The Electric Ant In Its Natural Habitat

Can soil power us all?

Written by: Romie Stott

Illustrated by: Jordan Moss

At that time, there was a parenting fad that when a kid turned 18, you kicked her out of the house to make it on her own for a year on the government-dispensed minimum income for which she was now eligible, to prove both how scanty it was and how her own ingenuity could make it stretch. This strategy was confined to the upper class–not the ultra-wealthy, but professionals. Families on the other end encouraged their children to stay at home into their 30s and beyond; a family of four to six adults could pool resources and raise a baby, plant a vegetable garden. Thus society was increasingly split into families of wolves and families of ants. The wolves each thought they had lived as ants, and the ants all thought that the story of Oedipus had to be a metaphor for weather patterns or something.

"The trick is to find a place in South America or Thailand where the dollar is strong and live like a king," said Caden Olson, one of the wolves, a friend of mine. "Servants and everything. Tropical fruit." These days, he'll give more pompous reasons; he'll say it's a way of spreading the benefits of imperialism back to the places it was extracted from. But I've known him since high school and I remember. Prosocial gloss aside, it's always been his plan.

When the phone rang one February at four in the morning, I figured it was him. He calls me a couple of times a year, I think because I still have a landline. Rural valleys are great in a lot of ways, but not cell service. Caden likes underdeveloped locales with shoddy internet, and is not above saving a few pennies a minute on outgoing calls. Also, he's bad at time zones.

"Maria," he said, "can I ask you a favor?"

"Yeah, great, I love that," I said, rolling my eyes invisibly in the dark kitchen.

"Maria?" said my mom.

"Yeah, I've got it," I said. "Go back to sleep."

"Night," said my cousin Jorge. "Night," he emphasized. Several clicks as several receivers beeped off. With less background noise, I could hear Caden breathing heavy. Not sexy heavy. Heavy like sad.

"Where are you?" I said.

"Comoros," he said. "We just got phones back."

My face tensed up involuntarily. Comoros was a small, poor Afro-Arab archipelago that supplied most of the world's ylang-ylang, and the only reason I knew was because a cyclone last week had put the whole place underwater. Some big new system of dams had failed–some sort of U.N. consolation prize for sea level rise. There were going to be hearings.

"What's the favor?" I said. This was not the first time Caden had called just after a natural disaster. He was a voluntary beach bum, a wave-chasing surfer who'd never taken up surfing. He gravitated toward areas where deals could be had–areas where nothing was safe from rain, where people were cashing in their chips. Maybe he liked the natural beauty, the philosophical implications of impermanence. A few times before, he'd asked me to ship him some stuff after a sudden disaster-scheduled move. "A change of climate," we said, like it was funny. He always paid me back. Did I need the money? No. Still, I wouldn't have kept running his errands if he hadn't paid me back.

"I know some people here who need to move in with you," Caden said. "Some Comorians. Just for a little bit, so they have an address to give at the airport. They'll pay you rent, or you can kick them out..."

"You want me to take strangers into my house, where my family lives?" I said.

"You'll like them," Caden said. "Scout's honor." (We met through Scouts.) "They speak English. And French, and Arabic, four different versions of Comorian. They worked in tourism. This island is not coming back."

"I cannot for the life of me figure out what angle you're working," I said. I am the type of person who takes in strays, but Caden is not. I don't think I'd ever heard him mention a specific person in all our years of phone conversations–just "the people here" or "the women here" or "some guy" offloading something.

"I really like these people," he said. "Haven't you ever met somebody and thought: 'yeah'?"

“I cannot for the life of me figure out what angle you’re working,” I said… “I really like these people,” he said. “Haven’t you ever met somebody and thought: ‘yeah’?”

I honestly hadn't.

I sighed through my nose. I'd been hearing a lot of "please help" commercials on the television my Grandfather kept on all his waking hours, supposedly to keep him company but really to deter the many members of the house from trying to talk to him.

"Are you asking me to break the law, put my family in danger?" I said with theatrical menace, voice growling and dangerous. I was already pretty sure I was going to do it. We ants always let in the grasshopper. But we have to make a big speech first. I didn't expect Caden to know that, which was the joy of it. Nobody in the U.S. even cared about the legal status of immigrants anymore. Illegals were good because they paid taxes that wound up in citizens' incomes, and if they complained about anything, you could kick them out. We were a whole nation of shitty landlords. He'd been out of the country too long.

"Maria," he said, "you're the best person I know." That floored me. I hadn't known he thought that. Maybe it was even true.

****

They arrived in mid-April, and when they stepped off the plane they were wearing jeans and American sports team t-shirts. I don't know whether that was their attempt to blend in or reflected donations to aid agencies. Two men and a woman. Siblings.

"Maria," said Hamada, tall and skinny with a tilt jaw, "you must be. Caden said you were very beautiful."

"Caden hasn't seen me in ten years," I said, "except selfies."

"Ah yes. Selfies are very beautiful," said Hamada, and laughed, which I liked. "Still, you are Maria. The heart knows."

"And we saw photographs," said his sister Nasrine. "Do you know the way to bag claim?" In the car, she took the front passenger seat and started scanning the radio stations with a tossed-off "do you mind?" which I also liked.

"So, is all your house underwater," I asked backseat Hamada over my shoulder.

"No," said Hamada, "we live high up."

"I thought the whole island was underwater," I said. They all laughed.

"No," said Hamada. "Just the tourists. It's a volcano. The farms are higher. We are fine."

It was obvious I was going to ask.

"The trouble is importing food, and the ports. And it is not sustainable," said Nasrine, pausing briefly on some oldies trap house, like my grandmother used to sing along with.

"We think we will be good Americans," Hamada said. "We have the monthly payment also." I let that slide at the time, but he meant that some relative of theirs had patented a process involved in perfuming, or cultivation, and they got regular income from it.

"Your brother doesn't talk much," I said.

"Yes," said Hamada. "Azali is nervous about his teeth. He doesn't like to show them."

"His teeth are fine," said Nasrine.

"I just don't like them," said Azali. While he talked, he covered his mouth with his hand. I could tell he was smiling. I liked it. I liked him. I liked all of them. Caden was right.

They settled into the family very quickly. This was a couple of years before my father died, but at a point where managing his A.L.S. was a full-time job. Three full-time jobs: a full time job for my mom, plus part time jobs for me, my brother, my sister, and Jorge. Then there was another part time job's worth of stuff that fell through the cracks. On top of moving Dad around and taking care of his physical needs, we were supposed to enter all kinds of information about him constantly, a nonstop monologue of every movement and perception, so an A.I. could figure out what molecular treatments could work. There was no way to tell what was and wasn't useful data; the A.I. was a neural net which changed constantly and invisibly. It was opaque to even its designers, who compared it to trying to predict which hair on your head would go gray next. The only guideline doctors gave us was "more: as much as possible." It was like talking to God when you were pretty sure God was simultaneously fake like Santa Claus and real like the NSA. We'd all pretty much given up on it—on faith in a cure for Dad—but we felt bad about it. Mom was the only one who could keep up the patter of narration to the Echobots. For her, it was my now-silent Dad's soul talking to her through a radio, telling her she was doing ok. "That's very helpful, Marisol," is a line I'm still tired of hearing in that robot voice. The rest of us had already turned off notifications. It kept us all pretty close to home most of the time. We had to remind each other to leave the house for reasons that weren't groceries or medical appointments. It was a hard house to be in.

Two weeks after his arrival, Azali was doing most of the cooking, which is amazing if you know how territorial my mom is about the kitchen. Or I am about the kitchen. Another year, we could argue for days about the best way to thicken a stew, I don't care with who—each other, a stranger—could slam doors over someone trying to sneak cornstarch in when I'd said arrowroot, like I couldn't tell. Could look slyly at each other when someone requested an overly vinegared hot sauce brand.

Azali's cooking was nothing I would have normally said is ok. He made mash stews of pea and cardamom. He coated fish in vanilla. He put lemon in the hot sauce.

I ate it. My Mom ate it. My Dad and my Grandfather and my cousin Jorge ate it. It was a relief.

"You know a lot about food for a man who has no teeth," I said. Azali threw his apron over his head and laughed.

"I'm smiling a big grin under here," he said. "Toothy grin. My teeth are shining at you. They are blinding."

"Hey, I'll get some indoor sunglasses," said my cousin Jorge. "Just keep cooking." We hadn't all sat down at a restaurant in probably a year. Hadn't had a vacation or felt like we were someone else's guest.

"Cool guys wear sunglasses," said Hamada. "Like in the movie."

"That's right," said Jorge. "We'll all be real cool guys."

I knew for sure they'd be staying with us a long time when I caught Mom moving papers out of the file cabinets in Dad's office, where we'd set up folding cots for Azali and Hamada.

"Your dad doesn't need these anymore," she said, which had been true for a long time. She filled the emptied file drawers with his old shirts, old pants, the ones he'd shrunk out of. "He doesn't need these anymore," she said. "Tell your friends they'd be more comfortable."

They did not fit Hamada at all, baggy geezer clothes on a tall, skinny man. He belted them so tight they had pleats they weren't supposed to. His pant legs ended mid-thigh and his shirts billowed when he moved, like lace curtains trying to escape a window.

"It fits good in the shoulder," said my Grandfather, who hated to see anything wasted and sometimes tried to reuse dental floss.

"Real cool guys," said Hamada, and struck a high-fashion pose against the wall.

****

The strain of my father's illness influenced all our hobbies in ways that were obvious at the time but extremely obvious in retrospect. Mom was obsessed with that exercise craze Jump Bop, which was just as weird at the time as it looks on old videos. If she wasn't taking care of Dad, any walk down the hallway might be interrupted by Mom leaping from doorway to doorway in unnatural choreographed kick steps, sloshy water weights strapped to her wrists and ankles. She had not successfully convinced anyone in the family to join her in this pursuit of eternal strength and health, but Azali went all-in, and Nasrine sometimes too. I tried to explain to them that this was not normal, not typically American, but Mom triumphantly produced advertising circulars about "the craze sweeping the nation." Nasrine told me not to worry so much, since it was funny.

As for me, I obsessed over the garden. Or rather, the lack of a garden. I obsessed over the soil. We had none. We had some, but it was terrible. We'd picked up the land for cheap on account of mountaintop mining decades before that had pretty-well poisoned it. It wasn't dangerous to us as long as we were on top of it, but I wouldn't have planted vegetables. It was acres of good-for-nothing. Even weeds wouldn't grow there. I'd been sprinkling kitchen compost for years (when I remembered to) but as far as I could tell, it had leached out or blown away. I'd had to dig flood diversion channels because it didn't hold water. I didn't care that much, but the yard was a neighborhood cat I tried to feed occasionally, out of a dream that one day we'd be pals.

I obsessed over the garden. Or rather, the lack of a garden. I obsessed over the soil. We had none… the yard was a neighborhood cat I tried to feed occasionally, out of a dream that one day we’d be pals.

When the Comorians did their multiple daily prayers out front (a preference of theirs, weather permitting), I'd sometimes stretch out alongside them and pat the dry clay.

"She is pounding signals to the ground again," Nasrine said. "Thank you, sister, for reminding the ground to bow down."

"Thank you, ground, for lifting us up," said Hamada, to tease Nasrine.

"We are humbled by your chastity, O yard," said Azali, with a wink at me.

"Maybe you are not allowed back in the house," I said, and some dust blew in my face.

Their family farm's volcanic landscape had been almost entirely dissimilar to my depleted stuff. The way Nasrine talked, things would grow when you didn't want them to, spit-out fruit seeds turning into vines you had to pull and pull and pull again.

Hamada was more helpful. He would sit on the porch with me in the evening, under blankets, avoiding the Jump Boppers the way I did. He didn't know how to remediate land any more than I did, but he did at least acknowledge that dirt was more than dirt. When I wondered how to get heavy metals out safely, the closest he could think of was the opposite: volcanic basalt was good for carbon sequestration, and he'd tried to interest a Qatari company in using his family's land for that purpose. Unfortunately, the small scale and the long distance kept it from being economical.

He could talk about this at length. Apparently, he had made many arguments.

"What has been pulled from the earth will return to earth, is this not so?" he said. "Your friend Caden agreed with me."

"He's romantic in that way," I said. Caden had not checked in with me once since putting the Comorians on a plane, which was typical. "True believer in 'leave no trace.'"

Hamada smiled and leaned back until his neck was on the porch railing and he could peek out at the satellites twinkling in the darkness.

"He left his trace on me," said Hamada.

It was true. By introducing us, Caden left his mark on history. If he's still alive and reading this, he should know his name will show up in research papers. No slipping away consequence-free. Not this time.

****

We did not set out to turn the dead yard into an electric battery. "Grounding electricity" meant something totally different then. It was a way of getting rid of electrical current, moving it away from your house. Not storing it close by, like now. Back in those days, we were certainly used to taking things out of the soil–mountaintop removal of coal, harvesting the last of the fossil fuels. And we were used to putting things in the soil, like carbon or nitrogen or potassium. But electricity was something dynamic and unpredictable, like Jump Bop. It came from spinning rotors and from the sun. Your house's battery was an appliance, like a refrigerator or a television. It wasn't something you grew in the dirt.

We had decided to hold a lawn competition–not between us, but between different pieces of the yard. Which would grow the most vegetation in a season? Or any at all? I marked off a grid of strings attached to stakes. When I was almost finished, I tripped on one of the string lines and pulled the whole thing loose, and was declared the simultaneous winner and loser for having booby trapped myself. Playing into the joke, I staggered around the yard, strings trailing from my legs, moaning and stiff-armed like The Mummy.

"It lives!" laughed Azali. They hadn't seen The Mummy. They had seen Frankenstein, who walks the same. Nasrine applauded. But Hamada had a look on his face like he'd left us to go sit inside a memory.

"We should use shock treatment on the dirt," he said. "It is a heart that has stopped."

"Sure," I said. "We'll turn the dirt off and then on again." I wasn't sure whether tech support used the same catchphrase worldwide; from Nasrine's reaction, they did.

"Men want to turn everything into a sports car," she said. "Even on an island with no good roads. A little extra money, a little extra time, look at how I put more volts in. Shall we also paint the dirt red?"

"Yes!" said Azali. "Red is beautiful." I was wearing a lot of red that year to try to cheer myself up. Azali was always good at slipping in compliments indirectly, so you couldn't plead out of them.

"Plants need energy," Hamada insisted. "They pull it out of the air from the sun, but they store it in the ground. There are no plants here, so there is no energy to draw up to make the first leaves. There are no ionized channels. We have been scattering the compounds, but not charging them up."

Nasrine knelt down to untangle the trailing strings from my ankle, and we sat a while winding the loose twine around sticks, which weren't as good as spools, but were all this twine deserved.

"Maria," she said, quietly enough that her voice carried only to me, "he is ridiculous, but I do want to go to a farm supply auction. They are always advertised in the mail and on the radio. It seems very exotic. Will you come with me? Hamada can buy his dirt chemicals so we will fit in."

"Just don't turn my yard into a bomb, ok?" I said, loudly enough Hamada could hear.

****

I don't know if you've ever been to a farm auction. Or any auction. I had not, until the Comorians decided it was a thrilling part of the American experience. They still exist, just like there will always be flea markets, often in close proximity. People would always rather sell something for five dollars than pay someone else to come take it away. And there will always be a crowd looking for something to do on a Saturday, who will drop in "just to have a look around," who will buy something they didn't expect to, to justify the time spent.

It was quickly apparent that Nasrine wanted to attend these events for the joy of haggling. She'd buy an auction lot and immediately turn around and try to trade part of it with somebody else for whatever they'd bought. It did not matter what she had. It did not matter what they had. She would stand in a field ringed by portable silos and used tractors with outdated software, bantering with whatever blue-shirted man in a cowboy hat was milling nearby. Some of them were gamers more than serious farmers; they turned old equipment into demolition derby drones and robots, then live-streamed battles in trap-rigged corn mazes. Nasrine wasn't the only enterprising dilettante.

Hamada and I were mostly pack mules who lugged or babysat whichever items Nasrine currently owned. At one of the first auctions we went to, Hamada badly overpaid for a few sacks of potash, and I was prepared to go over and fight the guy who took advantage of him. I was not about to let some rube discriminate against this dark-skinned man in baggy clothes. I had had enough of that.

"Maria, you misunderstand," Hamada said. "I am bad at negotiating. Very simply."

"Truth," said Nasrine. Apparently there were many family stories. Once, he'd traded a beautiful coral necklace for a cracked pot that the owner swore had once been the home of a djinn. I guessed the story dated back to childhood, but none of them would specify. "We have not been bothered by a single djinn from then to now," was all they'd say, poker faced. Another time, it seemed like he'd sold most of their crops one year for well below market value.

"I don't like to take too much profit because it's not ethical," he said. "Allah gives us money to live another year, and I am satisfied."

"Don't listen to him," said Nasrine. "He's just very bad at it."

So my role at the auctions was also to watch Hamada and make sure he didn't pursue foolish purchases. If he saw something he wanted, I would interrupt his flush of excitement and send Nasrine after it.

"Bring me the aluminum filings," she would say. "I am trading them for a replacement lawn mower part." We did not have a lawn mower, except once for about ten minutes. At, I am told, a very reasonable price.

****

I don't know what all we carted home from those auctions, all the dead ends. Nasrine kept track of it in a notebook, the same way someone else might record their scores in a bowling league. It was something to get me out of the house, something to focus on, but not really pay attention to. I don't even know when we switched from trying to grow plants to trying to make a soil battery.

We didn't have a reason to–no shortage, no clamor in the marketplace. We didn't need another battery ourselves, that we knew of. The idea just grew, for no particular reason, because we had time and curiosity. It was a thing to talk about, a diversion. An artwork. We kept an eye on weird auctions of soil additives that hadn't sold in time for growing seasons. We cultivated and on multiple occasions accidentally electrocuted assorted microorganisms. We created a grid to separate our "control" and experimental dirt beds and promptly lost track of it.

Somewhere in the middle of it, my Dad died. It came as a surprise, can you believe that? We knew from the time of his diagnosis that he only had a few years to live, probably. We'd watched him get weaker and weaker. He was having more and more trouble breathing. We put a pulse oximeter on him at night. He wore an oxygen tube all the time. One day, after the pulse oximeter beeped, we took him to the hospital, like we had done many times, and he came home as ashes. My mom wanted to spread them in the yard. I thought that was the end of our strange project.

"Don't you dare stop," she said, fierce but crying. The box of ashes shook in her hands. "He is part of this. He is part of you."

Azali lay a gentle hand on her shoulder. "You are calling him back," he said. "You are inviting his spirit to guide you."

"Yes," said my Mom. She set down the box and allowed herself to be held by Azali. They stood there a long time. They looked for all the world like a rosebush and trellis, Azali's slim arms keeping my Mom safely anchored to the house. I will always be grateful to him for doing what I didn't know how to do.

Jorge took over the cooking for a while, so my Mom could rest and we could "work."

I think it was Azali who made the connection between potassium-ion batteries and the way dirt could smother a fire. That had been the problem before, the tendency for potassium batteries to explode when exposed to oxygen. It sounds like the kind of leap Hamada would make, but I think it was Azali.

I know it wasn't me. I was doing, not thinking. There had been a lot of times in my schooling when nothing made sense, when a subject stayed incomprehensible for a long time. I had found that continuing to show up was my best strategy. That was adulthood, I figured.

It took years. Nasrine had to go back to Comoros for a while to take care of things there. Their family's land never flooded–land I found out was Nasrine's according to inheritance laws–but there was hunger, and crime that went with hunger. One of their aunts was injured. Nasrine tried to get her to leave, but she wouldn't. I understood that, the desire to stay put. Nasrine came back.

That's it, really. We weren't trying to save the world, or save money, or get famous. Those were nice outcomes to daydream about, but we were playing a game, in between caring for each other.

I think maybe we made the leap to a stable potassium battery because it was time to make the leap. It's why several other people invented the soil battery at nearly the same time. Our patent filing only beat the next group of inventors by a few months. It's nice that it worked out. I do think our design was a little bit safer than the others–improbably, given our methods.

People still use fast-discharge lithium-cobalt batteries, you know. For sports cars and such. (Nasrine says “told you so.”) But it's not like it used to be, the scramble for rare metals and combustibles. Less blowing up mountaintops. Fewer children in holes, digging. There isn't that same idea that the tv has to turn on at the push of a button, like a startled jackrabbit. I'm not as fast as I used to be either. It can wait a few seconds to warm up.

Abundant power is all around us, available whenever we can stay in one place for a while, whenever we can wait for things to slowly draw energy. It changed the balance.

It was a good program, minimum income. I hope someday we bring it back. You can get a lot done, being ants.

---

Stay tuned…

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