Spiders and essays

When I was very young, staying at my grandparents house meant staying in their bed with them. This house never had a guest room clear enough of clutter to permit guests, and back then my uncle was still staying most nights in his room. I remember their room as mostly dark, packed with clothes and books. When I was older, I’d sleep in my uncle’s room, while he stayed at a girlfriend’s or camped. He had a single sized mattress on the floor, the walls were so permeated with pot smoke that it smelled like the inside of a bong, and it was also full of clothes and books and junk. I liked staying in his room because he (like my father’s younger brother) had a lot of comic books I could read, though his were mostly Fabulously Furry Freak Brothers, rather than Marvel and DC. I didn’t understand much of what I read in the Freak Bros comics until much later.

When I woke up each morning, I’d have to stay very quiet in bed, because my grandmother’s ancient Siamese, “Momma cat” would start yowling for canned food the moment someone stirred. I couldn’t feed her, as my grandmother’s kitchen was crammed to the gills with stuff plus rats, and my grandfather would be grouchy if the cat woke him up first, so I’d try to remain as still as possible, carefully turning the pages of whatever paperback I was reading until someone else got up.

One morning, I reached over for my book, slow and stealthy-like, and as I did, I registered movement out of the corner of my eye. Crawling up the wall, from the place where the pillow leaned against it, was the largest spider I’d ever seen in my life, excepting a tarantula and its owner, who had both visited my class once.

I remember being fascinated and terrified. But I don’t now know if I was more afraid of what would happen if I shrieked or jumped out of the bed, or of the spider itself. I remember getting out of bed as quietly as I could, while keeping one eye on the spider, and one eye darting around the room, which suddenly felt full of potential spiders. If I told my grandmother about it, she would not have appreciated or soothed any of my anxiety. This is the country, and spiders live here, she would have said in one way or another.

So my grandmother’s house is now mine, and while the kitchen is much less of a mess (and rat-free), and the rooms are no longer packed floor to ceiling with literal decades worth of flotsam and jetsam and the occasional dead cat, there are still sometimes spiders of unusual size to be found here.

Our biggest spiders are technically known as Eratigena atrica, or the aptly named Giant House Spider (or GHS for short), and they are native to Central and Northern Europe, but have been transported to the Pacific NW in all the ways that things from there have ended up here historically. Normally, the males (the smaller of the sexes) can be found roaming around homes looking for females in late summer/early fall. The females generally stay somewhere dark and out of the way for most of their lives, catching prey in messy webs. The females can have leg spans as large as 4″ across (this is how tall an iPhone 5 screen is, for those of you who prefer comparative sizes). David Sedaris once fell in love with one (back when they were still known as Tegenaria duellica), which says more about his idiosyncrasies than their general lovability.

The GHS has been clocked as the fastest spider in the world. It prefers to escape, rather than bite, but it can and will if trapped. The bite can’t disable a person or make one sick, but it would hurt and the agatoxins in their venom would probably leave a painful welt.

Even though it is early summer, we had a couple of hot days, and it seemed to rouse the spider males from their slumber for a bit. I’ve recently found two on the floor and one in the kitchen window. I can’t abide them inside, and so the rule is that if I see them and can reach them, they are dispatched.

But what they hell do these monsters have to do with essays?

Well, I’ve been thinking a lot about spiders. I’ve done some research into these particular spiders. I have anecdotes, and even literary references… I even recently told a story about being torn between trying to photograph one running, and needing to kill it before it hid, and the folks I told the story to said, “You need to write about this!” But there’s no essay yet. I’m still missing the so what factor that a good essay needs.

I can have facts and scenes and even a terrifying main character, but without that one other thing, to propel the facts and scenes toward some realization or idea that offers a reader a sense of progress, if not closure, it doesn’t matter.

This is the point in a topic or idea when I start asking myself why these spiders (or my fear of them) matters. I might only get at an idea of the answer by way of a metaphor or analogy, and so begin drafting a couple of braids to see if that works. Or the answer may be related to a phenomenon larger than me (invasive species? how anxiety is an example of an animal brain on high alert for dangers no longer present in the environment? maybe even the importance of monsters?) in which case I might need to interview an expert or do some more research. I’ve also been thinking a lot about the snakes out here, and so maybe these thoughts are about my own relationship to this landscape/how that relationship has changed as I’ve grown up. This last one is the one I’ve been rolling around in my brain the most, the way you might rub on a stone in your pocket or poke your tongue into the socket left when a tooth has been pulled. I roll the spiders and snakes around in my brain with all of the other stuff in the hopes that something will catch/latch on, or some other memory or thought will pop up.

And it is important for me to remember that this poking at an idea is just as much a part of the writing process as actually sitting down and pounding out words. I forget that, and since I haven’t been drafting long pages, it can feel like I am failing at being a writer. I’ve been feeling that way a lot lately, which is maybe part of what the spiders are trying to tell me, too, that it’s all writing. Writing and spiders and snakes.