We’ve recently been invaded by spiders. I’m told that this is normal for this time of year in Hilo, but having either lived in an apartment well above ground level or having been completely oblivious to my surroundings, I’ve never noticed. When I walk down to the mailbox to get the paper in the morning, I have to hold my hand in front of my face to avoid getting a mug full of sticky web. I hope my neighbours don’t think I’m daft.
I suppose I haven’t had much experience in the arachnid set before, but I hadn’t realized just how sticky spider webs can be. They’re not like the movies where people walk into them, wave their hands around a bit going “ack ack ack” and presto, they’re free of web. No, I walk into them, stumble backwards waving my hands around like I’ve been struck by lightning going “ack ack ack” and presto, there’s a spider living in my hair. Fifteen minutes later I’m still picking bits of web off my ears, my arms, and my neck.
And these aren’t regular spiders either. Most spiders, as far as I’m aware, have eight legs and nasty-looking eyes and pincers. These spiders just look like little blobs. I don’t think they have legs. I don’t know how they get around, other than perhaps by hitchiking with people when their webs get tangled up in some poor human’s head.
Sure, we’ve got regular spiders. The ones we have are the take-no-prisoner ones. They’ve got legs aplenty. They’re the tough ones that put a nice white stripe of solid silk down the middle of their webs so birds won’t fly into them. The spiders aren’t worried about their webs getting ruined by birds, they just know that they’re so badass that they could actually take down a bird if it flew into their web, but they’re not greedy. They know they don’t need a whole bird to feed off of, so they tell the birds to just stay away. Smart, that.
But these blob spiders, they don’t have any sense at all. There’s one section of our back yard above our shed where there are twenty-six webs all strewn about a tiny volume. I went out and counted. The spiders in the middle, don’t they realize that they’re never going to catch anything? It reminds me of my rugby-playing days in high school. See, I never wanted the ball because I knew I’d get clobbered, so whenever my team had possession I’d run to the other side of the field. Far wide wing out, I think the position’s called. I always made sure there were plenty of teammates between me and the ball, and I never got clobbered. Sure, I only got a C+ that term, but that’s beside the point.
Now that, that’s smart. But when you’re a spider, you don’t want anything between your web and the bugs flying around. If you don’t get the bugs, you don’t eat. And generally, as far as I know, if you don’t eat you don’t live very long, which doesn’t seem all that good to me. But then again, a few spiders not living as long as possible does seem very good to me, if it means I can stop wearing a web facemask each morning.
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