The Big Ant Hill and Other Special Places

THE BIG ANTHILL AND OTHER SPECIAL PLACES

When my brother, Gordon, and I were kids, often on a Sunday afternoon we would take a long walk back to a field near the woods on our farm and visit the “big anthill”. This ant hill had a couple of characteristics about it that made it special enough that it would always beckon our return. The structure was huge, at least 18 to 24 inches in height, but its main attraction was its horseshoe shape, taking up a space at least seven feet long by four feet in depth. Like a house built to take advantage of a southern exposure, this structure was perfectly aligned to face a field that never changed over the years we farmed, because of its value for wiregrass hay, the caviar of forage crops back then.  A truly amazing structure that even as a budding naturalist, I realized was a bit out of the ordinary. In the accompanying photo, I am almost dwarfed by the structure and the grasses that grew beside it.
 
Some 50 years later, I am still visiting that anthill. The fence bottom at the location has changed little, but the field beside it that once grew some of our best wiregrass hay has since succumbed to ash saplings and scrub bushes, and is now more difficult to reach. Amazingly, the ant hill is still there. The horseshoe shape has been retained, but is now more a series of smaller colonies, broken by open spaces and tall grasses. No longer is it the continuous horseshoe I remember so well, and is but a fraction of the original structure. Many generations of ants have come and gone, and if only the ones that remain could reminisce about their ancestors and what possessed them to construct such an unusual shape.
 
I am eight years younger than my brother, but that never seemed to make a difference when it came to enjoying the simple pleasures in life on the farm. He was always around to introduce me to these things, even after he left the farm in 1955 to work in Belleville. On weekends, he would come home, and off we’d go again to seek out something new, or simply enjoy special places on the farm that we had visited many times before. Sometimes it was off the farm.
 
When we heard that our neighbours at Baycrest Marina, were trying out a new black and white television, the first television set to make its debut on Big Island, in 1948, it was Gordon who took me by the hand and led me up the road to see this new addition to the entertainment scene. I can still remember the walk up the road and the entire Owen family and a few neighbours gathered around this mundane brown box perched on a corner shelf in the dining room as we peered into the poor reception – “snow” it was called –  to catch sight of something resembling a picture, and one of them fiddling with the horizontal and vertical controls to hold the picture still. I still remember their daughter Wendy yelling out, “Hey, look! I see a picture, an outline of a person!” I can remember catching sight of the figure too, leaning ignominiously to one side, as it fought against the vertical setting, now and again suddenly taking a leap and rotating around the screen, shaking and trembling as the horizontal setting struggled to keep the image under control.
 
Presumably an outline is all they ever got on this particular television as they decided the poor excuse for a picture wasn’t worth the investment. My brother and I must have done a lot of whining and belly aching in the ensuing weeks, as it was our parents a short time later who became the first residents on Big Island to own their very own black and white television set.
 
Gordon and I had several special places we’d often visit, simple pleasures but providing what was probably the impetus to my eventual pursuit of nature. There was a small grove of mature white cedars, located on a slight knoll in a pasture field that always seemed special. We’d wander around these trees and chat, and marvel at the sound of the wind as it filtered softly through the coniferous branches. We’d look for robin nests, then wander a few feet to the foundation of what must have been a fence line at one time, and search for fossils in the thin waffers of limestone rock.
 
Two enormous elm trees in another pasture field was another favourite destination, both trees permanently bent from the forces of the prevailing westerlies, their huge umbrellas offering a canopy of shade beneath, while grasses behind them burnt to a crisp in the unrelenting summer sun. A major drainage ditch ran beside the trunks of both trees, ripples of water cascading over the roots as it made its way to the Bay of Quinte, a short distance away. The slight rise of ground and abundant shade was even appealing to our herd of dairy cows who would often take their afternoon siestas under these trees. Gordon pointed out my first Baltimore oriole’s nest, its grey pendant shape swinging in the light breezes from one of the uppermost outstretched limbs of the tree. It was such a peaceful spot that we would often stretch out on the grass ourselves beside the cows who were so absorbed in this quiet time of their day that they were reluctant to do more than roll their eyes menacingly at us, then resume chewing their cud.
 
A spring on our farm, surrounded by a rail fence, a sparse growth of red cedars and a lone butternut tree, was often another destination. The “big basswood tree” , the culvert in our laneway through which the spring rush of water drained from both our farm and a neighbouring farm, a cow path that followed the upper ridge of a limestone knoll beside the “garden field,” and a visit to the groundhog hole in one of our hay fields were, to us, destinations of importance. Upon arriving, we wouldn’t so much ponder their existence, or wonder how they came to be, but subconsciously, know that these things were different somehow, and in our minds, special.
 
How does one put a price or value on these things, some of which have long since disappeared? The grove of red cedars on the knoll have since melted into a much larger growth of red cedars that have now grown almost as high as the grove itself; they no longer stand out. The elms succumbed to Dutch Elm Disease, the big basswood is gone as are the wild gooseberries that grew at its base, and a dense forest of red cedars have all but engulfed the spring where our cows came to drink. The culvert and its environs have changed too and about the only thing that seems to have remained constant, is the groundhog hole, a home to many generations of groundhogs in the past 60 years.
 
And the anthill – changed, of course, but still enough of the original structure remaining to take me back in an instant to those Sunday afternoons when it was one of several such attractions on our farm which my brother and I routinely would visit. These special places were  awesome, or Coolsville, or far out, or whatever term we used back in those days.