Atomic Nerds

I am an arachnophobe. I’m in recovery.

When I was a little kid, it was probably fairly sensible of my parents to at least somewhat encourage my reticence toward spiders. Phoenix in general and our area in particular is pretty heavily infested with black widows and Loxosceles (recluse spider family); there was a high enough chance of any given spider I encountered being poisonous that it probably made them feel easier to have me avoid them altogether. I already showed a distressing inclination to chase snakes without bothering to think about whether they might be poisonous, so not having to worry about the critters that actually would take up residence inside the house must have been nice.

The university I went to has an excellent biology program with an emphasis on field trips, lucky me. Unluckier for me, the chunk of land the university owned and used for some of these has one of the highest spider population densities in North America. It’s jammed with spiders, an extremely diverse range of spiders. First there was the ecology lab section that required us to find and measure individual spiders and their webs and note the species- including the massive Nephila orb-weavers, which would build giant horrible webs across the trails to catch flying insects and could grow to be the size of my hand. You couldn’t always see the webs unless the light was right, either, so I always looked like I had some sort of neurological disorder as I bent and twisted with every few steps to see if there was an upcoming trap.

Then, I got the Professor, who studied the mating habits of the giant evil orb weavers and to whom life was entirely spiders with the occasional interruption from class Mammalia, mainly in the form of whiny students. I got over my fear of spiders through what a psychologist would call flooding- it’s hard to keep jumping and grimacing when your teacher is constantly pointing out spiders everywhere in your environment that you never would have noticed otherwise, some that looked as though they were wearing the pelts of the small rodents they seemed large enough to feed on. (“And there’s a lovely female Lycosid!”) It was either get over it, or have a nervous breakdown.

I still don’t like them, though. I’m calm enough and educated enough to find them interesting creatures in their own right, but the feel of a spider walking on me is still cause for Defcon 5 freak-out, and I’ll probably never lose that little core of revulsion- especially with black widows, which look like something Satan would have personally invented, and jumping spiders, because hell if I’m going to be sanguine about a spider that can move that fast and that unpredictably onto me. My skin is still crawling horribly from the searching through local spider species and their photos that I did to try and identify the spider in the photo above. (The best I could do was “some kind of Araneus orb weaver”. Apparently there are nine million of them and they all vary hugely between individuals.)

Stingray tolerates spiders. I discovered that when I moved in with him. With my newfound decreased reactiveness and the rational acceptance that, yes, harmless spiders are beneficial and eat bugs and compete with harmFUL spiders and I should leave them alone, I figured this would be no big deal. What I didn’t realize until far too late was that he actually likes the little fuckers. He didn’t just not want me to kill spiders because they’re beneficial, he didn’t want me to kill them because he felt sorry for them! And with the weight of rational argument on his side, this has led to… something of a proliferation of spiders. This house is now Spidertown. There are house spiders on the windowsills inside and out, daddy longlegs seemingly everywhere, wolf spiders large and small cruising around with impunity. I have to admit it must be kind of a good thing, because even though New Mexico has just as many black widows as Arizona, I’ve never seen any inside the house- I think the other large spiders are outcompeting them. He looks out for them. He throws them insects, if they have webs. Occasionally he’ll leave the porch light on so the fuckinghuge spider in the above photo can get more and bigger insects. They’re practically pets. It’s disgusting, but this is one marital argument I thoroughly lost a long time ago.

There are even spiders in my shower now. For whatever perverse reason, the daddy longlegs in particular love to lurk in there, and I’ve counted as many as three hanging out with me in the shower. As long as they keep to themselves- and they do, although they look as miserable as any wet arachnid- I don’t mind enough to either shoo them out myself or go get Stingray to do it.

Even I, however, have my line in the sand.

One fine day, I was taking an otherwise routine shower, when I opened my bottle of shampoo and dispensed a spider from it instead of shampoo. Right away, I learned two things:

1. Even the smallest and most unassuming arthropod can grip with truly arresting strength when it finds itself deposited from a warm, dark haven onto a human thumb in what appears to be an extremely bright rainstorm.

2. Much as it boosts the resonance of the bathroom baritone, a shower and tiled room will elevate a pedestrian girlie-scream into an operatic shriek. I’d like to say it was a bellow of surprise and outrage, but bellows do not hit the kind of high notes required to make all the metal in the room ring in sympathy.

In order to shower, I need to take off my glasses. I am extremely nearsighted; I’m not quite legally blind without them, but all I can see are light, dark, and blobs of varying size and definition. All I could tell in the space of a few seconds was that there was a dark multilegged thing clinging to me, with surprising force. For all I knew, it could have been a facehugger that was merely starting with my thumb.

Stingray and Kodos, being the brave defenders of home and family that they are, came running to my aid in response to the scream. The cat came hot on their heels, because if I’m being butchered, he wants to make damn sure he’s going to at least get a drumstick. Thus it was that they burst in on the tableau of the spider and I confronting each other grimly from opposite ends of the tub.

The cat, seeing I was not going to become food, left in disgust. The dog did what he always does in such situations, which was stand by looking confused and wagging his tail hopefully. Stingray became totally incapacitated with laughter for what seemed like an indecent, or at least unsympathetic, length of time. Eventually, he recovered to the point where he could tell me it was a totally harmless house spider, and hand me a tissue.

I squashed it myself. How could I look in the mirror if I refused to slay my own Shower Horrors?

They can live with me. They can even hang out in my shower. But lurking in my grooming products is a god damned spider capital offense, and that’s final.

Posted homestead, OK so this one time... |