The Red Ants of Thailand

Joom and I.  2010. 

In 2010 I lived in Thailand, working as an English teacher and
a social media director for TEFL International. My salary allowed
me to rent a three-bedroom bungalow that was a few blocks from
the beach on the Gulf of Thailand. The bungalow was on an acre
of land with a huge pond seething with fish and turtles, along with
a rundown orchard of sapodilla fruit trees. You won’t believe the
rent I paid; a measly two-hundred dollars a month. There was
a small teakwood pavilion nestled in the quiet shady sapodilla
grove, where I liked to sit and spoon with my Thai girlfriend, Joom.
Between bouts of canoodling we’d gather the fallen fruit for our lunch.

It was idyllic alright, but there was a fly in the suntan lotion. Red ants.
Aggressive, inquisitive, biting red ants. They considered the sapodilla
grove to be their private property; Joom and I were the trespassers.
To keep them at bay, Joom sprinkled the pavilion with talcum powder --
the ants disliked traveling through the perfumed dust. Talcum powder
is cheap in Thailand; everyone uses it to fight the roaring midday heat
and humidity, blanketing themselves until they look like ghosts.
We had to dust the teakwood pavilion frequently, since each
monsoon downpour washed away the talcum protection.

One day Joom decided to leave suddenly so she could visit her
brother’s rice farm up in Jungwat Loey -- three hundred miles
away by the Laotian border. I had to stay and work. After she
was gone I realized that she hadn’t told me where she kept the
talcum powder in the bungalow. I ransacked the cupboards and
closets but couldn’t find any. Oh well, I thought idly to myself, the
next time it rains I’ll just run down to the local shanty shop for a
couple of cans.

The rain came down in pails that night and the next morning
the red ants were all over our love pavilion. So I sauntered down
to the open-fronted shack that served as the local
grocery-cum-everything shop in the neighborhood. It was closed,
the rusty steel shutters all the way down and padlocked.
 I’d forgotten the day was one of the innumerable Buddhist
holidays that Thais observe. There’s about 25 of them, from
Loy Krathong to the full moon Magha Puja. Drat! I’d have to
forgo an afternoon snooze out in the shady grove (Joom had
rigged up a weaved sisal hammock inside the place for desultory napping.)
The next day I once again toddled off to the store for talcum powder,
but the place was still shuttered. I’d also forgotten the slew of
Thai national and royal holidays -- the Thais normally take a couple
of days off to celebrate the birthday of each previous monarch of the
Chakri dynasty -- and there were nine of them; plus a week or two
off for the birthdays of the current king and his royal consort. Plus
more time off for the annual plowing ceremony, which is set by the
Brahmin priests at the royal palace according the phases of the
moon and some kind of ouija board thingamabob. Come to think
of it, that’s why Joom had been in such a hurry to get back to the farm --
she wanted to be there in time to help her brother celebrate the ploughing
ceremony to insure a good harvest (but mostly, I think, to imbibe as much
of the local rice beer as possible before the wild elephants in the
neighborhood trampled down the bamboo fence surrounding the big
wooden vat and went on a toot.)

“No wonder nothing ever gets done around this place” I muttered to
myself as I slunk back to the bungalow and its appealing grove of
sapodillas -- now Off Limits to me.

I decided to improvise; there’s nothing that good old-fashioned
Yankee ingenuity can’t handle, I told myself with pride.

There was a gallon of bleach back by the laundry tub, so I gingerly
walked out to the pavilion with it to slosh around. The red ants didn’t
like it, but the bleach soon evaporated, not sinking into the hard
teakwood a bit, and the critters were back in a matter of hours --
more belligerent than ever.

I kept a can of roach spray in the house, so I tried that next.
The ants seemed to thrive on it. I swear on a stack of pancakes
they even started to grow bigger!

Admitting defeat, I sat all alone in my bungalow, fuming,
or went out to the pond and fed the fishes and turtles all of
the dog food Joom kept at the house for her mutt, Neepoo.
Sapodillas covered the ground in growing mounds, and they sure
went good in a Panang curry -- but each one had a troop of savage
red ants around it. I suspect they sensed that they had a farang
milquetoast at their mercy, and made the most of it.

When Joom finally returned I did not greet her as kindly as I
might have. Instead, I lit into her about her thoughtlessness
in leaving me alone with the red ants and no talcum powder.
She was not at her best that particular day, what with the long
bus ride from home (and the after effects of all that local homebrew),
so she gave as good as she got, and we had what might be called a
lover’s spat -- one that ended with her throwing a thumping great papaya
at my head and me threatening to duck her in the fish pond.

I did not see her for a week after that, but then one evening she was
at the door, with Neepoo and a large box of yellow chalk. Although
I spoke Thai reasonably well, she insisted on speaking in English.

“This make it better than powder!” she told me forcefully.
Demonstrating, she marched out to the pavilion, now overrun
with those insufferable red ants, and began drawing circles around
the posts that held it off the ground, and then began drawing lines on
the floor and the bench with more chalk. The ants grew confused.
They hesitated. They didn’t bite. In fact, within a half hour they had
disappeared from the pavilion completely. Joom thrust the chalk box
into my hands in smug triumph and then demanded “You say you
sorry now!” And I did. And she made us a lovely curry with stewed
sapodillas that night, which we ate companionably out in the pavilion,
the  cool breeze off the Gulf tossing her shiny black hair in a most
attractive manner.

To this day I don’t know if there was anything special in that chalk --
she bought it right off the same shelf that held pencils, notebooks,
and other grade school accoutrements, and she made sure I had
several more boxes squirreled away in the bungalow for the next
time she decided to wander off on her own to celebrate Songkran or
some other Thai fiesta. And the best thing about that chalk was that it
didn’t wash away after the first or even second monsoon rain.

I’ve tried drawing chalk circles around the tiny brown and harmless
ants that swarm along the sidewalks here in Utah in the summer,
but it doesn’t faze them a bit. I’m beginning to think that Joom
(whom I haven’t heard from in over five years) had something
magical about her. In fact, I believe that all the Thai people have
some magic in them that we farangs just never will understand.