By: Jefferson Weaver
Jim Stafford’s controversial (for its time) song was stuck in my head the other day, while a spider was stuck to my lip.
That song, “Spiders and Snakes,” details a boy’s first big crush; like many youngsters in the Age of Overalls, he attempted to impress the love of his life with a frog. She made it clear that amphibians, reptiles and arachnids were not on her pinafored agenda.
I wasn’t trying to impress anyone, much less the love of my life, when that spider chomped down on me. Indeed, Miss Rhonda lacks much of my tolerance for spiders. She is an independent, strong-willed woman when it comes to killing her own spiders, and does so with a certain frightening enthusiasm. Give the woman a stick, and place a carpenter bee to her left, and a spider to her right, and she’ll be standing there tomorrow, trying to figure which one to kill first.
Anyway, I was drawing water up from a rain barrel with a garden-hose siphon when I met my assailant. Said spider wasn’t particularly large, but he was of sufficient size to make a satisfying crunch when I instinctively bit down on whatever was biting me.
Critter wasn’t venomous, thankfully, but he did have a somewhat unusual taste. Kind of salty, with a hint of sweet. I offer the latter observation simply because I would hate to have the opportunity, albeit unintended, to eat a spider and not take note of its taste. I spat out the less tasty parts, and went back to watering.
I have always gotten along with spiders, which is odd, considering how badly I was traumatized by the large, hairy, jumping spiders that infested our porch when I was a toddler. Whilst I do not recall the details of the event, I had a bad reaction to some childhood medication which sent me into paroxysms of fear at the huge spiders leaping everywhere – even in the emergency room, which despite being in the late 1960s I am sure was spider-free. When I was completely recovered, and couldn’t find a new way to worry my mother or pester my Sister the Troll, I went spider-hunting on that selfsame porch.
People driving by thought it was cute that I was using a claw hammer to drive imaginary nails into the old wood. I wasn’t driving nails, though – I was saving the world from spiders.
As the years passed, spiders and I have come to an agreement—non-venomous spiders who pose no threat always get a pass. Venomous spiders who are minding their own business in their own neighborhoods get to live another day, while the widows, recluses and tiny green biters who press the issue are flattened.
It works for me, and for them, but your mileage may vary.
I look at spiders as rather admirable bugs, since most of them don’t mess with humans, and they work for a living. Anyone who has ever blundered through a massive spider web in a dark forest can testify to the work ethic of the Brotherhood of Eight-Legged Terrors. For every species of flying insect, and many of the crawlers and jumpers, either biting or benign, there is a spider who looks at them like I do a large, juicy bear steak. Being aggressively omnivorous myself, I can respect a fellow predator who specializes.
There are even spiders who eat birds and rats, and while I feel sorry for the birds, I often wonder if we could somehow genetically manipulate some of those critters to Hammer-movie horror size, and turn them loose in Washington and Raleigh. We might have to manipulate their tastebuds, since I am sure rats are more palatable than a lot of elected officials and bureaucrats.
Yet, I’ve had my share of bad spider experiences, toddler hallucinations aside. I’ve been nailed by a recluse, scared (yes, I admit it) by a black widow, and wrapped up in what my beloved calls “those radioactive green things,” we called “morning dews” when I was a kid.
Years ago, when we lived in the Kingdom of the Canebrake Rattlers, I was crawling under house to fix a broken waterline. Now, this particular house sat remarkably low to the ground, so I had to scoot along on my back, and occasionally turn my head or dig a trench to slide under the floor joists.
Everything was fine until I felt something run across my face, followed by several dozen other somethings. Then they ran into my clothes, as well as taking refuge in my beard.
It’s human nature for the heart to begin beating, the adrenaline to burst forth, and breathing to speed up when a person is in a dangerous situation. Unfortunately, the resultant tension and rise in body heat apparently makes spiders nervous, too, and when spiders get nervous, they bite, or whatever it is they do with their fangs.
Imagine, if you will, being in a dark, enclosed space, almost unable to move, covered in nervous, biting spiders. It was, shall we say, exciting.
I used the broken waterline to rinse as many of the critters as I could off myself, then kicked open an old crawlspace access. Naturally, there were more spiders – black widows, this time –taking advantage of the tiny beams of light reaching through the cracks in the old wooden hatch. None of those nailed me, though, since they were too busy fleeing the heat generated by the speed of my passage.
When I was back in the sunlight, the blessed, glorious sunlight, I began to itch, my eyes began to water, and my throat began to swell shut; there isn’t much in this world I am allergic to, but I recognized the start of anaphylactic shock. There was nothing to do but start driving toward town. I figured the folks at the emergency room – the same one where I’d been terrified of huge, invisible spiders 30 years before – would recognize me and contact my next of kin.
Almost to the hospital, however, the symptoms suddenly disappeared. It was weird, to say the least. I had tiny dimples like chicken pox all over my body, and I’m fairly sure Miss Rhonda washed dead spiders out of my clothes for weeks, but almost as suddenly as the poison hit, it went away. I was left with a wicked hangover, without even the excuse of a single drop of booze.
As I eyed another arachnid trying to stand me down at the pump the other morning, I wasn’t afraid. After all, he was just working for a living, same as I was. He finally withdrew, waving one arm as though in farewell.
I am not scared of spiders – but I will admit, I check the siphon hose a little more closely now, so we can all avoid the tragic consequences of an avoidable disagreement. One never knows when one might be under a dark old house, and suddenly be on the wrong side of things that crawl.
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