Varmints in the House

I'd rather write about the Christmas season in Boquete, but since it isn't over yet and there are bound to be even more stories, I'll fulfill my promise to fill you in on the army ants and the snake-in-the-house episodes. For better or worse, Larry wasn't present for either, as most of his waking hours are spent on the golf course. The more I think about it, I believe it was for the better as there was quite enough wrong thinking with just me in charge.

I've known about army ants for a long time. They called them driver ants when we were in Africa, and, although we never encountered them, the stories were legion. The passage of time doubtless has rendered my imperfect memory even more imperfect, but my recollection is that we were led to believe they were merciless devourers of any flesh in their path: sort of land piranhas (not to be confused with land sharks). Fortunately, that myth was dispelled by Doc and Charly, who told us early on that army ants forage primarily for insects and spiders. (It could be that African driver ants are more voracious, which is partly borne out by my research.) They, Doc and Charly, recounted coming upon army ants when they rented a house in Jaramillo. When the ants made it inside, they related, they simply cleared out and returned later to find everything clean as a whistle.

Army ants have been in the back garden several times, and even made it onto the back terrace once when we had lots of workers about. I was startled at the columns of ants up to two-feet wide, but was told by all present that they weren't a danger, just to leave them alone and get out of their way. So I had become somewhat used to them and didn't give any consideration to what I would do if they made their way inside. I should have realized that since we leave the patio doors open when we're home so the dogs can go in an out, it was a distinct possibility that they would pay a inside visit at some point.

Several Fridays ago, when Dalys was here cleaning the house, I ran a few errands downtown and returned to find the entire great room covered by a mass of scurrying ants. They had abandoned their neat columns and spread out everywhere. It's a large room, and the floor was positively boiling and seething with ants. Dalys was cleaning in the master bath and had no knowledge of their intrusion, and I didn't cry out for fear of alerting the dogs, who presumably were asleep in the bedroom. Common sense completely abandoned me, and the first thing I did was close the bedroom door, grab a can of bug spray, and spray the threshold of the open door leading to terrace in an effort to prevent any more from coming inside. This effectively trapped them inside, of course, so I was obliged to try to spray all of them, a nearly impossible task even before the spray can ran dry. I was afraid to open the front door because Juanita was napping on the front porch. Dalys finally emerged from the back and told me, too late, to just leave them alone, they wouldn't bite, and they would be gone within twenty minutes. But now there were dying ants and panic-stricken ants everywhere, with no place to run to, so the two of us set about trying to sweep the dead, the dying, and the panic-stricken into dust pans and out the door. This involved about an hour of frantic labor and, despite Dalys' assurances, a number of bites on my feet when a few became trapped beneath the straps of my sandals. Eventually the house was cleared of ants and order was restored.

Belatedly, I did a little Internet research and learned that they pose little threat to large animals, which generally can get out of the way in any case. But they do bite. And their bites inject a tissue dissolving substance which allows them reduce their prey to jelly so as to be able to consume it easily. That would account for the agonizing itching I suffered on my bitten foot for over a week, even in the absence of discernible bite marks. I further learned that they have no nest but, instead, at times of rest attach to each and form an enormous ant ball, with the queen protected in the center. Interestingly, none made their way up in walls or onto furniture; they confined themselves strictly to the floor. But they are said to climb trees and invade birds nests. I wish I had had my wits about me, had vacated the premises with the dogs and let them have their way with the spiders and other insects lurking throughout the house. Next time I'll be better prepared.

The snake is another story of delayed common sense. I came upon it when I again returned from a trip to town, opened the door, and spotted an intruder curled up in a corner by the front double doors. It's a fairly dark corner, so I'm surprised that I saw it at all and even more surprised that the dogs and Juanita, who were jumping around me in greeting, had not. I don't have a morbid fear of snakes and didn't run screaming through the house, but I'm aware that there are some extremely poisonous snakes in the tropics and that animals seldom ask questions beforehand. So my attention was focused on keeping the animals away from it while I tried to identify it. It was small, only about six to eight inches long, and marked with the ubiquitous brown and black of so many snakes, poisonous and non-poisonous. I was trying to get a look at its head, but the corner was in shadow and I couldn't get too close without alerting the critters to the fact that it was there. I finally called Edwin, who was working out back not far from the house, with the view of his taking charge of the dogs while I threw Juanita out front and then got a close-up look. Edwin strode insidewith his clippers still in his hand and, upon learning what the situation was, casually walked over to the snake, bent down, and decapitated it before I realized what he was doing. If I had been thinking straight, I would have predicted this inasmuch as Panamanians declare virtually every snake to be a fer-de-lance and, regardless of what they are, kill them without hesitation. (Alan Tenant tells a great story about being on a hike with some Panamanians and discovering a rare rat snake. In his excitement over the find, he pointed it out to his companions and was about to explain its importance when one of them chopped it into pieces with his machete before Alan could get a word out.) We hauled the dead snake outside in the sunlight, where I found no evidence of the triangular head common to vipers. I'm not sure what it was even after consulting three reptile books, but I'm pretty sure it was non-poisonous.

A couple of days later Jane was visiting with Christmas cookies and I told her about the incident. She advised that, although fer-de-lances are common in Chiriqui and even in some parts of the Boquete area, we are at an altitude which is out of their range. That sent me back to the Internet, where I discovered several different calculations, but the highest elevation reported for the fer-de-lance was 4265 feet. Jane and Barry's place is at about 4200 feet, and ours at about 4400. So that's one less thing I have to worry about, it seems. We do have eyelash vipers at this altitude, but they mostly hang out in the coffee bushes and other shrubbery and are rarer than the fer-de-lance, which can produce 50 or more young in a brood (or whatever you call a clutch of snakes). I also haven't seen any tarantulas or scorpions here, although Jane reports scorpions at their elevation. Now other spiders--large and small--are quite another matter. They're everywhere.

The varmint pictured above is Juanita Bonita, of whom we both are totally enamored. More on her later.

The Christmas Tree

To begin with, you men can just skip this one unless you have a decidedly nonmasculine interest in the erection and decoration of Christmas trees. Or unless you have a sadistic inclination to find joy in the misfortune of others.

Those of you who have known my Christmas trees of the past know that I have roughly 1,000 ornaments and that, in the best of times, putting my tree together for the holidays involves between 8 and 10 hours of hard work. This year was not the best of times.

Edwin's daughter, Denise, and Dalys's two children, Daisy and Roberto, had communicated an interest in helping with the tree trimming this year, so we set Tuesday, December 8th, for the date. That gave me three days from the culmination of my Spanish classes to get the tree up and string the lights, allowing time for a birthday dinner out on Friday night, the Florida/Alabama game on Saturday afternoon, and a leisurely pace getting ready. It's Larry job to put the tree together and retrieve all the boxes from storage, but he had a golf outing on Saturday morning and was too consumed with the game that afternoon to do more than unload the tree from the box. He put it together Sunday morning, however, and left me to unfurl and fluff out the branches while he alternately watched football on t.v. and punished the lawn practicing his golf swing. After a couple of hours unfurling and fluffing, I set about unwinding the lights and then winding them around the tree. I grew tired after a while and put off the completion of the task until Monday. For once I had allowed myself plenty of time, and my back was aching from all the reaching up and bending down. The golf course is closed on Monday, so I could count on Larry's help with the highest spots.

Monday dawned bright and clear and, after making some preliminary moves toward the preparation of lunch for myself, Larry, and Edwin, I tackled the lights with renewed enthusiasm. Just as I got past the midpoint, however, I realized that I wasn't going to have enough of the little buggers. There were plenty last year, but I had done some branch winding (as all the professional tree trimmers advise) and had overshot my supply of twelve strings. So I dashed downtown with an hour to spare before having to get serious about lunch only to discover that there were no clear, non-blinking lights to be had in the town of Boquete. Distressed, I returned home, completed and ate lunch, and announced that a trip to David that afternoon was unavoidable. Larry deemed such a trip to be foolhardy, so he called Doc/Charly/Ramon to find out if they had any clear, unblinking Christmas tree lights to spare. They offered three strings, only one of which worked. And one of my remaining three strings didn't work.

So it was off for a whirlwind trip to David, which, I found when I arrived, was approximately 110 degrees. Arrocha, the big housewares store where we had purchased lights last year, had the entire back wall filled with shelves of Christmas tree lights, but not one strand of clear lights. I hadn't anticipated this possibility; Panamanians' love of color tends toward the garish, so I figured clear lights would be the last to go. A trip to three other stores in the same shopping complex was similarly fruitless: plenty of colored lights, musical lights, icicle lights, but no small, clear lights. Sweating from every pore in my body, I drove across town, through David's hellish traffic, to a big grocery/hardware/everything store which at first appeared to have NO Christmas items. As I was leaving, however, I stumbled across an aisle with Christmas paraphernalia. (Marketing, like customer service, is not the Panamanian businessman's strong suit. This particular store chain, which carries most everything but in a very hodgepodge way, is owned by the current President of Panama, which gives me pause.) After a lengthy shuffling through of items in complete disarray, I came away with six boxes of clear, unblinking lights. I made my way home on the pot-holed two-laned highway filled with activities of all sorts, showered, and set about finishing up the stringing of the lights before the arrival of the kids the next morning.

There were some moments of anxiety when two-thirds of the tree went dark shortly after completion. Larry came to the rescue, eventually located a bad connection, and set everything right. The morning with the kids is a whole nother story (Daisy dropped and broke the first two ornaments she touched and then got bored; Denise did a fine job except for hiding the best ornaments behind other ornaments or tree limbs; and Roberto, who was attracted to the very small ornaments, placed every one of them within an inch of each other on about one one-hundredth of the tree.) In any event, we were moving right along until, about an hour into the chore, most of the lights went out again. I did my best to find the source of the problem but, with three children underfoot and lots of ornaments already on the tree, it was a hopeless task. The children would have been crushed if I had called the whole thing off, so we continued to decorate; all the while I had the sinking feeling that I probably was going to have to take the whole thing apart, sort out the light problem, and redecorate. I fed them lunch early and took them home as quickly as I could. Time elapsed: roughly 10 hours, not counting the trip to David.

Upon returning, I did, in fact, have to undecorate large parts of the tree, but I eventually found a very hot connection, unplugged it, and replugged a string into another outlet. Most of the lights were restored, but an area of about eight inches around the bottom of the tree was dark. Thus, another 45-minute drive to David, back to the store where I had finally found the clear lights, only to find that there were no more clear lights. Eventually, i.e., after about 30 minutes of shuffling through all the shelves, I found some other clear lights of the LED variety, considerably smaller than the ones already on the tree. Having no other option, however, I bought them and drove the 25 miles or so back to Boquete amid dense pre-holiday traffic, construction vehicles, livestock trucks, dogs and chickens in the road, etc., etc. The lights looked fine, and a complete nervous breakdown on my part narrowly avoided. I rehung ornaments and redistributed those hung by the kids. And the tree is finally up. I figure a total of 18 or more hours were devoted to the endeavor.

I'll write soon about a recent invasion of the house by army ants, as well as about the snake that greeted me inside the front door as I returned from shopping day before yesterday. I know you'll be relieved to hear about some real tropical adventure. But I assure you that neither the ants nor the snake, as alarming as they were, were as stressful as the Christmas tree.