Amber Waves of Grain

Amber Waves of Grain

It was late July or early August; the summer of 1970 and our first summer in our home on 104^th East Avenue. The wheat harvest was underway. We took a family vacation. I don’t recall where. It may have been one of our trips to California to visit our grandparents, or we may have gone to a Bluegrass festival down south.

Nevertheless, when we drove away, the wheat was standing tall, turning brown, and being what Katharine Bates ably described as “Amber waves of grain,” in her epic poem which became the song, “America the Beautiful.”

Bates may well have had Colorado wheat in mind when she wrote that line about amber waves of grain since the majestic purple mountain was Pike’s Peak.

Some time between when we departed and when we returned, the combines and grain trucks had come and stripped the land around our house of every grain of wheat. The stalks that stood above our fencing and swayed gently in the breeze, waving goodbye to us as we drove away, were turned into dead, sharp, brittle stubble poking up through the dry dirt of the Eastern Slopes of Colorado farmland, unaware and unconcerned with our return.

We all joined in the work of unloading the car and returning our things to our rooms. My brothers and I were quartered downstairs in the basement. The basement was divided in half. The half on the backside of the house consisted of two bedrooms, a bathroom, and a laundry room. Bob and I shared the bedroom at the far end of the basement.

We had twin beds against opposite walls. The space in between would often become a boxing ring where we would emulate the greats of boxing of those days: Ali, Sugar Ray, and Sonny Liston. We only had one rule – no hitting in the face. We had no boxing gloves, and as a result, our chests and arms would be red from the beatings, but we were spared the blackeyes and bloody noses.  

Charlie, by virtue of being the eldest brother, was afforded his own bedroom. Brenda, being the only girl, had her own room as well. And being the girl princess, it was upstairs away from the servant quarters in the basement.

There was a small bathroom in between our bedrooms downstairs. All three doors were in an alcove hallway off of the den. Near the stairs was the door into the laundry room where our chest freezer and washer were kept. It was there that Mom would regularly stand us against the wall and record our height with a pencil mark as we stood against the wall. She would add a date to track our progress toward adulthood.

The other half of the downstairs was a den. A long open room that spanned the whole length of the house. We had a living room upstairs, but the downstairs den is where we did our living. There was a fireplace on the end near the staircase, vinyl tile flooring, and paneled walls. Eventually, we would have a pool table at one end and a bar on the wall near the laundry room. A couch would grace one wall and a TV would be stationed across from it on the other.

But this summer the room was sparsely furnished. As I got toward the bottom of the stairwell and turned toward the far end of the den, intending to head to my bedroom, I saw a strange sight. At the far end of the den, in the middle of the room, on top of the tile flooring, there was a large black mound.

At first, it looked to be a large mound of dirt. But I immediately dismissed that idea because I couldn’t think of a way a pile of dirt could suddenly appear out of nowhere in our basement. I stood still for a moment, processing what I was looking at. While I was staring I realized it was moving, not as one cohesive organism, but like a frantic mass of millions of individual black demons. Each of them climbed atop the other in a weird “king of the mountain-like” exercise.

I took the final few steps down the stairs and slowly began moving closer toward the black mystery mound, stopping occasionally to gauge my risk and assess further what I was seeing. Finally, I came close, stooped down, and then saw clearly what it was. A massive pile of black ants – flying ants – had invaded our home while we were away.

On further investigation, we discovered that they had come down our chimney and into our basement and, for reasons I can’t explain, decided to pile themselves up into a heap on our den floor.

We figured out that when the wheat harvesters came and did their work, they disturbed the ants who were living in the fields. They escaped and found refuge in our empty home.

Every following year, just before the wheat harvest began, one of us would climb a ladder to the rooftop and place a piece of plywood with a brick to weigh it down, over the top of our fireplace chimney. The ants always came back, but they never came in again.

Photo by Polina Rytova on Unsplash