Grieving with spiders
(Originally posted elsewhere on 15 May 2020.)
At the time, hadn’t really ever known what it was like to live in one place for longer than a few years. People came and went. You lived somewhere, and then you were lost. Things are transient and passing. Slowly I attracted friends while trying to show them the colorful millipedes that lived along the edges of the “empty” lot, where native grasses extended beyond the lawns and playground architecture. I was nine-and-a-half years old. I don’t know if I was ready to watch things die.
“Weird Girl Bug Club” is not a make-believe internet joke. Some of the soil was sandy, some black and wet, and some rich with decaying leaf litter and mycorrhizal fungi. It was an amalgamation. Was this the remnant of the shortgrass prairie? Was it influenced by naturally-occurring sagebrush steppe in the area? Instead, was it actually full of non-native pasture plants, left over from cattle ranges or farms, which only appeared to be “native” in comparison to the obviously non-native green crab grasses of the adjacent school lawn? Unclear. Maybe all of the partially damaged environments were blending together. The empty lot was Frankenstein’s monster. (At the time, I was already in love with both Gothic monsters and unnecessary over-the-top accessorizing, so I had a keychain, hitched to a belt loop, from which dangled a cheap plastic model of Frankenstein’s mosnter and the Hollywood version of the Wolfman.) Along the edges of that grassy expanse? Oak, alder, maple, even aspen. I knew bugs but didn’t know trees, so which of those were native? I didn’t know.
The crew: Like nine girls and a boy, I guess. (To which essentialized gender assignment would I, in that setting, be sequestered?) During recess: Bug Time. Late March: Leopard frogs in the flooded lawn. April: Toads along the base of the oak. May: Three species of gartersnake, attracted to tiny little patches of differing microhabitat. Wandering gartersnakes preferred the leaf litter at dry spots beneath the trees. Red-sided gartersnakes preferred the vernal pools, always half-submerged in water. Plains gartersnakes seemed better able to tolerate the concrete-lined irrigation canal and the fertilizer-poisoned soils of the flooded lawns. I saw a bullsnake in the lot once. A schoolteacher was watching me, she yelled at me, told me to get away immediately, speaking bullshit about bullsnakes “are dangerous.” I picked up the snake, brought it to the edge of the woodland, skipped the beginning of after-lunch classes.
And everywhere in this lot, a multitude of spiders. A lot of jumping spiders, some massive, some very colorful. I folded some pages of blank white “printer paper” in half and drew my own “Jumping Spider field guide” and made photocopies. I used colored pencils, tried to draw each kind of jumping spiders. I had no idea which species most of them were. I think it was my second stupid homemade field guide after a “snakes of the Rocky Mountains” booklet.
Why jumping spiders? That year, settling into a residential neighborhood nearby, I went into the shed for the first time in a while, off in a shaded corner of the shared yard. No one ever really went there. Don’t know why. I opened the door:
Scene from a nightmare. Indeed, in years since, I did have dreams about that shed. (Not really nightmares, but more like auspicious and ominous dreams, you know?) It was late summer, but the shed was dark, almost unbelievably shaded from the sun. Like it was enchanted, meant to be dark. I of course loved spiders but I wasn’t prepared for this.
It was like a curiosity cabinet, like a museum. Like some animate sentient curator had purposefully decided to showcase as many different kinds of spiders as possible, to showcase the largest spiders possible. There were black widows, but I loved them, and understood them to be pleasant and unthreatening. But the size of these wolf spiders? Intimidating. There were orb-weavers, too. Big brown spiders retreated from the light, across the floorboards, they were physically reminiscent of tarantulas. (Maybe they were related to tarantulas, which were not unknown in the region.) But what shocked me most were the jumping spiders. The jumping spiders drew your attention most. I didn’t know they could be that large. And their dazzling colors? Bright red juxtaposed with black banding. Bright orange with black spots. Bright blues, glittering purples. Your eye was drawn simultaneously in every direction. Spiders in every corner.
It was a treasure chest, some of the jumping spiders almost-literally sparkling with iridescence.
--
Later. I was about 11 years old, different region, different landscape, and the city was gentrifying my neighborhood. There was an “empty lot” that was actually more like remnant prairie. Prickly-pear, rattlesnakes, toads, meadowlarks. It was being turned into cookie-cutter prefashioned homes.
The most ubiquitous species? Ground squirrels. “Whistle-pigs.” People would bludgeon them, fire BB guns from lawn chairs, laughing as they dropped explosive fireworks into the burrows. Casual violence. Like a sport. Adults encouraged children to take lives as if it were akin to skipping stones or playing board games.
The whistle-pigs slowly dwindled. The local human residents, and their children, were slowly doing the work of the developers: Killing. Paving the way.
As the rodents died, every single abandoned ground squirrel burrow had a web stretched across the entrance. All of them: Black widows.
My impression of black widows had always been: Graceful. Dignified.
When the bulldozers came, I tried to save them. A parental figure was passively supportive. My bedroom was adorned with a few glass mason jars. Black widows in each.
One day, dozens of tiny pale black widow babies were pouring out of the lid of one of the jars, a mass of fragile spider bodies pulsating on the desk. And I realized the spiders should probably be set loose. And they were, in the backyard. I don’t know how many of them lived, or for how long.
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The next spring, a community center a couple of blocks away, on the edge of town, was trying to drain a “bog” next to their building. The last place in the neighborhood where you heard the frogs and toads singing. It was a vernal pool that regularly collected water in the spring. Reliably, every year. Gartersnakes used the pool. But the real star, the real center of attention: the chorus frogs. I spoke with the people who owned the building. Later, I tried arguing with one of the owners or managers or whatever, the week that the contractors and the heavy equipment showed up. They laughed at me and threatened to call the cops. I kicked a rock at their building and took a cattail as a keepsake.
On one of the last days that the vernal pool existed, I was riding my bike over there. I found a gartersnake, dead, flattened on the road. One of my parents died later that year.
Before the apocalypse at the vernal pool, when I felt empty, in the evening, I would get on a bike, and go there. I’d sit in the mud in the reeds on the edge of the pool and watch the chorus frog tadpoles swimming. Dragonflies disappeared as the evening darkened. On some very special days, late in the spring, when the water was almost gone and the days were longer, you might be lucky enough to see a spadefoot toad. The insects and frogs and snakes were fleeting, they had habits and picky preferences. But there was one constant presence, always there, until the redevelopment, even after the frogs sang for the last time.
Fisher spiders, everywhere, navigating through the reeds, walking on the water. Always the spiders, until the end.
