This Land is Their Land

About my relationship with ants: I mostly don’t like them. When I was six or seven-ish, I stepped in an ants’ nest across the street from our Azalea Place home, ants crawled up my legs and into my sneakers, I wet my pants and the neighbor lady brought me home crying. At WSU, I lived in a scary, porn-studio-esque apartment one summer and poured a bowl of cereal for breakfast AND IT MOVED, crawling with members of the same ant family that had, only days before, feasted on whatever food shred I’d left in my toothbrush. I didn’t wet my pants, but I will say that I haven’t eaten Raisin Bran since 1989.

So I am, understandably, undelighted to lift a concrete block from its station on my empty lot and discover a swarming colony of formicidae Hymenoptera. You can crow all you want about ants and their mind-bending feats of organization and industriousness, but to me they’re still shiny, squirming, crack-penetrating dirt-diggers and they can’t be trusted. Not so millipedes, with their even more pronounced wriggly shininess and the way they look like miniature thousand-legged land-dwelling eels. But millipedes (thankfully) don’t bunch together in teaming armies of ick. They’re lone operators, and you know when you see one, it’s not going to be immediately following by a thousand others that swarm over your half-eaten turkey-and-avocado sandwich while your back is turned and skeletonize it 2.3 seconds.

Wasps, potato bugs, earthworms, and spiders are among the creatures that call my future home their current one. I’d feel guiltier about displacing them if I had more fondness for insects; I’m hopeful that they’ll find other accommodations as the project progresses and their hives, colonies, nests, and holes are molested by the excavator and crushed by the inevitable turquoise construction-site Porta-Potti. The “really big mouse with the long pink tail” witnessed by my ten-year-old helper Miles, however, can go ahead and slither under the next approaching WTA bus.

I feel worse about the eradication of the flora than I do the fauna. Although you’d never know it to look at the withering cacti in my home, I am a plant person. If it were nutritionally feasible, I might actually become a carnivorian, and not just because I hate the taste of cauliflower and cabbage. It pains me that I won’t be able to salvage all of the greenery on my lot. The house has been designed specifically to spare the chestnut and maple trees on the south side, as well as the shrubbery that forms a natural fence along Donovan Ave. and Arlene’s place to the west. What I can’t save, sadly, are the twelve-foot lilac bushes in the northwest corner (future garage), the huge alder in the center of the lot (future kitchen), the holly bushes—dangerous skin-scraping beasts though they are—and the wild raspberry plants scattered around the property (future everything).

Walking away from the property to my for-now home, I step over a beetle on the sidewalk, hesitant to hear the crack of its tiny shell under my dirty foot. I look back at the lot and see both a house, and a home. A 6000 square foot biosphere alive with a million squiggling, tunneling, worming pieces of the universe. The dirt and rocks, the flowers, the trees, the rustling leaves—it’s a wonder that we can build houses or drive cars or eat anything for the beauty of it all.

I’m feeling very Darwin right about now, very Survival Of the Fittest, and not necessarily in a good way. In order for me to build my shelter, I have to disrupt the homes of these ants, millipedes, rats and spiders I claim to have no warmth for. I have to uproot trees that have known no other ground. I have to balance my This Is the Way the World Works sentiments against the reality that once again, the strong overpower the weak just because we’re bigger and we have sharper, noisier tools. Then again, those ants might just be back.

Sarah Circles the Blo(g)ck

In the space that will eventually be my guest bedroom, Kosha lies stretched out in the sun, his snout barely visible behind the weeds. He looks like a lion hiding in wait on the Serengeti, except without the motivating killer instinct. The most he's done all afternoon is circulate the lot to sniff desiccated piles of dog shit and lick aggressively at the spot where his balls used to be. I know a little about how that feels--the sense that something should be where it isn't. Unlike Kosha, however, I can remedy the situation. It's what I'm doing right now.

It's Saturday at 11 a.m. and I've donned my junkiest jeans--Levis blotched with "Dylan's Grove," the paint I used in the guest room at my previous house--a BE Tiger t-shirt, and new pigskin work gloves. The Vanbulance is parked on 17th Street, top popped, I've cranked the Johnny Cash, chilled the beer, and greeted the nine-year-old neighbor, Sarah, who’s riding her bike up and down the alley. Today begins Phase One of Belben Builds a House: emptying and tearing down the decrepit, Boo Radley-esque wooden shack on the northeast corner of my empty lot on 17th and Donovan.

I open the doors timidly--the shed is dark and filled with a creepy assortment of damp mysteries that suggest a certain CSI excitement--a head in a bucket, maybe, or a partial skeleton or at the very least, an abandoned diary that hints at some long-forgotten misdeed. But what I find fails to deliver on the promise of my morbid imaginings: rotting window frames, mismatched sawhorses, rat crap, and a warped U2 Achtung Baby cassette tape. Even the creepy-crawlies fail to appear, the wasps' nest long abandoned, the spiders dry and curly, the ants and millipedes seeking sustenance outside. A dozen rusty tools sink into the husks of a thousand horse chestnuts littering the floor, all of it suggesting the shed was never the site of anything more interesting than discarded home improvement projects and an abandoned appreciation for Bono.

I spend the day dragging the contents of the shed to the corner, creating an impressive pile of rotten lumber and making myself available for neighborhood viewing. Apparently action on this long-empty lot qualifies as drama for Marvin, who registers his friendly annoyance that my new house will block his view (I invite him to come over once the place is built to join me for a drink on my veranda, where he can enjoy my view); Arlene, the independent retiree next door who welcomes me warmly, and the very aged, bathrobe-clad Lucille—who comes out of her house infrequently enough to have earned the name “Reclucy”—who wants to know which trees will be spared and which sawed down. Most importantly, my friends Noah, Dana, Laural, and Tom offer water, their bathroom, a wheelbarrow, and much companionship as I begin establishing my life just yards away from their home.

Despite my disappointment at the shed’s content, the purging is satisfactory—the hauling, piling, and pounding is cathartic; I’m not just sitting around waiting for the house to be built anymore. But besides that, besides making progress on the physical preparation of the property, I feel like it’s become more than just a vacant lot adjacent to other people’s homes, it’s becoming a part of the neighborhood. And me? I’m becoming a neighbor.