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Ants’ Journey
The motor steadily purrs as my car swallows mile after mile of bitumen road. We pass through great stands of monotonous Australian bush, where each tree yet remains an individual.
I pull to the verge of the road, unpack my steel thermos, my lunch box; and breathe the eucalyptus air. Stepping on dry twigs and dead leaves, I walk a short distance to sit on a miniature cliff, beneath one of the thousands of trees.
The tree is strong,
its brown peeling bark revealing
a smooth white trunk.
A dry leaf falls on my sandwich. I am not alone; small black ants are busy here, making their own journey. I am feeling relief that there are no red ants, only these little ones, black and efficient, numbering hundreds, each one identical. I’m thinking, perhaps they are like the trees, and each one of the teeming anonymous crowd is really a great individual. I watch them communicate constantly, their greetings kept brief as they hurry along.
Settling in comfort back in the car, resuming my bitumen route, I pass through more bush and through open country, through miles of grass-land where no stock is grazing. Coming into sheep country, the sight of them is a novelty. Slowing through towns, all of them similar, Australia’s typical country towns. Yet I know if I stayed in one just for one week I’d discover its character, find it unique.
Halting in one, I stroll in the main street, sit in a café watching the locals. I wonder about the life that each one leads. The air is still hot, though the sun is much lower, and I’ve booked at a motel miles away yet. As I drive through more country
changes come slowly,
the greatest change
the fading light.
With the coming of dusk headlights appear. Where I wonder, are these other cars going at the end of the day? Perhaps they carry people hurrying to reach their welcoming homes. The bright headlights seem symbolic, lights in the darkness, but their owners unseen, unknowable. Are any like me on a journey that’s longer, and forced to pause over the coming night on their way to an unknown city?
At last I lie on the motel bed, crickets sounding outside the open window. I think of the strange city, my destination. Suburbs there will all be similar to each other, yet be quite different too. And houses,
each house
after house after house
alike and different too.
And I will meet people, all individuals, all unique.
I feel at one with the little black ants.
................ by Margaret Williams
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Judge's Comments:
Somewhat ambitiously, perhaps, this story sets out to portray a typical day during a journey in the Australian Outback. On top of this, the writer poses existential questions arising from this journey and transforms the piece into a brief essay on the nature of individuality in a world where such a thing may just be an illusion… and all in less than five hundred words.
As if this isn’t enough of a balancing act, three haiku are set into this miniature like tiny jewels, underlining the meditations generated during the three stages of the journey. While it isn’t a “story’ in the strict sense of having characters in conflict striving to reach goals, it undertakes an epic journey nonetheless, and a willing reader will be transported and, hopefully, enlightened at the journey’s end. Congratulations................Single Malt
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