I’m not afraid of spiders and I’m not afraid of snakes. Snakes can startle me something fierce but so can a lot of things that I’m not actually afraid of. If it weren’t for snakes and sudden noises, I would have no measurable vertical leap at all. I am afraid of a number of things. Chiefly, these days, driving on freeways. I will take my chances with federal agents down at the ICE headquarters before I will feel calm on a freeway. I don’t know what happened over the last ten years or so, but them drivers is nuts. It does no good to remind them that knocking Grandma out of the gene pool is not effective in a natural-selection sense. No, I think they’re just assholes.

Spiders, though, are kind of neat. We have a lot of them at our mountain cabin. (Gosh, it’s going to take a while for me to call it “my” mountain cabin.) They hang out. They tend to be of the large black furry persuasion rather than your urban house spider. They love the bathroom. Even though they often have a preference for hanging out in the shower stall, which is not that big, I never bother to look for them before I step in. And then, once I’m committed, I see them—an indistinct fuzzy smudge, because I am frightfully nearsighted. I do know they’re big or I wouldn’t be able to pick them out at all. The bottom of that stall could be an inch deep with your delicate nearly translucent house spiders and I’d never notice.

They have shown no interest in climbing on my feet, that I can tell, so I just more or less keep track of them until I get out. I know there’s no point to trying to shower them down the drain, because they’ll just climb back out, irked and a little bit larger. No. I just give them their corner and get out when I’m done.

My niece Elizabeth does not. She scopes out the shower before she gets in and has a whole strategy when she sees one. First she opens the window. Then she fetches the toilet scrub brush. She pokes at the shower spider until it climbs onto the scrub brush to defend itself, and then, all in one smooth motion, she shoots it out the window, scrub brush and all, like an Olympic javelin thrower. Much later, she will go out to retrieve the hopefully spider-abandoned toilet brush. Lord knows what sort of new vermin might have latched on in the meantime.

Anyway, she claims she is not overly afraid of spiders, but just has some personal proximity rules she wishes they would abide by. And I believe her.

This is not true of my friend K.C., who has spent plenty of time, over the last forty years, in that cabin. Bless her heart. She is strenuously terrified of spiders, but she visited a lot anyway, and her pinochle prowess remains legendary, and her company ever-stellar, and I for one am right proud of her. Because we the hell have spiders.

One morning at the cabin, when we were blearing our way toward coffee and I was dressing to go coax a few trout out of the river for breakfast, I grabbed a sweatshirt I had unceremoniously tossed aside the night before and went to put it on. The scream that simple act engendered was only a notch below standard K.C. actual-spider scream.

“DON’T PUT THAT ON! DON’T PUT THAT ON! YOU NEED TO TURN THAT INSIDE OUT AND CHECK FOR SPIDERS!!” she, let’s say, “said.”

I gave her an indulgent smirk. I’d worn that sweatshirt yesterday. I’d draped it off the arm of a sofa. With some ceremony and a possible eye-roll, I turned it inside out and gave it a little shake. A spider the size of a silver dollar fell out.

Well then.

I was certainly not expecting that. I was happy to give her the win. If she had not been there to warn me, I’m certain, I would have put that sweatshirt on. The squatter spider would have become alarmed and slipped out at the earliest opportunity, with me none the wiser, as I am now certain has already happened dozens of times in my life.

I’m not afraid of spiders. I’m definitely not afraid of spiders I don’t know are there. One more increment downward in my myopia, that will include all the spiders.

I have no idea what to do about those assholes on the highway.