Spider Angst

Visible Webs

Spiders hate dew it betrays their only way to make a living/killing: Webs

I see them sometimes, on early summer mornings, glittering with dew. A sight for sore eyes — unless you’re a spider that is.

Then it’s “Damn this dew. Damn this sun. Damn this Mother Nature. Damn them all to hell.”

A lot of flying potential spider meals beg to disagree: the deadly web shines like a multi-diamonded beacon, screaming “Stay away. Stay away.” and that they do, while Starving Spider keeps cursing. All this brilliant overnight work for nothing, “Damn this dew to hell.”

I like spiders. I like spiders a lot more than I like ants.

I own and live in a fairly new Danish beach-style cottage (is what the seller — whose mother was Danish and whose father was Swedish, tells me it is, he designed it himself he says, to look like that; then he adds, I was conceived during a lull in their argument). This newish structure rarely sees ants, though far less rarely spiders.

I do like spiders. They, like I am, are loners. Solitary creatures weaving nocturnal food baskets while the sun lights up the other side of the planet.

Ants are the opposite: not loners. You see one ant, both his immediate and extended family are not far behind.

I really don’t want to kill ants though (I never kill spiders — instead I give them names and treat them as pets). One or two ants: usually tell them, “You stay out of sight and I won’t have to kill you.” Sometimes they get the message and scurry out of sight. Ten or twenty ants, I am so sorry, out comes the Raid. “I told you. I told you,” I keep telling them. This Raid stuff does give them the message — the smell does if nothing else (I hate that smell). They stay away for a while, sometimes for months.

And so, a few ant-less months roll by and all is well in my little cabin or cottage or whatever you want to call it; it’s not big: a six hundred square foot base (ground floor) and a four hundred square foot loft. That’s all.

Then, early one afternoon, while sweeping and vacuuming, I discovered that ants, the small seemingly innocuous type, like warm, snuggly places, say, under my wi-fi router. How did I discover this you ask?

Vacuuming around the router I see a black spot on the hardwood floor sort of dribbling out from underneath the router. It looks more than just dirt or what have you. I scraped it a bit and found more of it, behind the router. This is truly strange. So I lift the router.

Shock: These ants were not just visiting, hanging out on the beach so to speak, they had come to settle: the entire — very extended — family, queen included. Hundreds and hundreds (if not thousands) of them, along with small continents of little white hills that I realize are masses of eggs.

Truth be told, I didn’t have the nerve to look closer. I felt invaded, violated, and, yes, shocked. What the…?

I vacuumed them all away. All the while asking them to forgive me. This was not part of our deal, I keep telling them. You just cannot do this, I keep telling them. I am so sorry, I keep telling them. But I keep vacuuming until they’re all gone. Then I wash the spot, scrub the spot, with 409. I don’t like the smell of this 409, but it cleans well. Then I lift and shake the router to see a few more ants fall out of it and onto the floor. I vacuum them up as well.

Then I Raid the area, while I keep telling them I’m sorry. I really am. I make sure they’re all gone and that they won’t want to come back (Stay away, says Raid).

The vacuum cleaner is a Dry-Wet Vac, which in turn I cleaned really well once done with this genocide.

I still check under the router once or twice a week to make sure no one’s thinking of re-settling.

One morning I found a spider in one of my stainless steel kitchen sinks (the lefthand one). The sides were too deep to ascend so there he (or she, how do you tell spider gender?) was investigating (or pretending to — to shield sheer spider panic) the bottom of the sink.

Me, spider-lover that I am tore off a piece of paper towel and fashioned of it a spider-elevator which I invited the desperate little guy (or girl) to enter for a ride.

Enter he/she did, climbed onboard while I lifted the lift (I like that) out of the sink and placed it on the counter beside it. Well, spider had not stayed put on paper lift, he/she had climbed onto my hand and while my initial (reflexive — based on similar though unsavory freeloaders) reaction was to shake my hand or brush him/her off, but I caught myself in time and instead I let the spider take his time to traverse the top of my hand and jump off onto counter-safety.

Which he/she did, and I swear: the soft-shoe shuffle of eight hairy spider legs was the sweetest, gentlest, whisperest touch ever — made my day. I’m not exaggerating, they made my day.

The spider, once safe on the countertop shifted gears and was gone from view in a breath or two.

I don’t wash my car very often (perhaps I should). I don’t drive it very often either. It’s a small car. A Toyota Yaris, 3-door, 2008 model. These days it’s not much more than a glorified shopping cart, though I never tell it this: he/she still thinks he/she is the cat’s whispers and I’ll happily let him/her suffer under that delusion as long as he/she is happy.

Funny thing is I still think of my car as new — going on fourteen years.

Mostly he/she just sits collecting dust (which is washed off whenever rain moves through my pacific coast region). What isn’t washed off, however, is the gathered collection of spider webs, between side mirrors and body, around the door handles, by the read license plate. And I’m thinking, as I notice the increasing webness of my little car, Who am I to deprive them of their livelihoods? Not me. And so I drive off, all webbed, sometimes wondering what other Walmart shoppers will think about her, my web-draped little brand new Yaris.

I am not a hunter-gatherer, I am pure gatherer, and I do my gathering at local produce sections (mostly Walmart — which I why I suggested to my realtor friend a great tagline for Crescent City, where I live: Crescent City, just like Big Sur but with a Walmart. He liked that he said, but I haven’t seen him use it yet. Then again, I haven’t seen him much lately.

This was an odd spring, though, and early summer. Not a single dewed spider web. Perhaps they’ve all cottoned on to dew-producing nights, and take those nights off.

© Wolfstuff

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