Spiders Are Sometimes Hilarious

Spiders and I have a truce: they don't bother me, I release them outside instead of squishing.  I'm not particularly fond of the (sometimes) little brutes; the one thing I'm afraid of in regards to moving to Oklahoma, above all other dangers of tornadoes, drought, and baffling laws, is that I'll be in proximity to fiddleback spiders.  Also known as brown recluse, these mini terrors live in dark, dry places (like my grandmother's garage), and have a highly venomous bite.  I've never been bitten by one, and I hope to keep it that way.

But whenever I start to think too much about how creepy spiders can be, I try to also remember that, sometimes, they are awesome.


The Jumping Spider of Buena Park

I'm an only child, and spent my early childhood in an area that wasn't known for niceness.  Since I wasn't allowed to play with many kids from the neighborhood, and both my parents came from a long line of animal lovers, my playmates tended to be furry (or scaly, or feathered...).  Enter Bottle-Bright.

Bottle-Bright was a jumping spider who lived on our windowsill for a week.  I named him for his eyes.

Hi!

Jumping spiders are adorable.  They're also harmless and eat flies.  The only awful thing about them is that yes, they jump.  As I got older, I grew nervous around jumping spiders, but for the week Bottle-Bright graced me with his presence, I had a new friend.

My First Tarantula

I mentioned earlier that I'm afraid of fiddleback spiders in Oklahoma, and that much is true.  But Oklahoma has a wide variety of spiders to be afraid of.  The brown tarantula, for example.

This dude.

Tarantulas are more harmful than jumping spiders, but they're still fairly docile creatures that can be handled (if you're careful and not a jerk about it).  They also migrate in herds, which is something I'll touch on in a moment.  For now, I wanna talk about the first time I heard my father's middle name.

Like most people, I have two grandmothers.  My mom's mom lives in Tulsa, which is about twice the size of Anchorage, while my dad's mom lived (until a few years ago) in an incorporated township in rural Oklahoma, called Enterprise.  For those of you not in the know, and incorporated township is a place that has people, but only, like, five.  It's barely even a wide spot in the road.  To get to Grandma Dowdy's house, you first drove down this long back road that was mostly overhung with trees.  Then you drove up a long, winding driveway to the faded yellow house with white trim, within which one could find four VHS tapes (Forrest Gump, Driving Miss Daisy, and a few Looney Tunes collections), an old piano, and my grandmother.  In this story I was either five or six; my grandfather had already passed away, but I was still young enough for this memory to be largely hazy.

My grandmother had one rule when it came to playing outside: don't go near the big boulders along the side of the house.  There were copperheads under there.  Since all the best lizards could be found in her backyard flower beds anyway, I happily complied.  So it came to pass that one day, I was lifting rocks and looking for blue-tailed skinks --

This adorable critter

-- when I noticed a giant, fuzzy hand sunning itself on the cement patio.  I screamed, more in surprise than anything, and my grandmother came running.  She, too, saw the tarantula and gave a scream of her own, shaking her hands and hopping from foot-to-foot: the traditional Southern Lady in Distress dance.  Within moments my dad joined us, probably expecting a mountain lion (I had also been warned about roaming the woods at night).  The second he spotted the arachnid he sighed, rolled his eyes, and went to fetch a small branch to scoop up the thing.  

"Robert Lee Dowdy, you put that thing down!  I mean it!  Right this instant!  Just kill it!  It's only gonna come back, kill it!" The litany lasted until my dad reached the edge of the yard, where the trees started, and he set the now-deaf (if it had had ears) spider in the undergrowth.  I had never seen my grandmother be anything but calm and collected, even when I insisted on bringing all sorts of reptiles into her home, and had started laughing almost the instant my dad came out.  Like most daughters, I was completely secure in my belief that my dad could handle any threat nature could throw at me.  Unlike most daughters, I had also seen mine decapitate a rattlesnake, douse an actively-swarming and stinging (me) wasp nest in gasoline, and now remove a giant spider from my immediate vicinity--so I had a little more evidence to back up my claim.

I later asked him why Grandma had called him "Lee," and he told me it was his middle name.  Then we discussed middle names for a while (my parents have called me by mine since birth) and the incident was put behind us.  Later, I recounted this story to my mother, and she told me the following one.

My Grandfather, The Troll

Like I said before, my mom's mom lives in Tulsa.  Specifically, the house my mother grew up in, from the age of eight on up.  I spent more time there than anywhere else (aside from my own home) when when I was growing up, and I couldn't begin to picture the gated community across the street having once been a field.  But I took her word for it that Tulsa used to be moderately wilder than it is now.  When I told her about the tarantula at Grandma Dowdy's house, she told me about her father, and his reaction to tarantulas.

See, when my mom and uncle were small, my grandparents were great believers in family vacations: road trips, camping trips, you name it.  On one such camping trip, the tarantulas were migrating.  The way my mom told it when I was little, my grandfather waited until nighttime, collected a box of the things, and then brought it back and shook it at my mom, causing the spiders to jump out at her.  She's hated spiders ever since.

As much as I love the image of my grandfather bringing a box of tarantulas to his young daughter with the sole purpose of frightening the bejeezus out of her, I've since uncovered evidence to the contrary.  I think.  They could very well be different incidents--but really, how many times did this man collect giant spiders?

Last year, my Grandma Bennett and I went through all of her old photographs.  We found some dating back almost 100 years, up through the generations, ending with my cousins and me.  The vast majority of these photos are from the 1950s and 60s, because my grandfather was a prolific photographer.  He died in 1975 of lymphoma, so the pictures tapered off after that.  However, two of them caught my eye.  In one, my uncle (looking scrawny and adolescent) was looking at the camera while a tarantula made its way up his arm.  In another, my grandfather was holding the same spider, but his gaze was focused on it instead of the camera.  My grandmother said that he'd found two tarantulas in the woods and had brought them home to show the kids.  My mom had refused to touch them, but my grandfather had fished out the mellower one and snapped a few pictures.

I kept those photos, and they're currently in a stack awaiting the tedious process of getting scanned and stored digitally, but if/when I see them again I'll include them on here.

And this brings me to...

My Last Tarantula

I was between the ages of ten and twelve, and we were once again visiting Oklahoma.  We'd moved to Alaska by this time, and since there were no exotic pet stores up here back in the 90s, my mom took me to one down there.  I liked looking at all the different creatures I couldn't have.  This particular store held mostly reptiles and amphibians, but it had some exotic insects as well.  This included a rose-haired tarantula.  A bald rose-haired tarantula.

Because their bite isn't a big deterrent, tarantulas have a back-up defense in case they get attacked.  They rub their legs against their abdomen, shooting the hairs into their would-be predator's eyes, which is irritating as all get-out and can sometimes give the spider a chance to flee.  I knew this, but most young girls don't make a habit of knowing about spider defenses, so when a clerk saw me staring he came over to explain.  I stopped him halfway-through his unintentionally condescending description of the flying butt-fur, and he relaxed, simplifying his story.

"Yeah, someone dropped her cage and she freaked out so bad she shot off every single hair.  I don't know if you can scare a spider to death, but we're trying to be extra-soothing when we have to handler her and stuff so she doesn't stress out any more."

My cat once jumped off the roof of our garage, and every hair on her body stood on end for a good half hour.  I sympathized with the spider.

I also laughed because, hey, bald tarantula!