis look at each other and roll their eyes. Ozzie's amazing feats of memory had astounded them in high school, but he'd had the Dewey system down for years. "How many books in from the right?" asks Delia.

Ozzie frowns. "No more than two dozen," he says. "We just added the latest E.O. Wilson book."

"Bet on it?" asks Delia slyly.

Hollis demurs. "I'm not betting against Ozzie in this place. I know my limits."

They find a couple of books that might have information and bring them to a reference table. Delia looks at the index, but Hollis flips pages, and he finds a description in John Crompton's Ways of the Ant (Nick Lyons Press). "Says here," he begins, "there's no way of predicting when a nest will `swarm' or release a bunch of male and female ants for mating, but when they do `almost invariably a large number of nests of the same species, scattered all over the place, swarm at the same time.'"

Delia leans over to see what he's found. She reads: "`released at last, the eager young things pour out. They have never flown before and never will again, and for all their excitement they find they cannot rise up into the air as they wish. They have to run about on hillocks, pebbles, grass stems, filling their breathing tubes with air and exercising the muscles of their gauzy wings.'"

"They're probably really easy to swat, at least," says Hollis. "So it's like a big open-air disco, with wild ants going at it -- "

"Like Caligula's Rome," adds Delia. "Makes ya think."

"It does," says Hollis. "I just wish they'd get it over with. I'm finding ant wings in my cereal."

Delia shrugs and replaces the books. "It's warm weather," she says. "All the cold season boundaries have collapsed -- open windows, rampaging nature. Speaking of which, are you really going to let your aunt cut down that butternut? Surely there's a better way of dealing with the squirrel situation?"

"I know," Hollis replies. "Guess I'll have to start thinking of a diversionary tactic. She's off at a Grange meeting now -- maybe she can devote her energies to whatever plot is hatching there."

"That's true," says Delia. "The politics of the Grange would mystify Metternich. In any event, your chainsaw can always run out of gas."

"That's a thought," says Hollis. "At least we've solved the ant mystery. Another day or so and they should be done with their party."

They leave the library, and en route to Happy's Delia sighs. "Pretty sad," she says. "The ants and the squirrels have the most fun in Tritown."

"Oh, I don't know," replies Hollis, pushing open the door to Happy's. "We're going to have a good time convincing Happy to start serving iced coffee again. Rules are made to be broken." n

Sally Cragin edits Button, New England's tiniest magazine of poetry, fiction, and gracious living, which is five years old this summer.

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