They Came from Beyond

                                                               Them! (1950)

When I was 12, I found myself living in a foggy rural valley tucked in the foothills between San Gregorio and La Honda off the Pacific Coast Highway. As a pre-teen girl, I had my doubts about living 30 miles from school in a town with three bars, and no movie theater.

We lived in a funky two-room, you heard me right, two rooms, not two bedroom cabin perched on a mud flat less than 100 yards from a creek that was prone to perennial flooding. This proved to be unaccommodating to me, my mother and my new stepfather so they bought me my own personal trailer, which they parked on stilts just outside the flood berm surrounding the cabin.

My mom tried to equate this arrangement to the beloved gypsy wagon that she'd used as a playhouse (but was not expected to sleep in) as a child. 

My friends who lived in town were envious of the opportunities this afforded me for sneaking out. They didn't consider that the only accomplices I had to sneak out with were the raccoons and opossums that nested in the woods surrounding me, or that we were situated IN THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE!

While I should have been wary of the distant strumming banjos—*Pling-Pling-Pling-Pling*Pling-Pling*Pling-Pling-Pling*—I was coming of age with movies like Watcher in the Woods, The Omen, Close Encounters, and Friday the 13th. Everyone knows that ones chances of being haunted by a poltergeist, possessed by Satan, abducted by an alien, or murdered by hockey-mask wearing psychopath increases exponentially when living alone in a trailer in the woods. 

I assumed that making demands on ghosts would be seen as presumptuous, so instead I made nightly requests that, should any otherworldly beings be planning a visit, they should just stay invisible and keep quiet. They respected my wishes.

However, this did not mean that I was without visitors, oh, no.

The trailer we'd bought came from the Santa Cruz Mountains, and it came inhabited. Right after we bought it, we had two weeks of rain. The kind of rain that generally brought floods, but this time it stopped just short of overflowing. It was followed by a heat wave in February, which always surprises people, but which occurs so frequently that I've since come to expect it. 

Lounging in the humid trailer, I heard a clicking. Out of the corner of my eye I saw something move. 

I turned to face a Giant Mutant Ant! 

This was not your average picnic ant. This was an ant whose individual digits were the size of my pinky nail.

That's a BIG F*ing Ant, People!

This ant was not alone. Somewhere deep in the core of the trailer a colony had formed. They came in droves, and they were mean. Within hours they were swarming the trailer. There was not an inch of surface that wasn't covered. The trailer was alive...a giant mass of quivering black bodies. 

And it freaked the hell out of me.

We were environmentally friendly, peace-lovin' types, but clearly, sprinkling cinnamon around the perimeter of this encampment was not going to clear the infestation.

We had to take drastic measures. Bombs were dropped. They kept  coming. More bombs were dropped. They grew wings. Pretty soon, the trailer was a quivering flying mass. Upon opening the door, one would be attacked. They would fly at our heads, tangle themselves in our hair, aim for our ears.

For obvious reasons, I didn't want to enter "my room," much less sleep there.

After three months, their numbers subsided. That didn't mean they weren't still there, it just meant there were fewer of them. My parents felt I should return. I was less certain. I'd developed such an aversion that the mere site of those ants made my skin crawl. 

My adolescence was tainted by the odor of Raid, and a twitch that developed should so much as a hair graze my neck.

Unfortunately, I've never quite lost my aversion to ants. Even small sugar ants send me into a rage. For days now, soldier ants have been scoping the perimeter of our kitchen. I've been scouring like mad and spraying their trails with vinegar. I've been avoiding poison, what with two small children and my fear of environmental retaliation. And yet, every time I leave the house, I'm quite convinced that I'll return to find my kitchen crawling out from under me.