Beam Up the Spider, Scotty

It’s winter: snow, wind, Christmas, fireplace, the whole 9 yards. Which means that it is the time of year in the Pacific Northwest when you wrap yourself in a nice quilt near the fireplace, turn on a direct light, and read an engrossing book. So picturesque: the fireplace glow and crackle, the quilt so cozy, the light illuminating me on the couch near the fire with the book, while the rest of the room is only lightly lighted. And then, in my peripheral vision, I see a mouse run across the cream-colored carpet and under the chair. Except it is not a mouse. It is never a mouse. It is, instead, a spider as big as a mouse. I don’t know where they go in the summer, spring, and fall. I know them only in winter. Maybe in the other seasons they are just growing in order to achieve their full size in the dead of winter.

Seeing the spider reminded me to find out something about arachnology and arachnophobia, relevant information up here where there are more easily visible spiders than anywhere I’ve otherwise lived. Not more than anywhere, of course, just more than in my previous experience. I’m not afraid of spiders; never have been and the fact that my older daughter at one time was managing the American Tarantula Society would have required me to get over it if I had, I guess, but it surprises me that so many people are afraid of them, given that spiders, even tarantulas, are so extremely small. Even one the size of a mouse (in overall outline) has the mass of a butterfly. So what’s that fear about? At this site, they say that fear of spiders is much more common in European countries and is somehow associated, after the 10th century, with disease. But the authors also say it is a culturally transmitted fear.

I used to think it was some kind of learned fear, but I have seen enough families (including my own) where one kid is terrified and the next one indifferent to suspect that it is genetic. The other day, Yahoo News was claiming that there was a gene for recognizing Brittney Spears (or someone like that), so why not a gene for being afraid of spiders? (It's surely easier to argue some kind of evolutionary potential for the latter than the former.) If it’s genetically based among those with a European ancestry, then it would make sense that people with the gene are largely unreachable with respect to discussing this fear on a rational basis.

My oldest granddaughter has the (alleged) gene and she can be (and has been) reasonable enough not to faint or nearly faint upon seeing them, but she is absolutely unwilling to touch them. When one shows up in the bathtub, one of us un-spider-gened people must rescue her. I myself don’t much like picking them up, but that is because in the process of chasing them around the tub, I’m afraid I’m going to kill them with an awkward grab. They can’t get out of the sink or tub and they really want to but they are not anxious to have a big human hand doing the heavy lifting for perfectly good reasons. But that means that lifting them out is no easy task.

We get a lot of them in the tubs and sinks. And another thing I want to know is how they get there. I sort of vaguely thought they might come up through the drains, but Ed says that makes no sense since they’d have to swim their way up. So, what’s the alternative? They suddenly fall off the ceiling? They walk up the outside of the tub but can’t walk back up from the inside? I don’t know; they are really mysterious creatures. Where’s the Tarantula Society (or just the Really Big Black Spider Organization) when you need them?