What leads a colony of ants to land in a clump on the surface of a swimming pool? How did they get there? Does this happen all the time? Do most of them feel like this is just business as usual? Do a few of them know that something has gone horribly wrong? It all seems very metaphorical to me, of course, partly because I'm not an ant. A small city or a suburb. Planet Earth. I showed the strange little island of ants to my friend Craig, who said, "We've chased something we wanted so far that we can't get back."