The Fire Ants of Doom!

It saddens me to announce that my Grandmother has lung cancer.  I have a lot of fond memories and stories involving my Nana, including the story posted last month about the dinner with Stephen King.  Eastport is a place I spent a lot of summers.  My grandparents loved to watch me, my parents loved to get rid of me for a week, and I could entertain myself for hours.  There used to be an old fashioned store where you could buy Root Beer floats and used books.  There is no question that my writing interest was development from my summers in Eastport.

Eastport has tons of stories, and I may eventually getting around to writing about them all.  One story, the one I'll tell today, is about the fire ants and the anthill of doom.  In Maine, fireworks are illegal.  And my dad, being the progressive that he is, provided me with half-a-brick of firecrackers on a regular basis.  Fireworks are nice, and watching them explode is fun, but I've always been the kind of person who likes to take something fun and do something productive with it.  Legos were mansions and fireworks were the instruments of revenge.

Eastport is an international shipping port.  It isn't a major port, but it has had lots of imports from around the world.  Well, somewhere along the line, one of the ships managed to get some sort of fire ants in a shipping container.  I've never seen these ants before and attempts to research them online have led me again and again to ants that aren't native in the US.  So yeah, these ants were unique.  And they had a home just outside of my grandparent's house.

The bite is most notable.  The bite hurts like hell.  They have absolutely no problems biting anything they come across.  If you walk through a field with a nearby ant hill, they will be all over your leg and do a lot of damage.  I hated these suckers.  So, when I had those firecrackers, I got revenge.  I used to throw them down on the ant hill and blow them up, only the issue was that the main hive was built into a piece of stone bedrock (not sure the actual type of stone and it's gone today).

Somewhere along the line, I learned that the ants loved watermelon.  I would shove firecrackers into the watermelon, wire it up like a master, 12 year-old demolitions expert, and set it down by the hive.  I'd go inside and read for an hour or so.  Then I'd return to watermelon swarming with ants.  One light of a match and it was time for fun.

Of course, the first time taught me an important lesson of physics.  Twelve firecrackers going off will send ants skyward.  What goes up, must come back down.  And they did... onto me.  I learned the hard way that if I was going to do this, I needed to run faster.  I experimented a lot with fuse settings, but honestly, the best way to destroy those suckers was to light the fuse and run.  And I got really skilled at running fast.

The ironic end to the story is that the ants no longer exist.  Eastport needed to do some infrastructure work about eight years ago.  When the city encountered the bedrock housing those ants, they had to remove it.  They did so with TNT.  I still can't think of that without a smile creeping across my face.  It couldn't have happened to a worse species on the planet.

The Stephen King Post

Photo of Stephen King's Home in Bangor, ME.

When I was one-and-a-half years old, my family had dinner with Stephen King.  The dinner happened at my grandparent's house in Eastport.  Eastport is a port city in Downeast Maine.  Though it is a port city, and has its own airport, the only reasonable way to access the city is by car.  In order to drive to Eastport, you have to drive through Pleasant Point.  Pleasant Point is a part of the Passamaquoddy reservation.  The most notable portion of this drive is a stretch of road with ocean on either side.

For reasons I'm not entirely certain, my father's side of the family was having dinner with Stephen King.  I know that my aunt was involved somehow in the reason behind this meal.  Stephen King is a wonderful philanthropist and my aunt worked for the harbor during this stretch of time.  I suspect it was a dinner following Stephen King doing one of his many charitable contributions to the State of Maine.  I don't know for certain.  What I do know is that the dinner took place at my grandparent's house.

For as long as I have known my grandmother, she has always had strange, people-hating cats.  At the time this story took place, her current cat had another particular trait; he loved to curl up in the backseat of parked cars.  You see, while Eastport is technically a city, it's only one in political structure.  The actual population of the city resembled the size of a small town under normal definitions.  There was little crime and everyone left car windows down and doors unlocked.

Stephen King came to dinner, met me and my family, and after socializing, climbed into his car to start the three hour drive drive home.  As the story goes, Stephen King driving through Pleasant Point  when my grandmother's cat, woke up, jumped into the front seat and raised a kind of hell only a person-hating cat could. The incident scared the crap out of Stephen King.  He somehow dealt with the cat, turned around, and drove all the way back to my grandparents house.  Once there, he somehow managed to wrangle the cat into his arms.  He carried it over to the front door and politely returned him to my grandparents.

The conclusion to this story came later when Stephen King's Cujo was published.  In the book, the five-year old Tad has a strikingly similar description to two-year old me.  Also the description of Donna was equally similar to my mother.  When Stephen King later published On Writing, he admitted that during this period of his life, he was in a dark place and doesn't remember where he got the idea from for this book.  In fact, he confesses only vaguely remembering writing parts of the book.  As far as I'm concerned, this cat incident was at least part of the inspiration behind his book, Cujo.  

My Life with Anosmia

I am anosmic. The word is Greek and translates to “without smell”. Anosmic is the term used to describe people who have no sense of smell. For a long time, I thought I was born anosmic. I hadn't been completely convinced of this fact, because I do have the memory of one single odor. It is the smell of cherry cough syrup. That's probably not the best memory to hold, but it is the only smell that I do think have. Given the fact that I recall this smell, it is possible that I had a sense of smell at one point in time. When did this change? I do not know. How did this change? I have a theory.

I don't know when I discovered I have no sense of smell. I don't even know when I came to recognize the fact that I lacked a sense other people had. What I have, instead, are three stories about my sense of smell from my childhood. I also have my experiences living without this one sense and the interactions and complications that I have run into with this smell. And, I have my own personal response to common questions or statements I hear.

My earliest memory involving the sense of smell is a very short picture. I remember having a set of scratch and sniff stickers. The stickers, I believe, were fruit shaped. I tried scratching them and sniffing them. I didn't notice anything different. I tried other stickers and came to the same conclusion. My mom, I believe tested them and confirmed they did actually work. I tried again and gave up. In my childlike mind, I could not grasp that it was me, not the stickers that were broken.

My next memory has a little bit more detail to it. I was in the fifth grade in Mrs. Murphy's class. The class was studying the five senses. I remember volunteering to the class that I had no sense of smell. Mrs. Murphy actually tested this in front of the class. I was blindfolded and different foods were held beneath my nose. I couldn't even tell that something was underneath my nose, let alone identify a smell to them.

My other memory is more of a story. I was a teenager and I was vacuuming the living room. My mom came racing into the room in a panic. And had me shut off the vacuum cleaner. I had no idea what the alarm was about. Well, as it happened, the rubber belt to the vacuum cleaner had slipped loose. The vacuum cleaner was creating a lot of friction on the rubber, making the entire house smell of burnt rubber. My mom, realizing I had no idea this had happened, turned to me and said, “You really don't have a sense of smell, do you?”

The last story is important, because it is an echo in my life. Smell is both a major part of our world, and something overlooked. On one hand, I'm lucky with my disability. The impairment is both minor and inobvious. People can be horrible or idiotic when dealing with people with disabilities. I have witnessed first hand on numerous occasions the offensive behaviors from members of our society. I've been lucky in that I've never had to experience those behaviors. On the other hand, my disability has the drawback of being both minor and inobvious.

My mom's statement is a perfect example of the minor drawback. She forgot. Everyone forgets. My sister over Christmas, who has known me for her entire life, forgot. Everyone forgets that I have a sense of smell. I absolutely hate having to remind people. If I had a five dollar bill every time someone asked me, “What's that smell?” I'd own my own personal elephant with a private elephant trainer.

People forgetting I don't have a sense of smell isn't that big of an issue. It certainly isn't my biggest annoyance. That is reserved for people who are trying to sell products with an odor to them. You might find these people annoying too, but take this from the stand point from someone without a sense of smell. Imagine walking into Best Buy and having a salesperson shove a DVD within inches of your face. Now imagine going into Target and having a salesperson spraying jets of mist in your direction that only make your throat choke.

You see, there is something I didn't know about my sense of smell. Smell comes from two sources. There is the olfactory gland and the nervous system. The olfactory gland processes the smaller odors and transmits the signals to the brain. This gives you the different scents you come to know. The nervous system gets larger particles and transmits directly to the brain. My olfactory gland does not work, but my nervous system does. For me smell functions like this. Air is clean and crisp or air is thick. Candle stores, perfume shops, and those annoying “smell this” vendors don't produce positive smells. They make my breathing clench up.

FAQ Time!

First common statement: “Can you taste food?”

Answer: Yes. I can taste food and I enjoy a wide variety of foods. Most of what makes my food experience different from yours, is your ability to smell the seasonings and spices of the food. I can taste some spices in my meals, but not all of them. Which, in my opinion, tells me that some spices don't actually add taste to food. The reason why your food experience changes when you're sick, is because you are used to having the smell and taste blend together. I am not.

Second common statement: “That must be nice, not being able to smell XXXX.”

Answer: Thank you for pointing that out. I never realized that before that moment. Yes, the world has a wide variety of smells that are horrific, or at least I'm told. At the same time, I'm missing all of the smells of the world that aren't horrific. And, if that isn't enough, smell can invoke memories. That's something I'll never, ever be able to do.

Third common statement: “Are you sure?” or “How do you know?”

Answer: Yes, I've gone 33 years of my life and just haven't sniffed the right odor yet. There is no response to this question and yet I hear it a lot.