October is my favorite month. The humidity has finally tucked tail and fled Georgia, leaving us with clear blue skies, heavenly temperatures and changing leaves. Not too hot, not too cold, but like Goldilock’s porridge, it’s just about right. I can finally enjoy a long walk outdoors without looking and feeling like I’ve been lost and wandering in the Amazon for days. There is one thing of which to beware, and I usually avoid it by placing my very tall son or my friend Heather in front of me on woodland forays. This admission reveals my practical and somewhat Machiavellian nature, I know. But nothing can interrupt a peaceful reverie like a full-on facial encounter with a spider web.
True, you have to admire their industriousness. King Solomon, who was not so shabby himself, wrote in the Proverbs that the spider takes hold with her hands, and is found even in the palaces of kings. I wonder if he had a servant whose sole job was to walk before him waving a palm frond due to a previous unpleasant experience. A writing spider’s web is a marvel of animal architecture, and amazingly resilient to be constructed solely of a single organic material excreted by such a tiny creature. Glistening with morning dew and displaying some intricate mathematics of pattern, these glossy deathtraps rid us of at least a portion of the population of nasty flying insects, and are truly works of art. It’s just hard to appreciate them up close and personal. From the merest child to the hulking body-builder, even, say, the fairly calm and unruffled veteran teacher of elementary-aged children, most of us lose our dignity when we happen into a spider web. Especially if we have seen its occupant out of the corner of a panic-widened eye.
I do admire spiders at a distance, but it is important for me to see them before they see me. I probably am a good candidate for hypnosis therapy. My borderline arachnophobia began at the age of nine, when I innocently stopped to rest on a rotten log while following my father through the woods, and was overwhelmed by several somethings dancing frantically across my face and down my neck. My visual perception of the creature or creatures was blurred and distorted by the extreme closeup as it crossed my cheekbone just below my eye in its mad dash for freedom. The sensation of millions of tiny feet made my skin crawl. I danced with the wild abandon of a celtic druid engaged in a pagan ritual.
“Spiders! They’re ALL OVER ME!” I wailed as dad came rushing back to the rescue, brushing and patting and trying vainly to calm me.
“It’s not spiders, it’s just a ‘thousand-legs.’ It must have been in this rotten log.”
Yes, dad literally tried to comfort me by telling me that something with a thousand legs was possibly down the back of my shirt. Not his best moment as a parent. Perhaps had he used the term “millipede,” I might have felt better about the thing that ran rampant through my hair and over my face…well, probably not. But to this day, if even the driest remnant of spider web brushes my face, I am back in my nine-year-old body doing a buck dance and singing “I’m gonna wash that man right outa my hair.” Millipede, spider, whatever, it doesn’t belong on my person.
I am not the only candidate for hypnosis when it comes to spider-induced irrationality. In the news this morning is the true story of a man who set fire to his parents’ house trying to get rid of Black Widow spiders with a blow torch. More than 25 firefighters ended up on the scene to control the damage.
"The tenant used a torch like a handheld propane torch to kill the spiders that were around the base of the residential structure, and in doing so some flame from the torch went in between some of the cracks and the siding and into the interior of the wall," said Lee Wilding, deputy fire marshal with the Fresno Fire Department, in an interview with ABC News.*
I guess it was the old OK Corral philosophy, I might die, but I’m taking you down with me. Sure, it seems a little extreme, especially in the tinderbox that is California. But we don’t yet know all of the circumstances. Maybe some black widows got together with some thousand-legs and the safety of the neighborhood was at stake. Maybe his pyromania was not sheer stupidity, but a sacrificial act of heroism. The moon is full, the frost is on the pumpkin, and it’s almost Halloween. I mean, have you seen the movie Arachnophobia? Mutations happen! We need to be on the safe side.
So when you are out for your next walk in the woods, admiring the autumn color, don’t take any chances. Wear your turtleneck. Bring a tall friend to wave a pond frond before you. Just leave the blow torch at home.
