The Ant City

More about The Ant City

It was 1983, and I was working in the Bighorn Mountains doing 500 miles of trail maintenance. Long before that, there is a Chinese story—“The Governor of Nanke” by Li Gongzuo—about a man who falls asleep beneath a tree and dreams an entire life inside a kingdom that turns out to be an anthill. When he wakes, the empire collapses back into dirt and insects, and the question lingers: where, exactly, did that life take place?

I didn’t know that story then, but I walked into something close to it.

I started out with all kinds of gear, but as the job went on, the gear lessened and lessened down to very simple fare. I only had a piece of plastic. I didn’t even have tent poles—I used tall, skinny, narrow pieces of lodgepole pine that I would find dead in the middle of lodgepole thickets.

One night, I slept in the middle of a meadow without even a sleeping bag. I put my head on what I thought was just a mound. I had a strange dream about a city, and there was a whole society in there. It was a kind of university of all these beings. Then they became aware of my presence, and they started making this high-pitched squealing noise, which called in the army, and I was running out of the city.

When I woke up, it was early morning, and I looked at the mound my head had been resting on. I realized it had been an ant hill, and I had been dreaming about the ants.

If having dreams is a real experience, then this actually happened.