The Terminators
June 8, 2006

I didn't want to kill them. Live and let live, that's my policy.

But we couldn't take it any more: the destruction, the arrogance, the constant wearing away of the very infrastructure of our lives. No, not teenagers. Not even the Bush administration. I'm talking termites.

Ever since a neighbor ripped out his rotting back porch years ago, a swarming colony of the little vermin had been feasting on our house. They reduced the wood siding to kindling; there's nothing holding those boards together but paint. They chewed holes in windowsills and turned the interior drywall into Swiss cheese leaking piles of grainy termite droppings on floors, stairs and furniture. Besides the disgusting factor, our house is our only investment and the time had come to defend it. For its own good, we had to tent the house.

The very idea gives me the willies. Poison gas inside my home, saturating all my stuff? Please. When we had cats I refused to do it. Not only would they not be amused at being kicked out of their familiar habitat for two nights, but if there's a hidden pocket of trapped death gas anywhere in the house, a cat will find it. But the last of our beloved cats had joined the Choir Invisible, while the housemates we didn't want, the damn termites, were still around. I was out of excuses. It was them or us.

We evacuated all food from our kitchen cabinets, refrigerator and freezer, and anything in the bathroom that might be ingested, tasted or inhaled: pills, toothpaste, toothbrushes, lipsticks, dental floss, Kleenex. Art Boy persuaded me to leave our dishes and glasses. (They say gas leaves no residue on any surface, but, hey, they used to say margarine was good for you.) I stripped off the  bedsheets and tucked them into our overnight suitcase. Sinking into freshly gassed sheets our first night back would not exactly be my idea of Downy fresh.

The rest of our stuff we just had to leave. I avoided the reproachful eyes of my dolls and our family photos. Art Boy's paintings, each with a vibrant personality of its own, my walls of books, their pages whispering of people, places, stories, adventure, all of them were like old friends. It's one thing to gas an empty house between owners; this felt like we were leaving family members trapped inside.

Any outside plants touching the house had to be removed, so we'd spent days replanting succulents, peeling away our giant bougainvillea (trellis and all) from the porch, and piling up the potted plants from our attached deck on a table in the back yard. It's a good thing we were so organized—food boxed, overnight clothing mostly packed—since the tent crew arrived three and a half hours early. Instead of an entire morning to finish up for a noon appointment, we had about twenty frenzied minutes to get everything out after the crew showed up without warning at 8:30 am. Major casualties were my house plants—those hardy few I'd not already managed to kill—that did not respond well to two nights out in the cold, cruel world when there was no time to pack them in the car.

We had to wake up our friend Lia (who generously lent us her spare room), pulling into her driveway early in the morning instead of mid-afternoon, with all our possessions stuffed in the car like the Joad family. Fortunately, we'd brought her several bottles of thank-you bubbly; the champagne grapes of wrath, Lia called it.

It was creepy driving by the tented house later that afternoon, with those Danger/Peligro signs plastered all over everything. Our funky little Live Oak home had become the House Of Death. Creepier still was driving by the next day, after the tent had come off, and seeing our house in bondage, chains across every door, death's head signs in every window, the ominous whirring of fans inside, stirring the gas around. What happens to the poison gas they blow out of tented houses? Does it evaporate into thin air? Does it join the other billion noxious pollutants of modern life (fossil fuels, pesticides, spray deodorant, reality TV) and erode the ozone layer? Is that why we had snow in March? I'm just asking.

When we finally repossessed the house, we found a dislocated gutter (easily fixed), a board in our gate split off, and Art Boy's favorite outside painting table squashed like a bug by the falling tent. Inside, black drops of unidentified ooze and the shadow of a hose were embedded smack in the middle of our hardwood floor by some piece of equipment evidently hauled into the room without a tarp. The Head Termite Guy arranged for floor repair (not so easily fixed; the best they could do was sand out the spots and refinish), and agreed to give us a discount on the job. Still, it's hard to spend a lot of money and go through all that aggravation without something to show for it, like a trip to France or a new laptop.

The good news is, the termites appear to be gone. We'll know for sure when we start ripping off the rotten siding next month—but that's another story.