I have written about fire ants before. But things have changed in the South. Call it global warming. Call it a fire ant invasion. Call it an environmental rash, whatever. I have experienced fire ants up close all of my life. I have never seen anything like this.
Over the holiday season, I visited the deepest of the Deep South. I was in half a dozen Southern cities, including the one that introduced fire ants (from South America) into this country in the first place, Mobile, Alabama. Besides the overabundance of deer now roaming the highways, I paid attention to the ground. December temperatures hovered near 80º for over a week. I walked about 20 miles through the woods. It is no secret that fire ants are doing what Al Gore had difficulty doing – convincing people of global warming.
Forget zombies and robots from space, fire ants should have their own disaster movie. During my Gulf Coast trip I saw 5,569,867 fire ant mounds (or beds, as my mom calls them). I counted them (or came close). If you are a fire ant, I-65 looks like the Rocky Mountains for fire ant mounds.
Usually in winter, if you kick a fire ant mound, it looks abandoned. Kick one now and they will swarm like August. Beside I-85, I-65 and I-10, mounds are pushing a foot tall. There are dozens every ten feet. My mom’s yard is filled with them. My mother-in-law’s yard is crawling. Our farm is mounded up like an old Matthew Brady Civil War photograph with tents stretching to the horizon. Walking around them is like strolling through a minefield. Think global warming is a farce? Step in a fire ant mound in the middle of winter and tell me again. The red chompers will be up to your knees before you can deny that we’ve screwed up our environment.
Growing up in Alabama in the 1960’s and 1970’s, we had fire ants – but not at Christmas. Just take a stroll today and feel the pain. Rudy (our Jack Russell) did and he has the red whelps to prove it. We are not in an environmental cycle, we are in a pivotal moment in history. The normal cycle was left behind years ago. What humans are doing to the earth is not religious or political, it is biological and chemical. It is crawling all over right now.