#668 in a series of true experiences in real estate
We once met a drainage engineer hired by our client to look over his house. The client had been told that an old creek bed lay under part of his foundation and he wanted to know if there was anything he could do about it.
This engineer was not like any engineer we’d ever met. He was dressed in a khaki safari outfit and he had a leather-covered notebook clipped to his belt. We followed him as he silently walked around the outside of the house, watched as he disappeared underneath for awhile. When he reemerged, he took his time, settling himself comfortably before he began to talk.
I think we were expecting concrete specifications. Instead, the engineer told us stories. He described American Indians in the old days pausing in their travels at the banks of the creek. Their ponies were loosed to graze nearby. Overhead, live oaks shaded. Yellowing grasses, bent by breezes, covered the gently sloping land. Deer started, rabbits huddled.
It was a stirring picture. I’ll never forget it.
Time passed, the tale continued, and men moved in. They built houses, built them all over, some over the creeks. We were on that land now, the same ground where the Indians hunted and fished.
There are buildings and people and cars now, fences, concrete patios and curb cuts. The creek has been culverted, contained and redirected by men, so there is not much water left under this piece of ground anymore.
“But,” the engineer sang to us softly, “it is the same land, the same as it always was.”
I was reminded of this story on another occasion as Anet and I vacuumed ants out of a refrigerator. Everyday we went to an apartment I own, turned on the Electrolux and sucked up ants. They were mostly cold, dead ants. Some were still, very slowly, moving.
There were no paths of ants traveling toward the refrigerator. These ants seem to be walking into the freezer and main part of the refrigerator from somewhere inside the refrigerator walls. In the many years that I have owned the apartment and various refrigerators, nothing like this had ever happened and I was at a loss as to what to do.
After a tenant moved out, I had the floors refinished. The floor people unplugged the refrigerator for a week or so, then it was plugged back in and cleaned. There were no ants in sight. But when new tenants took over, they reported that there were ants in the freezer. “Ants in the freezer?” I asked. “How many? Are they dead?”
There were quite a lot of ants, and although we continued to remove them, there were always more. I called an appliance repairman. He figured there must be a finite number of ants. Why not just keep slurping them out? It shouldn’t take too long to get rid of them all.
My tenants didn’t want to put food in the refrigerator. After a week or so I bought a new refrigerator and stored the ant refrigerator in the garage. It took awhile but the ants eventually disappeared.
At least it isn’t bees. I’ve had to deal with bees in my tenants’ walls and ceilings a couple of different times. They came in through tiny holes next to waste lines mounted on the outside of the building. I called the bee man, he came and vacuumed up a lot of honey, comb and bees. He had to open the ceilings to get access, had to return a couple of times to get it all, but it worked. We’ve been bee-free for a few years now.
Anet had raccoons at her house. We work out of Anet’s house where, several years ago, we noticed something smelly. Some days it was strong, other days, not so bad, but it kept on. We cleaned and aired out the house. Still the smell stayed. Finally we called the pest trapper man. He crawled underneath the house and found a mother raccoon and her babies, all dead, which he removed. (What a job.)
I had termites in my living room at home. There is a basement area under the living room and the fireplace chimney goes through both floors. Subterranean termites (the kind that live under the ground) had chosen the surface of the chimney as their home. They built tubes straight up into my living space — and gave me the creeps.
I didn’t actually see the termites themselves, didn’t know they were termites, because they were inside their brown tubes. But I knew something alive was going on because the tubes were slowly multiplying. I’d see them attached to the brick chimney, sweep them down, and a week or so later, there would be new ones.
I called the termite inspector to come and look. “Subterranean termites,” he said quite mildly.
Gad. “But these walls were completely rebuilt a couple of years ago,” I said. “Torn back to the studs. There were no termites then. Where did they come from? How fast do they eat? What shall I do?” (I was a little panicky.)
The inspector was calm. He told me that they eat slowly, they’re in the ground everywhere, sometimes they come inside, we need to kill them.
“Do what you have to do,” I said, and he did; he drove the termites from my living room.
But probably not from my land. Because, as our storyteller sang, it is the same land as it always was, and this includes termites.
