Motion on a hot dirt road caught my eye.  The ant was carrying a straw six times its length down a dusty tire track.  I paused to watch an ant’s frenzy of work in the still noon heat.  I had to admire its single minded purpose.  Grains of gravel were boulders.  The straw would catch and stick under them.  The tread pattern of a tire in the dust was a jagged canyon.  The ant scrambled up and over every one - never losing its grip on the straw.

And it was clear that this was a special straw.  The ant carried and pulled the straw over the top of other straws.  Straws that, to my careless eye, looked easier to carry, or more appetizing.

I noticed that the ant had a goal.  An ant hill was several yards away - over the horizon to the tiny ant.  This was no selfish ant working for personal gain; this ant worked for the whole community of ants.  But the ant couldn’t know that it was impossible to drag the straw all the way to the nest.  There were cracks in the ground  that would be canyons to the ant.  There were weeds that would be impossible mazes blocking the way. The ant could never drag his straw through all that.

I had to know.  I decided to watch and find out how long the ant would struggle before dropping the straw.  The desert sun burned like an open fire as the ant met the first clump of weeds.  Every new challenge only inspired the ant to work more feverishly.  The ant pulled the straw, then rushed to the other end and pushed.  Long moments passed when nothing would move the straw.  The straw was surely stuck beyond the power of just one ant.  I kept expecting the ant to give up, wander off, and find another straw.  But the ant kept racing from one side to the other, tugging and pulling until the straw broke free, and then blindly trying another direction until all the weeds in the road were passed, all the cracks crossed, and only smooth open ground was ahead.

With nothing between the ant and the ant hill, the sun didn’t seem as hot and the desert wasn’t as empty.  Against the odds, the hero ant had won.  As the ant carried his prize closer to the hill, other ants crossed its path.  Their unfeeling disregard for this ant’s magnificent triumph of will seemed so wrong to me.  This ant and this straw should be special.  Instead, I had to watch carefully just to keep track of the hero ant among the swarm of other ants near the hill.

Suddenly, without the slightest hesitation, the ant dropped the straw a little way up the hill, picked up a small rock like a thousand others, and carried it off in another direction.  I lost the hero ant in the confusion of ants on the hill.  I looked back for the special straw, but it was just like a thousand other straws on the ant hill - ignored by all the ants now.