Flying Spiders
Last week, I sat down with my tea and opened my computer, ready to write, when the headline "U.S. Facing Invasion of Giant Venomous Flying Spiders" popped up on my screen.
My first thought was to call my brother and let him know he has to move in with me as my designated spider killer. But then I remembered I live on a boat, and he gets seasick.
So, I decided we would just have to leave the country because Rance is a terrible spider assassin. When I tell him he needs to kill a spider in the galley, he says things like, "Just leave it there; it will keep the other bugs away."
As I read through the article, I began to relax because, apparently, the spiders are invading the opposite side of the country. But I was reminded of the time my brother rescued me from a flying spider.
I was 17 years old and had just moved into my first apartment. It wasn't a bad place — just a simple one-bedroom in a typical apartment complex. There was just one problem. The apartment had a gnarly spider infestation. Big, black wolf spiders determined to engage in a territorial dispute over who the apartment really belonged to.
I had never been a fan of spiders. I would deal with them from afar, but if they got too close to me, I would freak out.
On this particular day, I walked into the bathroom and spotted one on the shower curtain rod. It was about 6 feet away. Working up the courage to mount an offensive, I formulated a plan. I would stand in the doorway and attack it with a bottle of all-purpose spray cleaner set to stream. I figured the spider and the spray cleaner would end up in the bathtub. The spider would die, and I would be halfway to a cleaner shower. Win-win.
Spray bottle in hand, I checked to make sure it was set to stream, took aim, and began to spray. But the spider was much smarter than I was because, as soon as the liquid got close to it, it began to spin a web and swing back and forth.
Logically, I know this all happened in about 3 seconds, but in the moment, it was an eternity. I was paralyzed with fear. Frozen in place, I watched with rapidly mounting horror as the spider swung back and forth on its ever-lengthening strand of silk, getting closer and closer to me, then landing on the doorframe about 3 inches from my leg.
At that moment, my body un-froze. I quickly pulled the door closed behind me and mentally prepared to never use that bathroom again. That was now the spider's room. I grabbed a blanket and stuffed it under the door so he couldn't escape through the crack at the bottom.
As I paced around the apartment, compulsively checking the blanket stuffed in the crack of the bathroom door, Shelby sat quietly playing on the living room floor, unfazed by the war being waged around her.
With renewed resolve, I took a deep breath and decided I was being ridiculous. I needed to act like an adult and take care of the situation. So, I picked up the phone and called my brother. He didn't answer, so I left him a message.
"Lance, oh my god! There's a giant spider, and I need you to come kill it, PLEASE! It flew all the way across the bathroom and tried to attack me. It FLEW Lance! Oh My God. Help, help, HELP!"
When my brother and his girlfriend, Jenny, showed up at my apartment an hour later, I had calmed down a little and was only checking the bathroom door every 5 minutes or so.
They were both highly skeptical of my flying spider story, but my brother went and took care of the spider anyway. They did these sorts of things for me a lot back then. They were both friends, confidants, and a huge source of support for me at a time when I really needed it.
Shortly after the flying spider incident, the apartment manager brought in an exterminator, and the spider infestation got better. But the incident made my fear of spiders SO much worse. Before this happened, I had never really understood how smart spiders are. Now, I knew they could fly across rooms and attack you if they wanted to.
I've gotten better about my fear as I've gotten older, but I will still get someone else, anyone else, to deal with the occasional spider if I can because I'm convinced that the next spider who flies across the room at me… will probably have better aim.
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🤣 I think we both know the human race wouldn't make it if everything depended on an interaction between me and Rocky.
It’s funny that you wrote about the flying spiders because I too succumbed to that click bait headline on my newsfeed immediately thinking of you and your lifelong aversion to spiders! I think what made the headline even more tempting was the fact that I just read Andy Weir’s, “Hail Mary,” which has a very different kind of “spider.” My imagination took a very interesting turn while my common sense took the expected roller coaster of clicking an interesting headline, gearing up for a fantastic magical adventure, and then plummeting back to reality within the body of the story. P.S. do you have a baseball bat onboard? ;)