Arachnophobia

I had a truly frightening experience yesterday that I just had to write about. I’m still creeped out today, and I want you to get just as creeped as I am.

I was with my buddies Luke and Jonathan, brothers, at their parents’ house in Nicholasville last night around 8 p.m. We were sitting around a fire pit in their backyard that was about three feet in diameter and made of large rocks arranged in a circle on the ground with benches around it. We were sitting there drinking iced coffee when Luke spit a small ice cube that landed on a spider web on one of the rocks. Seeing the ice get caught in the web, as boys do, I tried to match Luke’s shot with a few ice cubes, one of which finally hopped up and got caught in another web right next to it. We went back to chatting, when I saw that a spider had crawled out onto the second web, thinking that it had caught some food. As soon as I looked at it, I recognized it as a black widow — it was about quarter-sized, black and bulbous, with the unmistakable red hourglass shape on its back.

That image got us all a little unnerved (not scared…you know…concerned…) — we know that they are extremely poisonous and kill about one in every 100 people that they bite — so we decided to kill it, and Jonathan got the bright idea to use aerosol and a match, so he went inside to get those items. While we were waiting for him, the spider crawled back under the rock and out of sight. Jonathan got back outside, and Luke and I flipped over one of the rocks to see if we could find her (I did some research — it was a her), but instead we saw a smaller male under that rock, which Jonathan torched with his new toy. We flipped over the rock next to it, found the female, and killed her. At this point, we’re feeling pretty good about ourselves for our Rambo-like strategies against these little things.

Well we had just killed a male and a female black widow, and I know a little about the birds and the bees, so we flip the next rock. Lo and behold, there are two baby black widows under there (this is starting to make me a little jittery just thinking about it). Under the next rock, another male. Jonathan and Luke’s dad came outside to scold us for taking his fire pit apart, and as soon as he saw the situation, he grabbed a shovel and starting flipping rocks quicker than any of us.

And we were off, flipping rocks and torching or squishing spiders. We found eggs that had hatched, some that hadn’t. We found two females carrying sacs on their backs as they ran away from us. At some point in our battle, we realized that there were brown recluses living in that same pit, so we started going after them, too (a poisonous spider convention, Luke called it). The four of us — all in flip-flops — danced around that pit for a half hour, jumping whenever we saw anything move. In all, we killed around 30 spiders and flipped over every rock, effectively destroying the fire pit. Jonathan gathered some brush and sticks and lit what was left of the pit on fire, and we stood there, admiring our handywork and shaking our our pant legs, scared that some had crawled up there in an effort to escape.

I helped another friend’s dad kill a 6-foot rat snake in their backyard a few weeks ago, and I learned that I’m not that afraid of snakes. I think, however, that the spiders may have won out this time. The fact that there were so many of them, and they are extremely poisonous, and you can’t really see them in the grass, that just gives me the creeps.

I snapped a couple pictures with my phone of our skirmish with the eight-legged monsters. They’re not great quality, but you get the idea:

Here’s how the flamethrower worked:

And here are a couple blurry pictures of the spiders:

And here’s a theatrical reenactment of the situation. It’s a little hokey, but this shows EXACTLY how it went.