THE ANT MAN AND “THE SWORD OF DAMOCLES”

DECEMBER 27, 2025 – I remember the time I accidentally crushed an ant on the sidewalk. It registered on my retinas but a nano-second too late for me to rotate my leather-soled dress shoe to avoid the mishap as I rose off the downtown park bench after having finished my Subway sandwich. On my way back to the office, I felt a twinge of remorse as I considered how that poor ant had met its doom so abruptly and through no fault of its own, except by way of its being at the wrong place at the wrong time.

I thought of that ant today in a context where I could well have been the ant—meeting my doom with similar abruptness and through no fault of my own, except, well, potentially, being dumb at the wrong place at the wrong time. The “dumb” potentiality was brought into play by the appearance of a kind of “Sword of Damocles.”

It was about 3:11 this afternoon. I say “about,” because my car clock read 3:10 when I pressed the ignition button, and I reached the “Sword of Damocles” no more than a minute later. I was hellbent on getting ahead of the weather system that was moving across northern Minnesota and Wisconsin. Unseasonably warm temps over the snow cover produced a heavy fog over the entire region, but that was about to change. The same disturbance that had washed out Southern California was forecast to reach our part of the continent soon, bringing rain, then ice, then snow, as temperatures slid, then plunged.

In the local forecast I’d seen a narrow opening to allow me to dash up to the Red Cabin to check on the furnace, replace the filter, and reactive the remote indoor temperature sensor—all ahead of the seriously cold weather due by Wednesday of next week. I’d left home at 10:30 and stopped at Menards on my way to grab an extra furnace and set of batteries. I didn’t arrive at the Red Cabin until 2:00. My goal was to leave by 3:00 so that only half the trip would be in the dark and to reach home before the roads turned to ice.

Except for fog so thick in places, Santa could’ve made a fortune by hiring out Rudolph, the trip was uneventful. The mercury held steady at 35F most of the time, with stretches of 36, then a retreat to 34 once I got north of Shell Lake. When I turned off Williams Road onto Yopps Road, I noticed signs of high winds—several windfalls and lots of large twigs and small branches strewn across the snow throughout the woods. Our own long, narrow, twisting drive to the Red Cabin was carpeted with the same kind of arboreal detritus. Occasionally, I had to stop to drag larger branches out of the way, and in two spots I had to wrestle whole trees off to the side.

Then there was the “Sword of Damocles.” I could maneuver the car around it, but our snowplow guy and the propane delivery truck driver, I knew, wouldn’t appreciate this obstacle; this upper third of a 25-foot-high maple that the wind snapped over but not off. It hung right over the drive, and I would have to deal with it before returning home. I figured I’d attend to it on my way out—with a bow saw and pruning shears.

My only other activities at the cabin were (a) eating a sandwich I’d packed from home; (b) inspection of the 15-foot length of a white pine crown that had blown off one of the shoreline guardians and landed on the fire pit (in front of the cabin) some distance inland; (c) trudging through the snow to the Pergola-on-a-Platform to make sure it was still standing—and to see how it appeared in the dead of winter; (d) trudging through more snow to check on our neighbor, John Buman.

Anyway, at between 3:10 and 3:11, with saw and shears in the car trunk, I approached the “Sword of Damocles.” As I took the situation under advisement, I called to mind my adaptation of the Hippocratic Oath: “Whatever you do, don’t make matters worse.” For starters, in the context at hand, this meant backing the car up a few meters so that if the “Sword” fell the wrong way—which, I could see, was the probable way—the situation wouldn’t became far worse by the hilt of weapon smashing my windshield and putting a huge dent in the hood.

I then retrieved my tools from the trunk and took aim at the large assemblage of branches once pointed skyward, now dangling precariously over the drive. The twisted break in the trunk was too high up to allow for reliable reconnaissance. Was the sword dangling by the proverbial thread or was the attachment the equivalent of several nylon ropes?

As I asked the question, my imagination ran a bit wild. In pulling, tugging, pruning, sawing away at the dangling treetop, would I cause it to give way suddenly? Would the broken end of the mess—the trunk was about five-inches in diameter—rip free and falling at the rate of “9.8 meters per second squared” (as I learned in high school physics), crush me like an ant? “Like an ant”! Was I experiencing poetic justice at the prankish whim of the ant gods—who were putting me in exactly the position of that ant as it scurried into the wrong place at the wrong time so many years ago? The memory of the sound of my shoe sole smashing the life out of the ant was all it took for me to yell, “STOP!”

I adjusted my approach, my angle of attack. I extended the arms to the pruning shears to put myself at a safer distance. With the saw, I sought places where leverage was optimal and least likely to bring the whole mess down at once. With a staged approach and abundance of caution—which included keeping an eye on the tenuous sinews that kept the broken trunk attached and knowing my escape route if I saw the connection break altogether—I managed to clear enough of the “Sword of Damocles” to neutralize its threat over most of the drive . . . and to protect the mirrors on the plow guy’s pickup and the gas man’s delivery truck.

And as the “ant man” I lived to fight (and otherwise do what ant men do) another day.

Subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

© 2025 by Eric Nilsson