Coyote's Den

When I was younger, I was afraid of, among other things, spiders. Actually, I was afraid of everything, but spiders were on the list.

Normally, when you have a deep-seated fear of something, traumatic exposure to the object of fear makes it worse. Perversely, I believe there are times when you are confronted with the object of your fear in such an over-the-top fashion that you actually explode the brain cells in charge of making you phobic, and they die screaming, so that you are no longer afraid of that particular thing.

Here is how I got over my fear of spiders.

Now... in my defense, I've been bitten by so many spiders that you can probably make antivenin out of my blood. Hell... I've been bitten by so many damn spiders that I can probably spit flesh-dissolving poison. I don't know why. I'm just lucky, I suppose. They fall down my shirt, crawl into my pants leg. I stick my feet under counters and into hidden webs. If I fall out of a tree, I'll land in a spider web. If I am walking down a forest path, behind ten other, taller people, I will walk face-first into some venomous little web-swinger. They say that spiders rarely bite, even when offended. All one has to do is touch me, and it instantly sinks it's teeny fangs in to the hilt, and if they can't break the skin (most spiders cannot), I swear they actually gnaw on me, while cursing angrily.

I grew up in South Florida, which I swear has more interesting spiders than anywhere else in North America. The only place you can go for more interesting and terrifying spiders is Australia, where all critters are apparently measured in how many hundreds of times more deadly they are than a King Cobra. Is that a unit of measurement? King Cobra toxicity? Is that like those animals, like Piranha, fire-ants, army ants and carrion beetles - who are measured according to how quickly they can skeletonize a cow?

So... one night, when I was maybe sixteen or so (I'd just hit puberty - my life sucks sometimes, but my late puberty is another tale of woe), I woke up at about three or four in the morning. I don't even know why I woke up. I just suddenly opened my eyes in the darkened room, facing the ceiling, for no particular reason. It was like I sensed something. I didn't have my glasses on, so everything was blurry, but there was a dot in the middle of my field of vision that seemed to be getting larger.

I thought, despite the fact that I usually came to full wakefulness instantly, that perhaps I was having some weird sleep-related visual artifact or something. So I just laid there for a moment, watching this dot swell to encompass most of my field of vision. Suddenly, the dot was shaped just like an enormous spider! Wasn't that intere....

PLOP!

The "dot" was a huge hairy wolf spider, almost the size of a tarantula, that had been precariously navigating upside-down across my ceiling. I didn't even know wolf spiders could do that!

The thing hit me right between the eyes, with an audible and stinging smack.

Needless to say, I did what any sixteen-year-old red-blooded American male would do. I screamed like a girl, and shot out of bed clawing at my face, dancing on my tippy-toes in terror.

You see, the best part was that the spider was a lady spider - covered with about fifty zillion baby spiders, which were now running all over my face, in my hair, and in my bed.

So, I hopped around like my ass was on fire for a moment, and then found myself looking for the enormous momma spider. That's the last thing I wanted to lose track of at that moment, I assure you - if I hadn't been able to find the damn thing I'd probably have slept on the kitchen table for a week - except that would have put me at the mercy of the palmetto bugs. In case you don't know what a palmetto bug is, it's a cockroach about the size of a Toyota station wagon.

Well, the mother spider was not hard to find. She was running around my bed, like she was crazy. I leaned in closer, amazed, as I realized that she was running around picking up baby spiders. When she'd get close, they actually seemed to run back up onto her, very quickly. It was hard to see what was going on, without my glasses, but it was almost as if, wherever she passed, the baby spiders just disappeared and reappeared on her back.

After a moment, both the mother spider and I were sitting still, staring at one another. The poor thing was just sitting there, covered with whatever little babies weren't lost or smooshed, and I swear she looked like she was panting like an athlete who'd just run the five hundred meter.

It was then that I noticed that a couple of her legs were broken off in the struggle.

Well... now I felt like a heel. Poor critter falls off a ceiling, lands on a screaming nutjob, loses a hefty percentage of offspring and legs, that's just gotta suck.

So... I carefully got a big piece of paper and coaxed her onto it. I was being ultra-careful, partly because I didn't want to hurt it any more than it already was, and partly because those kinds of big hairy spiders jump, and the last thing I wanted was a repeat performance of the face-full-of-spiders trick. I managed to get her outside into the yard, where she promptly disappeared into the grass.

I went upstairs and took a shower, to clean spider legs and goo and smooshed baby spider bits out of my hair (ahhh... the joys of long cascading hair that goes down to the middle of your back - ask me why I shave my head nowadays).

After that, I went back to sleep. I contemplated how that had to be possibly the worst experience an arachnophobe could have, and yet, by the end of it, I was so busy worrying about the mother spider that I forgot to hyperventilate and shiver in terror.

After that, spiders really just didn't freak me out any more. It's not that I'll pick them up, or give them hugs or anything. They still bite me on contact. But I kinda got over the phobia at that point.

In a way, humorous as this story is, I sort of feel like I grew as a person because of the incident. Again, at the expense of the creature involved, but, life's touch when you're a hairy, ceiling-crawling, urban mother of four thousand.