When the Smoke Clears

One thing I did not realize I would miss was the spiders.

Sure, many people get freaked out by spiders, and when we were in the woods, there were plenty spiders around, though none in the barracks. But the cabin has a number of spiders and these breeds are more familiar to me. I’ve been able to walk through my woods to the stream and up the hill and see the well-known web patterns. In the cabin, the spiders stick with a few choice corners and occasionally one will seek a place along the high beams, ambitious in its production of strands.

There really aren’t that many spiders around the cabin, but there are enough to be noticed. They do not bother me at all but seem to live in harmony with my comings and goings. After a week or so in one spot, they will have moved on to a new location, I might sweep up their web and the evidence of their meals. I note that I have almost no pests in the cabin. Ever. (Carpenter bees excepted). I also note that I do not spray for bugs and that I am in a heavily wooded place along a stream. Spiders are my friends in this sense.

Sitting on the porch this morning, enjoying a mild breakfast, I noted a spiderweb that seemed to hang in midair, resisting the buffets of the wind. The web was beautiful, almost perfectly symmetrical in the main eye portion, a small spider sitting proudly in the center, riding out gusts, but what was so remarkable was the web’s location. It was suspended 20 feet in the air in the middle of the small bit of back yard I have which slopes down towards the stream.

Investigating I saw the extreme diligence the spider put into the construction of the web. An extreme overachiever, this spider somehow found her way to the outer branch of a very old tree and dropped down at least 35 feet with its first strand, attaching itself to a log. Then this little creature must have climbed back up to the tree and dropped several more strands, wind carrying her to other sections of the yard. On one of her drops she must have been taken over by a particularly strong wind because she found one of the beams coming from the house and used that to add a stabilizing arm. These eight strands somehow met up to create her central target of her web, approximately a foot and a half across.

Simply amazing. It must have taken her the entire day to construct. Her thoughts, her instincts led her to a vision of something far different from all the normal places a spider of her size and breed would inhabit, leading her to create her space where no other existed, where none of her kind would have considered, but where wind would seize her flying prey and allow them to be captured in the filter she placed in their flight path.

She deserves to get fat from all her effort.

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