Spidery thinking

As a kid I was always terrified of spiders.

There was a triggering event. We lived out in the woods in Ontario and one day every spider in the world came after us, creeping everywhere in our direction, scuttling across the ground, crawling up the walls, darting across the windows, skittling along the floor. I suspect someone had sprayed the area to eliminate gypsy moths or something, but what I know for sure is that there were spiders of all shapes and sizes everywhere and they were horrible, hairy, long-legged, sawdust-filled sacs of yechhhhh and there was no escaping them. Even my bed was crawling with them. My father collapsed and was rushed to hospital where he spent a week recovering from anaphylactic shock in response to a spider bite. I loathed spiders from that day on, loathed them with a visceral intensity, sick with fear.

As I grew older I developed a reasoned response to fear in general. I suspect it developed during military training when I realized I was afraid to do lots of things. Afraid to jump 30 feet into Halifax Harbour, afraid to wriggle into small underground spaces, afraid to take limpet mines apart, afraid to pull decomposing corpses out of the sunken wreckage of fishing boats. As one toughened drill sergeant or petty officer after another bullied, cajoled or shamed me into doing things I never believed I could do I developed the notion that whenever I felt fear the most gratifying response was to walk directly towards whatever inspired it, and thereby overcome it. Courage, for me at least, does not mean freedom from fear. It means doing things even though I'm terrified. After I've done those things often enough the fear fades, and with it so does the need for courage.

Spiders. Never had to deal with spiders in that time.

So I grew up and learned to do lots of brave things, nearly got killed a few times but never did. I left the military because when I got home after months at sea my children didn't know who I was and I decided against living that way. We moved to Victoria, British Columbia. We bought a house, a huge old thing that had been built in about 1890. We paid $19,000 for it, more money than I had ever dreamed of. It had a huge, completely undeveloped basement holding other people's "stuff" that had been consistently gathering dust down there for 70 years.

Guess what else was down there.

I decided at some point to clean up the whole mess, and build some rooms, but I had to handle the spider thing first. Everywhere down there was dark, gloomy, dusty and covered in a rich, thick layer of cobweb. Every nook and cranny, and there was nothing down there that was not either a nook or a cranny, was alive with them. Spiders everywhere, big, dark hairy spiders. Invisible when I disturbed nothing, but at the first agitation they became visible, scuttling across their webs, falling to the floor and giving me the heebie-jeebies.

I first tried using a long-handled broom. I flailed away until it became clear that I was really pissing them off but I wasn't getting rid of them. Just displacing them which meant they were more visible, not less. Then I tried using a vacuum cleaner with a really long hose, and that was far better. I could make them pretty much vanish with a soft popping sound as they and their webs pulled free of the structural filaments and simply disappeared. I don't know for sure who invented vacuum cleaners but in my mind I built a little shrine to Saint Electrolux and paid sincere homage to her.

The job took weeks. Ever so slowly I began to feel less fear - not because there were fewer spiders but because... No, I take that back. I felt less fear because there were fewer spiders.

I never got over the heebie jeebies. Spiders still do it to me.