The Ant Farm
Christina Hamlett
December 19, 2006
There comes a time in every child's life when he or she discovers that something crucial is missing.
For some, it's the desire to get a new pet.
For me, it was the realization that I would probably have been better off just getting a new set of parents. Certainly the parents of my friends were more interesting to spend time with. They laughed more, took themselves less seriously, and were not nearly as likely to go ballistic about spills on white carpet or "good clothes" as my own parents were.
They also took the view that animals were as welcome indoors as were the playmates of their boisterous offspring, the two generally inseparable on long summer days or cold winter nights. My mother, in contrast, would just as soon have called the SPCA to remove them.
The Quintessential "Pet Parents" in my life were the Shinkoskeys, a rowdy family whose surname was an instant giveaway of not being from the same strata as my blueblood relatives. How I came to know Sandy Shinkoskey at all was the result of Brownies and Girl Scouts; we were not only in the same grade at Lake Hills Elementary but were in the same troop as well.
Sandy had Everything as far as I was concerned - three sisters named Janine, Suzie and Rocky, a German Shepherd called Singer (whom they had traded for a sewing machine of the same name), and a father with one of those contagious laughs that you couldn't help laughing along with. I recall overhearing one time that Mr. Shinkoskey's plane had been shot down early in the Second World War but that he had been taken in by a Chinese family and remained there in hiding from the Japanese for the next four years.
In exchange for watching their children while the elders toiled in the rice fields, they had taught Mr. Shinkoskey how to cook what had to be the best Chinese food in the world. Not a bad gig, considering everyone else in his unit was engaged in dogfights and eating bad meals in mess halls.
Whether he suffered any psychological damage for those long years of captivity never became apparent; like everything else, it was just another one of life's little adventures to be absorbed and learned from. Had he been able to go back to the Far East one day and look them up, I'm sure he would have. I'm just as sure they would have remembered him.
It was the fact that one or more Shinkoskeys was always rescuing something, of course, that fascinated me the most. Stray kittens, flight-challenged sparrows, field mice - you name it, the Shinkoskeys were more than likely to have provided it food and refuge until it was able to continue on its own. Much like, I think, Mr. Shinkoskey's benefactors during the war.
At one point, I even planned to run away and go live with the Shinkoskeys myself. They already had four daughters under the same roof, I reasoned. What difference would one more make at their dining room table, especially one with good manners who knew how to make her own bed?
My mother was quick to point out that I wouldn't like being one of them. "The Shinkoskeys are poor," she said.
In retrospect, I'm not quite sure how this could have been. Mr. Shinkoskey worked in the aerospace industry, they had a house less than six blocks from ours, and spent summer weekends at a second house (which they owned) on the shores of Lake Sammammish. In my mother's estimation, however, anyone who ate hot dogs and hamburgers and who also allowed their pets to roam freely indoors would never find inclusion in The National Social Directory.
Nevertheless, I continued to lobby for a pet of my own, if for no other reason than to have someone to talk to while I did my homework.
My prayers were finally answered in the form of the school science fair. Every student, you see, had to work on a special project for six weeks and then write a report on it.
I was going to be really inventive and tell my parents that I had been assigned by the teacher to write a report about horses which, thus, would have necessitated that they run out and buy me one over the weekend. Something that big, though, would probably have prompted a phone call to Miss Frederickson.
"What's this about our daughter needing a horse?" they would have asked.
Miss Frederickson, of course, would have been unhelpfully clueless.
I decided it might be safer to aim my sights a little lower. "I'm doing a project for the science fair," I said. "I need to get an ant farm."
The way they so readily agreed to it, I dismally realized I had negotiated too low. Maybe I should have opened the bid with a dog instead.
Oh well. Ants could be interesting.
Ant farms in the 60's could be bought just about anywhere. They were even advertised on television, which just goes to show how desperate viewers were for entertainment in those days. Roughly 5x9 and framed with bright green plastic, ant farms were hyped as "working communities" and "an industrious model for modern society". By watching ants all day, the color brochure explained, children could learn the benefits of teamwork and cooperation. Not to mention the subliminal message that being in management (i.e., The Queen), offered the distinct advantage of lolling around while everyone else did the grunt work and brought you food. During my adult life, I have actually been employed by people who subscribed to this theory, no doubt as the direct result of owning an ant farm in their youth.
As educational kits go, "Ant Land" (as I christened it) was fairly complete. It not only came completely preassembled and with a pouch of granular white stuff (presumably the ants' natural habitat), but a package of genuine squirming ants as well (Queen Included) and an easy-to-follow recipe for their favorite food: sugar water (i.e., "Mix sugar and water"). Later models, it should be mentioned, required that owners go catch their own ants.
Ant Land kept my attention for - oh, maybe a couple of hours. It was intriguing at first to observe not only their profound physical strength but the intensity and single-mindedness with which they constructed elaborate mazes that rivaled the Southern California freeway system and were just about as impossible to access.
My interest in them quickly waned, however, I think because I placed a higher expectation on my diminutive companions than they had of themselves. At the rate they were going, I figured they'd have built themselves a mini-Neuschwanstein and moved into it by Sunday night.
No, they continued to labor away on tunnels and tunnels and tunnels some more.
There didn't seem to be a lot of point to any of it.
The instructions in the brochure also failed to mention that, once the ant farm was set up, it was a good idea to leave it in one place. Running from one room to the next with an ant farm, for instance, produces much the same effect as shaking an Etch-a-Sketch. The result is that all the tunnels collapse and the ants - those that live to tell of the experience - are forced to rebuild from scratch.
As if seismic disturbances were not enough, the real demise of Ant World came with the introduction of larger, more aggressive companions for them to play with, specifically, three or four garden-variety ants who had been hapless enough to wander into a Dixie Cup and get caught.
Like the radioactive ants in the sci-fi movie, "THEM", these giant red beasts made quick meals of Ant Land's residents, including the Queen herself, and then proceeded to get stuck in the tunnels and die.
I did not get an "A" on the project, in spite of the larger, sociological inferences which might have been drawn from this experiment.
I was not to have a pet again until the brief bird interlude known as Sloppy Toppy. "S.T.", so nicknamed for his hygiene habits, was a bright yellow canary given to us by a friend who quickly changed her name and moved out of town. His best trick was to try to fly out of his cage when you were changing the newspaper, hop a ride on the ceiling fan, and stay on it until he got dizzy, at which point he'd slide off and hurl himself into a wall. The phrase "bird brain" originated with S.T.
There was also a brief stint with a painted turtle, specifically advertising "Hello from Hollywood", and the time I carefully taped 50 cents in an envelope in order to receive "two genuine sea horses by mail". One assumed from the ad, of course, that said sea horses would be delivered alive and that, by adding water, they would grow into a ride-able size. Having read Jules Verne stories about Captain Nemo and been hooked on a children's show featuring the intrepid Diver Dan, I was convinced that sea horses were definitely the way to go.
You can imagine my crushing disappointment when I opened the long-awaited envelope and two hard little scaly orange things fell out. Even the fact that the company had thrown in a genuine little scaly orange starfish didn't lift my spirits. I did, however, throw all three into a glass of water just as a show of childhood faith.
All three promptly disintegrated before my eyes.
Fortunately, by the time I had graduated to dogs, I had also become much wiser.
For some, it's the desire to get a new pet.
For me, it was the realization that I would probably have been better off just getting a new set of parents. Certainly the parents of my friends were more interesting to spend time with. They laughed more, took themselves less seriously, and were not nearly as likely to go ballistic about spills on white carpet or "good clothes" as my own parents were.
They also took the view that animals were as welcome indoors as were the playmates of their boisterous offspring, the two generally inseparable on long summer days or cold winter nights. My mother, in contrast, would just as soon have called the SPCA to remove them.
The Quintessential "Pet Parents" in my life were the Shinkoskeys, a rowdy family whose surname was an instant giveaway of not being from the same strata as my blueblood relatives. How I came to know Sandy Shinkoskey at all was the result of Brownies and Girl Scouts; we were not only in the same grade at Lake Hills Elementary but were in the same troop as well.
Sandy had Everything as far as I was concerned - three sisters named Janine, Suzie and Rocky, a German Shepherd called Singer (whom they had traded for a sewing machine of the same name), and a father with one of those contagious laughs that you couldn't help laughing along with. I recall overhearing one time that Mr. Shinkoskey's plane had been shot down early in the Second World War but that he had been taken in by a Chinese family and remained there in hiding from the Japanese for the next four years.
In exchange for watching their children while the elders toiled in the rice fields, they had taught Mr. Shinkoskey how to cook what had to be the best Chinese food in the world. Not a bad gig, considering everyone else in his unit was engaged in dogfights and eating bad meals in mess halls.
Whether he suffered any psychological damage for those long years of captivity never became apparent; like everything else, it was just another one of life's little adventures to be absorbed and learned from. Had he been able to go back to the Far East one day and look them up, I'm sure he would have. I'm just as sure they would have remembered him.
It was the fact that one or more Shinkoskeys was always rescuing something, of course, that fascinated me the most. Stray kittens, flight-challenged sparrows, field mice - you name it, the Shinkoskeys were more than likely to have provided it food and refuge until it was able to continue on its own. Much like, I think, Mr. Shinkoskey's benefactors during the war.
At one point, I even planned to run away and go live with the Shinkoskeys myself. They already had four daughters under the same roof, I reasoned. What difference would one more make at their dining room table, especially one with good manners who knew how to make her own bed?
My mother was quick to point out that I wouldn't like being one of them. "The Shinkoskeys are poor," she said.
In retrospect, I'm not quite sure how this could have been. Mr. Shinkoskey worked in the aerospace industry, they had a house less than six blocks from ours, and spent summer weekends at a second house (which they owned) on the shores of Lake Sammammish. In my mother's estimation, however, anyone who ate hot dogs and hamburgers and who also allowed their pets to roam freely indoors would never find inclusion in The National Social Directory.
Nevertheless, I continued to lobby for a pet of my own, if for no other reason than to have someone to talk to while I did my homework.
My prayers were finally answered in the form of the school science fair. Every student, you see, had to work on a special project for six weeks and then write a report on it.
I was going to be really inventive and tell my parents that I had been assigned by the teacher to write a report about horses which, thus, would have necessitated that they run out and buy me one over the weekend. Something that big, though, would probably have prompted a phone call to Miss Frederickson.
"What's this about our daughter needing a horse?" they would have asked.
Miss Frederickson, of course, would have been unhelpfully clueless.
I decided it might be safer to aim my sights a little lower. "I'm doing a project for the science fair," I said. "I need to get an ant farm."
The way they so readily agreed to it, I dismally realized I had negotiated too low. Maybe I should have opened the bid with a dog instead.
Oh well. Ants could be interesting.
Ant farms in the 60's could be bought just about anywhere. They were even advertised on television, which just goes to show how desperate viewers were for entertainment in those days. Roughly 5x9 and framed with bright green plastic, ant farms were hyped as "working communities" and "an industrious model for modern society". By watching ants all day, the color brochure explained, children could learn the benefits of teamwork and cooperation. Not to mention the subliminal message that being in management (i.e., The Queen), offered the distinct advantage of lolling around while everyone else did the grunt work and brought you food. During my adult life, I have actually been employed by people who subscribed to this theory, no doubt as the direct result of owning an ant farm in their youth.
As educational kits go, "Ant Land" (as I christened it) was fairly complete. It not only came completely preassembled and with a pouch of granular white stuff (presumably the ants' natural habitat), but a package of genuine squirming ants as well (Queen Included) and an easy-to-follow recipe for their favorite food: sugar water (i.e., "Mix sugar and water"). Later models, it should be mentioned, required that owners go catch their own ants.
Ant Land kept my attention for - oh, maybe a couple of hours. It was intriguing at first to observe not only their profound physical strength but the intensity and single-mindedness with which they constructed elaborate mazes that rivaled the Southern California freeway system and were just about as impossible to access.
My interest in them quickly waned, however, I think because I placed a higher expectation on my diminutive companions than they had of themselves. At the rate they were going, I figured they'd have built themselves a mini-Neuschwanstein and moved into it by Sunday night.
No, they continued to labor away on tunnels and tunnels and tunnels some more.
There didn't seem to be a lot of point to any of it.
The instructions in the brochure also failed to mention that, once the ant farm was set up, it was a good idea to leave it in one place. Running from one room to the next with an ant farm, for instance, produces much the same effect as shaking an Etch-a-Sketch. The result is that all the tunnels collapse and the ants - those that live to tell of the experience - are forced to rebuild from scratch.
As if seismic disturbances were not enough, the real demise of Ant World came with the introduction of larger, more aggressive companions for them to play with, specifically, three or four garden-variety ants who had been hapless enough to wander into a Dixie Cup and get caught.
Like the radioactive ants in the sci-fi movie, "THEM", these giant red beasts made quick meals of Ant Land's residents, including the Queen herself, and then proceeded to get stuck in the tunnels and die.
I did not get an "A" on the project, in spite of the larger, sociological inferences which might have been drawn from this experiment.
I was not to have a pet again until the brief bird interlude known as Sloppy Toppy. "S.T.", so nicknamed for his hygiene habits, was a bright yellow canary given to us by a friend who quickly changed her name and moved out of town. His best trick was to try to fly out of his cage when you were changing the newspaper, hop a ride on the ceiling fan, and stay on it until he got dizzy, at which point he'd slide off and hurl himself into a wall. The phrase "bird brain" originated with S.T.
There was also a brief stint with a painted turtle, specifically advertising "Hello from Hollywood", and the time I carefully taped 50 cents in an envelope in order to receive "two genuine sea horses by mail". One assumed from the ad, of course, that said sea horses would be delivered alive and that, by adding water, they would grow into a ride-able size. Having read Jules Verne stories about Captain Nemo and been hooked on a children's show featuring the intrepid Diver Dan, I was convinced that sea horses were definitely the way to go.
You can imagine my crushing disappointment when I opened the long-awaited envelope and two hard little scaly orange things fell out. Even the fact that the company had thrown in a genuine little scaly orange starfish didn't lift my spirits. I did, however, throw all three into a glass of water just as a show of childhood faith.
All three promptly disintegrated before my eyes.
Fortunately, by the time I had graduated to dogs, I had also become much wiser.
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