by Jeff McMahon
The roar of traffic wakes you in the narrows of the night. It sounds like Caltrans has relocated Interstate 5 through your kitchen. You stuff your feet into fuzzy slippers and shuffle toward the noise.
A line of double white lights pours into the kitchen under the back door and heads up the side of the garbage can. A line of double red lights runs beside it in the opposite direction. A brown haze hovers above the hum of tiny engines, the concert of screeching and honking.
"Damn ants," you say.
You peer into the garbage can, and that gnawed fried chicken from dinner has vermin all over it, driving their tiny Fords and Dodges and Chryslers, shoveling chicken fat into the trunks of their Nissans and Toyotas and Subarus.
What to do? No one buys "Raid" any more because all ants have to do these days is roll up the windows on their little cars.
You grab the garbage can and open the back door. Little cars slip off the side of the garbage can as you swing it outside. They plunge to the ground with tiny crunches. Some burst into small flames and spew plumes of smoke. You stomp on the incoming and outgoing lines of traffic.
You follow the parallel trail of red and white lights down the back steps, through a crescent of grassy backyard, and up the redwood border into the flower bed. There it is: the entrance to their vast underground parking structure, wide and well worn, cars pouring in and out.
You reach for the hose.
The water sparkles silver-blue in the moonlight. It sweeps up hundreds of little cars and carries them off like dust. A whirlpool forms over the entrance and whizzes down.
Saturns and Beemers and Volvos screech out of the ground, spinning their wheels, sending up rooster tails, fat white wiggling larvae strapped to their roofs. Bam! Bang! Smunch! They plow into each other in panic, headlights shattering, doors and bumpers and mirrors flying off.
***
I stood on South Chorro Street on a recent night and stared at black fur stuck to black stripes of burnt rubber on black asphalt. Streets aren't supposed to have fur.
Moments ago a blue car dragged a black dog 20 feet under its front left tire. It wasn't the driver's fault. She didn't see the black dog standing on the black road in the black night.
I was on the sidewalk, and I didn't see the black dog either, not until the screeching brakes stopped and the dog peeled itself off the tire and ran yelping toward the cool grass and vanished among fences and hedges and homes.
The car door flew open and the driver flew out and her hands flew to her face.
"Oh my god! Oh my god! I love animals!"
I've seen it many times: animals crushed and mangled, killed or left alive with limbs dangling. We've all seen it. And we've read the letters to the editor that begin: "To the thoughtless driver who ran over my little Muffy on Elm Street Thursday night..."
We know, we know. It's awful. But what can we do? We tune it out. It doesn't affect us... until we see it. Or until we find our own little Muffy, still and broken, fur wet and matted with blood.
I stared at the furry pavement and thought not about pets, but about humans. How readily we tolerate tragedies that afflict other species. Then I remembered stories I've heard about something I've not seen: humans hit by cars and dragged or thrown or ripped apart, skin and blood and bone clinicked by metal, rubber, and fire.
The closest I've come is the aftermath one Sunday night. I worked at a daily in another city, and the news came over the police scanner.
They'd removed the bodies by the time I arrived. I strolled the quiet street, taped off now and lapped by flashes of red, blue, and white light. I found a small blob of gray-red goop quivering on the asphalt.
"What's that?" I asked a detective. He stopped scribbling in his notebook and shot me a glance.
"Brains."
We wage wars against our major killersócancer, AIDS, heart disease, murderóbut we love our cars. We celebrate them. We wash them and wax them. We hang scented pine trees from their rear-view mirrors.
They're so convenient. Maybe a few neighbors have to die so we can go to the market when we want. Maybe the 38 people killed in SLO County car accidents last year represent an "acceptable level of risk."
***
The morning after, the waterlogged ground sparkles under the sun. Long blades of grass reach for the sky, stiffened by last night's flood.
Ant ambulances and ant hearses patrol the dirt roads beneath the grass, hauling stiff ant corpses back underground where they'll be tossed on the community compost pile.
Meanwhile, ant tow trucks hook up to smashed and waterlogged ant cars and drag them underground. Ant bulldozers clear pebbles and mud from ant thoroughfares and plow new entrances and exits to the giant ant underground parking structure.
Flying ant drones hover above, radioing directions to the frenzy below.
"There's a six-ant pileup in the gravel east of the main entrance, blocking both lanes. Worker ants are on their way to clear the scene, but scout ants are seeking an alternative route."
Scout ants march into the countryside, finding paths around knots of grass, wary of ant lions, searching for the shortest route between here and some promised there.
***
I'm gazing out the window at that stretch of Chorro Street again. It's morning now, and many neighbors have driven to work. They've left enough cars behind that we could park them bumper to bumper and form an unbroken line the length of the block.
I see enough steel, if we melted those cars, to forge two sets of rails and lay them up and down the block, with enough metal left over to frame a light-rail coach.
I intuit the presence of enough gasoline and oil to power the engine that will drag that coach. I extrapolate enough money spent on license fees, insurance companies, gas stations, mechanics, auto-parts stores, car washes, hospital bills, attorneys, and funeral homes to subsidize our railway so we can ride for free.
I imagine every street in America doing the same. I envision a network of frequent and clean-running light railways linking everywhere to everywhere else.
Those 38 neighbors would still be alive, but then again, we might have to wait a few minutes to catch the train to the market.
Ants will never have cars. Ants are smart.
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"The more you drive, the less intelligent you are." -- Repo Miller
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