Where spiders roam.
by Andrew smith

If God had wanted me to eat spiders he'd have made them better tasting. Or made me a bird. Since he did neither, I can only assume that I was not meant to eat spiders. A pity, since there are so many.

The area I'm working in now is prime, grade-A, spider habitat. The forest is dense and dark, and so thick that nary a breeze disturbs the fetid air. The trees, though a century old, are spindly, and crooked and often barely three inches in diameter. They bend, criss-crossed, to the ground, crushed under the weight of their own stagnating shade. All is brown, and grey and dead beneath them, for no blade of sunlight pierces to the forest floor to make something green spring from the sleeping Earth. All is stale, still and ripe with decay. It is a place of mold, and a half-night of never ending shade.

And here the spiders build their webs. The spaces between the crowded trees provide the perfect place to set a silky snare. Geometrical orb-webs gleam bright as jewels against the perpetual gloom. But behold! These jewels are magical. They vanish and reappear again like silver ghosts in the changing light. They seem etched into the space itself. They are the very structure of the silent dusk. They hide as one stares at them, then show themselves again as you step by. They wink at you, teasing you with their mirage.

There must be millions of spiders in here. The timber stand I'm working in now is 52 acres in size. It was logged shortly after 1900. Then, nothing was done to it. As a result the understory trees, the trees that should make up the future forest, stagnated into a condition commonly called doghair. They are spindly, diseased and contorted. There are probably 2,000, or more, stems per acre in here, when something closer to 150 stems per acre would be ideal.

Anyway, that gives us around 100,000 trees in this stand. And if only every other tree has a spider web attached to it then math will have ruined my assertion about the millions of spiders. I hate it when that happens. Math-it's probably why I'm not rich.

Ok, let's be conservative and say there's 25,000 spiders in this stand. Somewhere around 500 per acre. That's still a lot. More than I ever wanted to see, anyway.

I don't even know what kind of spiders they are. They're some kind of grey, orb-web spider that is common in dense parts of the forest. I usually call them "spruce spiders", because I usually see them in spruce stands. But that's not their real name. I don't know what it is. And I don't know much about them.
They seem to catch a lot of gnat-sized creatures in their webs. I don't know what the gnat-sized creatures are either. I'm fairly ignorant about bugs. I still haven't got women figured out yet. I don't know when I'm going to have time to learn about bugs.

The bigger spiders catch full-sized horseflies in their webs. I like spiders a little better than I like horseflies. The flies feed the spiders, the spiders feed the birds, the birds feed the cats, the cats feed the coyotes, (at least most of our cats seem to end up feeding the coyotes) and the coyotes howl at the moon. Being "in harmony with nature" usually means getting eaten by something else. Only the coyote gets to sing. But what a lovely song.

And who could look at a spider's web, and claim there's no intelligence in nature? Or a beehive, or a beaver dam or a butterflies wing for that matter? Why, all of nature seems permeated with intelligence. From a pebble in a stream to the lights that fall down from the heavens, the whole universe seems to radiate intelligence. The mountains push out of the earth to express it. The wind utters what no words ever could. Meanwhile, far below, I utter what no man ever should. I cuss and swear and fight my way through the thick mats of tangled tree trunks and spider webs. Branches reach out to grope my body with stiff, deadened fingers. They lift my hat from my head, grab at my shirt and tug at the compass hanging around my neck. I fight my way around them and stumble into spider webs instead. I crash through 1,000 spider webs a day-at least. What a lot of hours of hard spider-work I have laid to waste! How many spools of finest spider-thread I have broken!

Their silky strands wrap around my ears and eyebrows, tickling me in a most irritating way. They attach themselves to the brim of my hat, and often leave a tiny guest dangling just inches from my face. They net my nose, and my glasses and my hair, and trail behind me like streamers as I walk. They tangle around my neck, as if to wrap me up for dinner. What a feast I'd be.

And with every web comes a spider. Tiny spiders drop into my open shirt collar and mash against my chest as I move. They fall into my pockets, into my hair, into my eyelashes. They tumble into my work gloves, into holes in my jeans and into my ears and nostrils.

And when I open my mouth, they tumble in there, too.

I use the "crunch and spit" technique when that happens, and it works fine. At least it works fine on the little spiders-and, thankfully, most of them are little. But the big ones, the ones with bodies the size of a sparrows egg, those ones pop when you crunch down, almost like that liquid-filled chewing gum, or a chocolate covered cherry. And boy are those things bitter! Ugh!

And that's what makes me think that God never intended for me to eat spiders. For I don't like them. Not a whit.

But then, I don't like peas, either.