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.
My wife gets bitten by spiders in our bed. Me? Not once. Explain amongst yourselves.
You’re spending time in someone else’s bed? Is this a trick question?
Your beautiful photo is of garden orb weavers in the fall, when they create orbicular spider condominiums. Dew is an excitement, splintering into rainbow droplets in a rising sun. Well done!
I save spiders in toilet paper nests for ejection to Outdoors. I also rescue worms. So few times when we can make a true life and death action
I cannot bring myself to rescue worms. Hats off. I do remember thinking I could never make it to school on those rainy days without stepping on a stranded worm.
K.C. calls it correctly. Whilst I appreciate all wildlife, I do have eight Achilles heels. As the county dragonfly recorder, I once visited the house of a good friend who was an expert at identifying spiders. It was an uncomfortable time, as somehow I felt the weight of all those damselflies and dragonflies who met a sticky end in a spider’s web. In the spirit of personal growth, I do manage to relocate the spiders which don’t startle me.
WAIT! WAIT! YOU ARE THE COUNTY DRAGONFLY RECORDER??
I am! We don’t have many, sadly. It’s not an onerous task.
When I was a kid, I woke up to a huge spider walking across my stomach. From then on, my dad had to dispatch every spider I saw. Grew out of that as an adult, thankfully. And on the west side of the Cascades, snakes were never an issue except for startling me. But now I live where there are rattlesnakes. I took a class about snakes to get over my fear, but that hasn’t really helped when I go hiking and think I see one around every corner.
My dad was all about spiders. He loved to take photos of them and their dewy webs and sought them out. None of us grew up with a fear of spiders. He later mentioned that he had been afraid of spiders and started studying and photographing them specifically to get over it.
Once, a while back, I was sleeping and felt something in my eye. Went to the bathroom and looked in the mirror. It was a small spider. I tried not to blink it to death, but it was useless; when something is in my eye, I blink like crazy. Was really grossed out, first, because there was a spider IN MY EYE!!! Second, because I killed it with my eyelid.
Yeah, I wouldn’t have been happy about that. About having a spider in my eye, not about blinking it to death.
That is just plain weird.
I grew up in the Pine Barrens of NJ, home of timber rattlesnakes, live in a part of NJ that was known to be home to rattlesnakes and have explored another area in NJ where one of my teaching assistants conducted radio transmitter tracking of rattlesnakes.
I’ve never seen one. Part of that is because people have gone out of their way to kill every snake they find, venomous or not. The last timber rattlesnake reported in my current home town was killed in the 1970s by a man who was proud of killing them, but also puzzled that he wasn’t seeing them as often.
The other reason is that even in places where they are known to live, they are very cryptic and discreet in their habits. My teaching assistant reported that she never heard snakes rattle even when she was standing right among them. She said that usually she didn’t know where the snakes were until she turned on her receiver and often they then were close enough to touch. She said the only time they rattled was when another rattlesnake passed near them.