What Spiders Have Taught Me

It's October, so what better time to write about something scary?

Spiders, as anyone with a frontal lobe can tell you, are creepy. They are creepy as hell. I’ll be clear, though and say that yes, there’s a difference between something being “creepy” and something being “scary…” though sometimes, it can be both. Spiders are a great example:

Spiders scare the living hell out of me.

Spiders are creepy little monsters full of fun little surprises.

I didn’t used to be afraid of spiders. Not really. But when, in elementary school, we talked about what we were afraid of, the number of girls scared of spiders sort of gave me the impression that I was supposed to be afraid of them. Seems silly now but after years of dodging webs and a few nights where I’ve woken with a spider tap-dancing on my face, there’s no going back.

And god help the spider that pops in on me unexpected. I don’t like killing spiders, but instinctive fear is a blood-thirsty juggernaut and I’m not about to stop it. 

My arachnophobia is the Mr. Hyde to my Dr. Jekyll. That said, I do respect the little beasts. They have their own sort of magnificence: they’re perfect in that they always do their jobs (Gil Grissom said the same of bugs, but I feel it’s apt here, too) and focus single-mindedly on the task at hand.

You never see a sweet article about a new litter of baby spiders or a cute video of spiders cuddling. If there’s a spider involved, it’s doing something spine-chilling like being in multitude. Spiders are not sentimental. They are prolific, determined and beautifully methodical.

I was on a train platform late one night last summer. I looked up above my head to check the clock and noticed to my initial horror, a large brown spider. I was a little nauseous at first, but as I watched in disgusted fascination, I noticed it was working on a new web. I was hypnotized watching this spider crawl around and around, pulling that thread from its own body and making a beautiful but temporary death trap.

For that’s the thing about webs: they’re impermanent. They do their job a couple of times, then disappear completely. They’re meant to catch the spiders’ food, then be destroyed. And yet, for all their impermanence, they are still breathtaking. A spider is like the greatest artists who actually put a bit of their self into their work. I remember researching an American Indian and artist who, after learning he was diabetic, used some soda and his own diabetic blood to paint a still life portrait of a skull. 

Sometimes, I can’t believe the scale of webs. So big, they still serve the primary function, but the audacity of their size is sometimes too funny. I’ve seen webs over front doors, across roads, and under bridges. These are spiders reaching for the stars and landing in a black hole of “Never-Gonna-Happen.” Like novices aiming for prestige with no talent to back it, they’re the American Idol contestants we watch just to see how badly they’ll crash and burn.

But the spider doesn’t care. It know this is only temporary, that every opportunity is short-lived and imperative. The spider is not a defeatist. If anything, it’s an optimist. Keep on dreaming, you little shit.

But spiders are just as diverse as any other species. There are small spiders that make large, sunlit webs, and there are darker more creepy spiders that hide in dark spaces and set traps. Brown recluse, black widow, wolf-spider: each one appropriately named to invoke fear, hatred and queasiness. They’re also the most deadly. They’re toxic and they know it, clap your hands. But they use their horrifying talent in their own defense or to get their own food. 

You might blame the spider for biting you, but you put your hand in its happy little hidey-hole. In all fairness, you were intruding, not the spider. The spider didn’t know you were feeling nostalgic and felt like crawling around the attic for the first time in years. It didn’t know you were going to grab that one log for a fire. In the world of “fight or flight,” the spider is a devoted and ready citizen. 

Scarier still are the beasts of the deepest, darkest wild, like Australia, where “dinner plate” and “bird-eating” spiders are the horrifying norm. Names like that are enough to make me throw my hands up in defeat and walk into the ocean. But you have to gaze in disgust and awe as a spider the size of a Chihuahua leaps up and catches a robin out of the air! They have evolved to literally take down an animal that would normally eat the spiders own (smaller and thus more pathetic, the “bird-eating” spider would smugly add) kind. They are engineered to turn the tables on another would-be predator. In a world where bird eating spiders exist, I look at JRR Tolkein’s Shebol and JK Rowling’s Aragog and think, “You know what, I could see that happening.” 

And you know what? Good for the spiders. As humans, we’ve evolved and made incredible strides to become a formidable opponent in the natural world. Why not give some credit to another species that has done the same? I’ll still keep a rolled up magazine handy, but let’s just say I’m helping our mutual species advance.