When we were in Thailand, Depreena and I spent a few days visiting an orphanage. We really had an awesome time with the kids there and the house-mother, despite the communication barrier of neither of us speaking Thai beyond hello and thank you We took pictures, posed for pictures, played in the "river" (which turned out to be a small dam), had a seaweed fight, played around with guitars, and generally hung out with and loved on the kids.
Anyway.
We were staying in a small guesthouse, and it was great. The first night we turned the fan on, I pulled my blanket over me, and fell asleep. And I slept until the morning when the rooster(s?) decided to serenade us.
Depreena was not so fortunate.
She woke up in the middle of the night, cold, because we were in the mountains and the windows were open and the fan was blasting, and she was cold. So she turned off the fan, pulled on her blanket, and went back to sleep...only to wake up a little while later because her blanket had slipped onto the floor. She yanked it back over herself...
and felt something crawling on her.
She killed it.
And then felt something else crawling on her.
And in her blanket.
With remarkable fortitude of mind, she told herself that if she was outside camping, she wouldn't mind... and went back to sleep.
When we got up in the morning, we discovered that there were quite a number of ants that had swarmed our room. When we went into the connected bathroom, the ants were there too.
We squished them all while discussing if they could have been attracted to something we brought in. We both had food, but it was in our backpacks, and those were the one thing they had left alone. Once things were cleaned up, we went outside and got into the day.
We came back in the afternoon to shower after the seaweed fight, and all the ants were still gone. Victory, we thought.
But then when we came back at night...
the ants had come back too.
And there were more of them. Where there had been tidy ant-lines before, there were now floods of ants.
I lay down on my bed and read for a while. Depreena went into the bathroom. "I'm gonna spray the toilet hose," she told me. (Toilet hoses are basically what they sound like... hoses by the toilets. They always have fabulous water pressure. I think they're a Thai thing.)
"Mhmm," I said, not really paying attention. Somewhere in the back of my mind was the idea that she meant she was going to spray bug repellent on the toilet hose, because she thought the ants were coming in on it.
We continued chatting -- and I continued reading -- over the sound of water being sprayed all over the bathroom. Which did not register in my mind.
"I packed too many socks," I said at some point in our conversation.
"Yeah, well, don't come in here," Depreena said. "They'll get wet."
I assumed that she meant the toilet hose had dripped on the floor again.
Thus, it came as a shock to me a few minutes later when I went to plug my camera battery in and found that I was standing in a shallow pool of water with dead ants floating all through it. "So that's what you meant when you said you were going to spray the toilet hose..." I said to Depreena, and she laughed at me, as I deserved.
And then we went to bed, closing the door on the drowned ants, planning to deal with it in the morning.
When I woke up there were no ants in our room. That was pleasant!
I walked toward the bathroom door.
"Uh, I haven't gone in there yet..." Depreena said, tacitly cautioning me that she did not really want to deal yet with the aftermath of the ant flood.
I ignored this because I didn't feel like having to deal with it later, and cracked the door open.
"Depreena?" I said.
She braced herself.
"The water is gone..." I said, a little confused. It must have all gone down the drain and evaporated during the night, which I had been afraid that it wasn't going to do.
"Yeah..." she said, prepared for me to comment about how dumb it had been to drown all of the ants and the disaster that we now had to clean up.
"...and all the ants are gone," I said. Dumbfounded would probably be an appropriate word here.
Depreena jumped off of her bed in record time and stood beside me to look at the clean, ant-free bathroom.
Did they all drown and go down the drain?
Did they manage to get out of the water and scramble away to safety while we slept?
Did they decide that this was the wrong building to go into, after a massacre in the morning and flood at night?
We don't know.
I'm glad that there was someone else there who had seen the ants, or I would have thought that I had a curry-induced hallucination.
And that is the mystery of our magical disappearing ants.
Where is Encyclopedia Brown when you need him?
