Issue 1. January 9, 2022

Drift2

An occasional newsletter on books, writing and local life.

Tourist Guide to Hyattsville

steve2

#1 Thing to do in Hyattsville

VISIT STEVE'S BILLBOARD

Steve used to work for a local river. As part of his job, he posed for before-and-after pictures regarding the removal of invasive plants. A billboard was installed near a trailhead in what is now known as Driscoll Park. Steve votes in favor of removing invasive plants.

Some time ago, Steve and his son David went canoe …

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Book Review

A Good Marriage

Kimberly McCreight

A complex murder mystery grips upper middle-class parents relishing freedom while their children are away at summer camp.

The unraveling of the crime behind this story is skillfully managed through two primary channels. A first-person narrative from the attorney drawn into the mess starts just after the crime, and a third-person narrative from the victim's POV leads up …

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Research Notes

eo wilson
Edward O. Wilson's work on eusociality became an important subtheme to my road-trip novel, currently titled Claudine vs. the Ants.

My introduction to Wilson was The Social Conquest of Earth, in which he discusses the parallel development of humans and ants. What they have in common, according to Wilson, is eusociality or “true social condition.”

The key elements of eusociality are the protection of a nest, multiple generations living at the same time and, importantly, altruism. Among ants, that means the willingness of worker ants to forego sexual reproduction – they don’t even have sex for fun – for the greater good of the colony. Among people, altruism can mean rushing into a burning building to save someone you don’t know.

Somehow, I got from that to a novel where people generally ignore ants all around them and do a worse job living with the planet. And it caught my eye when Wilson observed that “cultural innovation and its adoption rose and fell with severe changes occurring during the same period in climate.”

It so happens that Claudine vs the Ants takes place in the Great Basin, a high desert in Nevada and Utah where climate change has significantly shaped human activity over the past 15,000 years.

Wilson passed away a couple weeks ago. During his long career, he hit choppy water for some of his theories, which he later acknowledged, but he was a bold and innovative researcher. There’s a very good documentary on his life and work: Of Ants and Men, originally on PBS.
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Scrap of Prose

anthill 5
A cool Sunday morning in the Sierra Nevada. Early April sun dappled through the trees. Outside the Walden Guest Hotel, David squatted on the balls of his feet, haunches resting on the back of his heels, studying a line of ants trekking back and forth from the front of the hotel to a secret hole. Some go forth, others go back. They were to him more than a sum of individuals, a vibrating chain of tiny spirits moving in both directions at once, never bumping into one another, accomplishing tasks and goals beyond his understanding. Left undisturbed, he might watch this show for hours.
The hotel door swung open. Claudine leaned on the jamb, a mug of tea in cupped hands, a warm admiring smile in the sunshine. It had been the most magical month of his life, maybe even hers, shacking up in the little hotel at the edge of town with its back to the national forest. Copious copulation, they called it, a love-sex honeymoon.
Casually, in the sublime mildness of the moment, she asked: “Should we do something about the ants?” She could as well have remarked on the sunshine, or said she was thinking of painting her nails. More a way of making contact, the way lovers do, than of actually trying to say something.
Yet it flipped a switch. David shifted his weight.
“Maybe.” He knew these ants; he had considered them before, their wonderful, jazzy intention. No one has ever before questioned their presence at the Walden. He and his brother were raised on its creaking floorboards. Worn copies of old Henry David’s book in every guest room. Straight-backed chairs and simplicity. No television, no credit cards. A small cast of semi-permanent residents who trade work for free lodging. The two brothers have been keeping things the same since their parents joined the Peace Corps a couple years before, leaving the pair of them in charge.
An April breeze stirred.
“What do you think?” Pleasantly, she persisted. “There’s a lot of them now.”
“I don’t know,” he answered. Something didn’t feel right. She probably wanted him to kill them, buy poison, dump it down their nest. “I’ll work on it.” He didn’t intend to.
“Thanks, honey.” She lingered, took a sip and slipped back inside, closing the door.
“Things sure are different around here now,” he informed the ants. He looked closer, trying to feel their presence, hear their cadence across the pine needles. He had read someplace that the mass of ants on the planet exceeds the combined weight of mankind. As welcome at the Walden as the other nonpaying tenants. He had no interest in “doing” anything about them. Arise ye hackles.
His brother was walking up the street that sloped to the lakeshore a mile away. Matthew was compact, had dark hair, large ears, a toothy grin. They didn’t look like brothers. He paused to see what had David’s attention.
“Ants,” Matthew observed.
“She wants us to get rid of them.”
Matthew leaned over, hands on knees, examining the plucky worker-girls. “What are we supposed to do about them?”
“They can’t be reasoned with.” In fact, David had not tried to reason with them, but he was probably right. “And they don’t scare.”
“Boo,” Matthew said quietly. The ants did not respond.
David romanticized the unrelenting simplicity of trekking back and forth. “I bet they don’t have any problems.”
“Well, people are always stepping on them and spraying them with poison.”
“Why does she care about them?” It was a rhetorical question. David didn’t expect his brother to answer. Something else came to mind. He rose from his squat, stepped carefully over the bidirectional ant parade and headed around the back of the hotel. He had a way of ending conversations abruptly.

Matthew stayed behind with the ants. He heard his brother muttering to himself as he rounded the corner of the hotel. Matthew was steamrollered the moment he was introduced to David’s girlfriend. Smoldering dark eyes, lithe dancer’s figure, gracious inclusion of those within her aura. If she wants extermination, Matthew thought, ants must die.
He had involuntarily Claudine fetish. On a practical level, nothing could ever happen; she was from a world far from the homespun Walden hotel. He didn’t know what she saw in David, but it was obvious to everyone that she was the best thing that had ever happened to him. Matthew wanted to keep the status quo. Nobody knew when the parents would come back, and Matthew was obsessed with the notion that he would finish his second year at the community college that May and be off for Stanford in the fall.
Nothing could upset that plan. If the ants had to take some casualties to keep the agenda on track, so be it. I’ll poison them, if that’s what it takes, Matthew told himself.
He went inside the hotel, where Claudine presided behind the small reception desk.
“David said we should do something about the ants,” he told her. Again, he lingered almost too long gazing at how her shoulders disappeared into her top. He caught himself, then locked on to her eyes, which were just as dangerous.
Claudine smiled her cool and intimate smile, the one that says the two of you are close without having to say anything about it. “Well, we have a lot of them.” She looked around the reception desk for evidence.
Ants are so often not around when you need one.
“Take a look at this,” she said, stepping out from behind the counter, pointing outside.
From behind, Matthew pushed the door open, followed her outside to size up the invasion.
He bent down for the second time to examine them. His brother’s new girlfriend towered over him, her arms folded in front of her. “I’ll see what they have at the hardware store,” he said.
“Great,” she said, then looked around. “Where’d David go?”
Matthew saw David emerge from the back of the hotel with his skis. Claudine followed his eyes to watch the older brother climb up the hill into the national forest.
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