You really might want to go to All Mediocre and stay there because I am about to tell you something horrifying. I found a spider carcass in our bed yesterday morning. It was small and decidedly dead, but it was definitely a spider. Typing that makes me shudder. It's hard to properly put into words the depth of my loathing for spiders. It's paralyzing. After a sighting, I feel imaginary legs crawling on me for hours and twitch involuntarily. Once I've spotted a spider, I either have to put at least a mile between it and me, if I'm outside, or it can not leave my sight until it dies, if it happens to be inside my house.
In honoring of traveling Wednesday, here are my top ten most harrowing spider experiences of all time.
10) The Woodpile Wolf Spider. This spider is the origin of my debilitating arachnophobia. When I was about eight, my parents kept a large woodpile in our basement garage. In the woodpile lived a Wolf Spider. The name says it all, really. Large. Hairy. Wolflike. Able to eat eight year old girls in a single gobble. The woodpile and it's horrific hairy inhabitant are the source of many of my irrational fears including basements, the dark, garages and woodpiles.
9) The Tarantula Crossing. I learned to drive in Oklahoma. My mother took me out into the middle of nowhere to practice on a deserted road cutting through scrub and sagebrush. I had to stop and wait while a pack of spiders big enough to be seen from the car crossed the road in front of me. A herd of tarantulas? A school? A horror of tarantulas. I was so traumatized by Wolf Spider flashbacks that she had to drive home.
8) Tent Spiders. I'm not a big tent fan at the best of times, but a tent in the middle of a huge national park in Mongolia crawling with quarter-sized spiders of undetermined lethalness. No, thank you. I slept in the dining tent. On a table. Several times that night, I cried.
7) Miniature Hopping Spiders. These are the official, scientific names for these spiders, in case you were wondering. My sister and I got the worst food poisoning I have ever experienced in Kathmandu. As I lay in my not so clean bed in our grubby hotel room, waiting for my next emergency dash to the toilet and pondering my imminent death, I noticed that small black things were hopping on me. One landed on my face and I said to my sister, "am I approaching death and hallucinating or are there small spiders hopping on me." She said, "no, I see them too, there are small hopping spiders." I spent the rest of the day on the floor of the tiny shower, periodically dousing myself with freezing cold water.
6) Middle Earth Monster Spider. Lord of the Rings, Return of the King. Shelob coming out of that hole in the cliff to eat Frodo. H.O.R.R.I.B.L.E.
5) Poisonous Crawling on My Back Spider. Cutting our way on horseback through the outback in Queensland, Australia. Our big, tough, cowboy guide, 'Stretch,' suddenly froze, motioned me not to move and whacked something off of my back with a vicious, hard, intended-not-to-miss swipe. With eyes like saucers, I looked to my husband. He held up his hands in a four inch diameter circle and mouthed 'spider.' I clutched my horse's mane to keep from passing out in horror. Stretch whistled and said, "whew-weee, those little mates are nasty." I have the heeby jeebys remembering this incident. Horribly poisonous things live in Australia. They always top the 'top ten most venomous' things list. Always.
4) Toilet Tarantula. I never actually saw the toilet tarantula, thank all that is good and wholesome, but I heard stories. It was rumored to live in the bathroom of the small room on the orphanage grounds where we stayed in Haiti when we went to bring our children home. The previous family had seen it crawl out of the toilet. Can you say constipation? I brushed my teeth with one eye on that freaking toilet.
3) Banana Spider Number One. I was eating with several girl friends at an outdoor, garden restaurant in the small town of Ubud on Bali. We sat on cushions on the floor at a low table, surrounded by lush growth, beautiful flowers and trickling fountains. I spotted this gargantuan beast BOOKING down the wall next to our table towards us. I wasn't able to formulate words to warn them, but the speed with which I removed myself to the other side of the garden told them all they needed to know. Later, they discussed in awe who had moved faster, me or the spider. If you've never seen one, banana spiders are enormous.
2) Banana Spider Number Two. This one took up residence under the sliding glass door of our house when we lived on Saipan (a small tropical island near Guam). I insisted that HSSH kill it. Gee was only three months old and I refused to have predators large enough to eat him living on our lanai. HSSH hit it with Raid and it climbed the door, blotting out the sun. He doused it in poison ten times before it finally died. The spider was so big that it left spider shaped prints surrounded by Raid frost on the door.
And my most harrowing spider experience of all time is...
1) The Tunnel of Bird Spiders. BIRD spiders. So named because they eat birds. I kid you not. Again outside of Cairns, Australia on that same damn horse trek through the outback only now we are were in the rainforest on the wet side of the mountains. The horses picked their way down a sloping trail. Huge trees lined the trail on either side. Stretch turned casually backwards on his horse and jerked his rugged chin toward the sky. An evil grin spread across his face. "Aye, Stoicey, you seen them yet?" I couldn't stop myself, with building dread I glanced upward. Above our heads, for as far as you could see were gigantic spider webs. Spider webs so big I still wonder if I imagined them, stretching between the trees on either side of the path. In the center of each web sat a cat-sized spider. A small cat, perhaps, but a cat nonetheless. There was no way out but through. It still prickles the hair on the back of my neck.
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