Arachnophobia

I was eight or nine at the time, maybe a little older, when I suffered my first traumatic arachnid episode.  Well, it might have been earlier, as I recall seeing some scenes of Kingdom of the Spiders on TV when I was a kid. That memory of a town entirely covered in spiderweb chills me to this day.  My earliest memory of an actual (not televised) encounter was on the way home from school one sunny day.  My friends and I were walking down Forest Avenue, returning home from a busy day at Tuckahoe Elementary School, when we decided to stop at the creek near the intersection of Rock Creek Road and Forest.  As I walked through the rails of the bridge, I felt this tickling sensation moving up my arm and looked to behold the biggest spider I had ever seen, scampering up my arm in an attempt to GET TO MY NECK ANDSUCK OUTMYBLOODAAAIIIIIIEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!

Ok.  Maybe the spider wasn't really that large.  I mean, when you're eight, everything is huge.  Size also could have been distorted by my point of reference:  looking up my arm at the DEADLY EIGHT LEGGED BEHEMOTH- I mean, spider- crawling straight for my face.  I still maintain that it was of a respectable size.  It definitely was not a tiny thing.

This memory came back to me in Church, of all places.  Heather and I were sitting at the back of the chapel during Sunday School and I notice a small object sort of floating in the middle of the room just above the pews.  At first I thought it was an airborne piece of lint, or other dust-like object, until it started to move and then dropped into the pews.  Since this thing was at least eight rows ahead of me, and I could see it quite clearly once it moved behind the sister in the white blouse, I could tell that it was larger than the average spider.  This alarmed me.  I had never seen a spider in the church, before.  Yesterday was the first, and now my last place of refuge has been infiltrated and I can no longer go into the Chapel without first looking up above my head to make sure a spider is not perched, waiting for the perfect moment to strike and GET TO MY NECKANDSUCKOUTMYBLOODAAAIIIIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!

I'm not really all that freakish about spiders.  I do all right as long as they don't make physical contact.  Let's face it- I live in Virginia.  There are a lot of spiders, especially in the wooded areas.  At scout camp there were some pretty big spiders residing in the woods.  In fact, at night you could lie really still and hear them walking around on the outside of the tent.  Again, I was ok.  I had a mosquito net over my cot that I would tuck under the mattress so nothing could enter my space.  There is one particular scout camp spider incident in which I came off looking quite stoic and unflappable, or at least too tired to care. 

My friend Sean and I worked on the camp staff at T. Brady Saunders for several summers.  The staff had a pretty nice setup.  Our tents were bigger than those the weekly scouts were using.  We lived in these things all summer.  I could stand up and reach up with my hand and just touch the apex of the tent ceiling.  They were on platforms up off of the ground.   We had room for our cots, our foot lockers at the end of the cots, a little table between the cots at the head,  and even room for a little table at the entrance of the tent.   Quite spacious.  Of course, due to the critter factor in the woods we all had mosquito nets over our cots.  I had started tucking the net under my mattress at all times ever since a Black Widow had managed to get inside my cot.  That unfortunate Widow was dispatched quite quickly with a overly generous amount of Off! repellent.  I considered myself fortunate to have only suffered that minor breach of security.  Matt Johnson, in the tent next to us, once entered his tent to find a snake curled up on his cot.  I'll take the spider.

Instead of the standard military surplus green netting, Sean had opted for a fine white mesh mosquito net.  Remember that detail, it will figure prominently in the telling of my tale. 

The day came that we returned to our tent for the evening and IT was there, waiting up in the tip of the roof of the tent.  A large, furry wood spider about the size of my hand.  Sean freaked.   I knocked the sucker off of the ceiling and shooed him out of the tent.  I wasn't stepping on that thing.  It would've been a mess.   Unfortunately, the little beast was back up on the ceiling when we came back to the tent the next night.  Again, I shooed him out of the tent.  This went on for several days.  Now we get to that fateful night- the night that will forever live in infamy- the Night of the Arachnid!!!

We had completed the spider-shooing ritual and turned in for the night.  We worked in the camp kitchen, which was a hot (meaning sweltering) and exhausting job.  I took my shower, then rolled up the tent sides to allow more airflow to cool the tent, and then went to sleep.  My peaceful slumber was interrupted in the wee hours of morning, when I  awoke to Sean hollering.  As I shook the fog from my head and tried to figure out what was going on, I saw Sean's flashlight come on and bounce around inside his mosquito net.  All I could see was the light, I never saw Sean.  He was yelling and practically jumping through his netting.  He finally freed himself and took off running into the woods.  I waited a few minutes for him to return, and like the loyal and concerned friend that I am, went back to sleep.  When I woke again at sunup, Sean was back in his cot, and the spider was gone.  I asked Sean what the deal was.  He explained that he had woken up in the middle of the night to see the moonlight reflecting off of his white mosquito net, and thought it was a giant spider web and freaked out.   I never saw the spider again.  I just figured that after enduring the being tossed out of the tent every night, Sean's episode was the last straw and the spider headed for greener pastures.   A year later I would be in Arizona, a place hotter'n heck and with the highest critter factor of any place I had ever seen.

I was serving as a missionary in the Arizona Phoenix Mission.  This place was an alien landscape to me.  It was hot, dry, dusty, flat, and was deficient in the foliage department.  Every time I got out of the car and stood up I had to hold on to the car till the feeling of falling left me.   I had never been in a place where you could see for miles from ground level.  The other missionaries made fun of me because I took so many pictures.   "You don't understand," I'd tell them.  "There's nothing out here!  Nothing!"   I had never seen so much nothing before.  I felt that I had to photographically document the place because I wasn't sure that I could adequately describe it in my letters home.  In Virginia, you're lucky if you can see two or three yards down due to the denseness of the woods and brush.  One of the things that got me the most was the variety of critters that inhabited the area.  There were snakes, lizards, roadrunners, jackrabbits, scorpions (another story in their own right), and of course, spiders.  These were not just any spiders, though.  They weren't even the Virginia wood spiders.  These things were tarantulas.   I remembered them from Kingdom of the Spiders.  Fortunately, I didn't have too many run-ins with them.  The first time I saw one my jaw dropped.  We were driving down the road and I saw one running in the opposite direction.  The size stunned me.  I couldn't believe they were really that big- and dodging traffic at that!  The next time I saw one was when we stopped by a church member's house one afternoon.  As we walked up to the door we heard screaming.  The screams would stop, then start again.  We were a little worried as we rung the doorbell.  The family's teenage daughter and her friend opened the door, looking quite panicked.  As it turns out, and as we could see from the front door, there was a really large spider up on the wall near the vaulted ceiling.  Every time the thing moved the girls would scream.  It was funny, actually.  We were unable to enter and vanquish the spider, since the parents were not home and mission rules restrained us from any further assistance.  I don't believe I ever heard what became of the thing.  I kept expecting to return and find it stuffed and mounted alongside the jackalopes on the wall.

My final big spider memory occurred during the last three months of my mission.  We were headed across the plains to a zone conference in Page, Arizona.  It was a three hour drive.  It had rained the night before, but it was a clear day.  I was driving the car, and I remember noticing the shadows of the clouds overhead, as they would cross the road and shade the landscape ahead of us.  At one point, what I thought was a shadow turned out to be something else.  As we got closer to it the shadow broke up into little dots, then big dots, and then a lot of flying, squished dots as I realized we were driving through a whole herd of tarantulas!  There must have been thousands of them!  It was really gross.  At least none of them managed to hop onto the car and hijack it at the next rest stop. 

Since then I have not been exposed to any large arachnids, just the run of the mill little spiders that are easily smashed by a rolled up newspaper.  I think it's possible that I have become complacent, and the spiders have sent me a message to remind me that they are there--watching...

I need to talk to the bishop about mosquito netting.