Wednesday, October 24, 2001
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Wednesday, October 24, 2001 |
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Spiders I have tolerated By
SALLIE SATTERTHWAITE
He looks ferocious, with his hairy grasping arms, hunched shoulders and bulging eyes. Alert to any movement in the flat world he rules, he is capable of springing into action at the first sign of an intruder. Or a meal. But take away the magnifying glass and he's just another spider hitchhiking with us. Not many spiders, three-eighths of an inch across, have traveled hundreds of miles in just a few days from where they crawled from an egg sac. My love-hate relationship with spiders dates from my acquaintance with a little soft-gray lady who lived atop the old upright piano in the living room of my childhood home. She apparently hid under the runner there, but emerged when I practiced, yo-yoing up and down between me and the music. I was convinced she was expressing appreciation. Maybe it was just the vibrations. Now, however, I'm more likely to mutter unmusically about the dusty webs the little weavers leave behind on shelves and the corners of ceilings, the tangles adorning the porch rafters, and the strands that stretch across the kitchen overnight, set to catch my face as I stagger toward the coffee maker. I flail at them with brooms or the long-handled "Oscar" a daughter gave me for Christmas one year. The sticky silk, of course, does not shake off and requires disposal by hand, which evokes another burst of malevolence on my part. Yet I've become enamored of the bright black-and-yellow striped garden spiders that in other years have woven spectacular orbs on the big windows where we observe their industry close-up. We watched one craft her trap from foundation lines to the zigzag stitching in the center, congratulated her when she caught flies and grew bigger by the day, then mourned when one cold morning we found her on the deck barely able to move her elegant legs, a state from which she would not recover. (We've seen fewer of these beauties recently, and none at the house. Last year and this, one was in the bushes near the end of the golf cart tunnel under Peachtree Parkway. Last year's lasted until cold weather. This year's disappeared early in August.) On the boat, we deplore the way the white gel coat gets black-polka-dotted under every web. In autumn cruising especially, gossamer long glittering strands of airborne cobweb festoons the boat like tinsel on a Christmas tree. When spiders dare to board, we nearly always lift them by one of their silky cables and toss them to the wind and waves. "Survival of the fittest, buddy. If you are meant to survive, you'll figure out how to swim, real quick." And they do, often well enough to make it back to the hull where they gum onto the fiberglass, rest, then start the climb back aboard. One morning when we awoke to heavy fog, we found an orb web strung between the motor cover and the dark green canopy above the afterdeck. Heavy beads of water clinging to the web had sagged it into a sad distortion of its original shape. "All that work," we tsked, pulling it down, but seeing no sign of its owner. Late that afternoon, anchored in a quiet cove off the Tennessee, I was sitting in the stern when I noticed a slim, pale brown spider drop from the canopy, hurriedly tamp down her line on the engine cover, and walk a few inches to climb back up another nearly invisible line. Several of these completed her infrastructure, and she began the rhythmic task of building the orb. By now, of course, there was no way we could throw that little creature to the fish. Instead, we enjoyed an evening of ballet, as she dipped from spoke to spoke, kicking out a foot to secure the line until, almost at twilight, she had crocheted a shimmering doily across the back of our boat. "Why there?" Dave wondered. "Because bugs attracted to the light of our windows fly straight through that space," I guessed. "Must work," he said. For several evenings, we watched her toil, and each morning found her web in tatters, either from dew or the struggles of her ungrateful guests. Then one evening, there was no ballet and no ballerina hiding in the canopy's overhang. The little guy with the yellow spot on his rump has been with us for nearly a week now. I don't know why we let him stay, nor why we think he's a he. He is not a weaver, depositing only an escape line behind himself. It never accumulates and so does not bother us. I think he's what we always called a "jumping spider." He hides in the frame of the window above the helm, coming out to let the sun warm his belly. Tiny mosquito-like bugs, almost too small to be noticed, flit around the cabin, and when one finds the window, its fate is sealed: Johnny Jump-up watches for a moment, repositions himself to advantage, and pounces. In a moment, tiny legs and wings disappear into his mouth, after which he fastidiously scrubs his face with his little claws. I wonder if we've been on this boat too long.
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