The Two Square Foot Lunch
Finding a comfortable, flat spot to sit without getting your butt wet is nearly impossible.
by Russ Richardson (Originally published in Two-Lane Livin’ Magazine, August 2016)
While working in the woods, some portion of every day becomes lunchtime. Lunchtime is more like an inactivity period than a specific time on a clock or watch. Often lunch takes place when encountering a good place to sit intersects with a raging desire to sit, eat, AND rest.
Eating lunch itself rarely takes more than a few minutes and I usually spend the remainder of my "lunch hour" enjoying the quiet, dozing, or observing my surroundings. Sometimes the scenery at lunchtime can be spectacular but most often lunchtime the deep woods is more like eating alone in a giant room with a complex green ceiling.
I have long wondered if the people who develop special effect scenes as well as the monsters and outrageous beasts portrayed in modern movies use magnified views of scenes from the forest floor as models for their work. As freakish as some of those fictitious animals might look on the big screen, more than a few monsters in recent movies look similar to actual bugs I have seen in the woods….only 10,000 times bigger! More than once, I have studied the hollow end of a mossy log filled with a tangle of spider webs only to find myself recalling a scene from a Hobbit or Indiana Jones movie.
Often during the greenest and dampest part of summer, finding a comfortable, flat spot to sit without getting your butt wet is nearly impossible. It was during one of these cramped, mid-summer lunches that I spent over half an hour watching a tragic but insignificant event unfold in front of me. The damp brush surrounding me was so thick, the most distant thing I could see as I relaxed was the ground at my feet.
Similar to many early summer days, a large portion of my lunch had been fresh cherries. By the time I finished eating the cherries, discarded fruit pits were scattered on the ground beneath me. Even though I tried to get all the nutrition possible from each cherry I ate, every cherry stone had a tiny red fragment of fruit firmly stuck to it. After a few minutes, an increasing variety of crawling and flying bugs was gathering to take advantage of my leftovers.
Of all the scavengers, ants were the first to appear, and soon, an organized and busy line of activity developed between the cherry pits and some nearby ant colony. As I watched the procession grow, I realized that not all species of ants play well together. A slightly smaller and different-colored ant entered the clearing and started to nibble on a single cherry pit located several inches from any being worked by the "line ants." After a short period of quietly eating the cherry, one of the much larger "line ants" noticed its' smaller neighbor and began a chase.
Almost as quickly as the aggressive line ant charged its' smaller relative, the little ant ran for safety with the large ant just a few inches away. The small ant climbed a blade of grass in an attempt to get away from its' aggressor only to have the piece of grass fold under its weight.
The scene of the small ant climbing a single blade of collapsing grass was repeated again and again, the chase continued from one side of the opening to the other and back several times until a piece of grass the red ant was hanging from touched the ground immediately in front of the line ant. Trying to escape the line ant, the little red ant lost its grip and dropped to the ground. In seconds, the little red ant was being carried away, curled up and dead in the pinchers of the line ant.
That was enough drama for one lunch hour, so I decided it was time to go back to work.