Mountain Girl

Very Scary Bugs Part 1

Very Scary Bugs Part 2


I will never be that gal on Fear Factor. You know, the one laying in the big tank filled with tarantulas. Or cockroaches. Or fill in the blank with whatever skeevy, thing that makes your skin crawl. When it comes to bugs, I’m a little bit of a weenie. Okay, make that a really big weenie. But I know this about myself. And I can live with that. So long as the bugs keep their distance.

No doubt my extreme aversion to critters with more than four legs comes from growing up in Hollywood, Florida, where the roaches eat Raid with impunity, know how to fly and grow to be the size of small house pets. A childhood friend’s brother actually kept one in a fish bowl on the floor of the bedroom they shared, which grossed me out to no end. Which is probably why I didn’t play at their house that often. Once, having lunch with my mom, I watched, awestruck, as an enormous roach defiantly marched -- in broad daylight! -- across the kitchen floor and into the den before my equally stunned mother came to her senses and squashed it with the Greater Miami Yellow Pages.

As a small child even seeing a roach could keep me up nights. I didn’t sleep for weeks after spotting one hanging out in the garage above the doorway to the house. I willed myself to stay awake in my girlie pink bedroom, reading The Wizard of Oz well into the wee hours, convinced that the moment I turned out the lights, swarms of roaches would attack me under the covers. (If you’ve ever wondered what keeps 8-year-old girls up, this is it.) Concerned about the deepening circles under my eyes, to get me to go to sleep, my mom assured me that roaches never crawl into beds because they don’t want to get smothered in the sheets. I clung to that story until well into my 30s. That is, until I repeated this “fact” to my mom, and she gave me such a withering you’ve-got-to-be-kidding-me look, that I realized, like Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny, this fairytale had bitten the dust too.

Of course, armed with Raid, hefty phone books and large quantities of paper towels, I’ve come to be able to dispatch my share of really unpleasant bugs when necessity absolutely required. But I’ve never quite gotten over the Ick Factor. And now that I live in the Mojave Desert, where there are far creepier crawly things than flying roaches, well, that’s a bit of a problem. I realize this is a bit like swimming in the ocean, then complaining about sharks. But, truly, nothing prepared me for what I’ve come to call the VSBs -- Very Scary Bugs -- living with us in the Bunker.

I’ve come home late at night to find three giant webs -- one under each bedroom window -- shimmering in the moonlight. I admit, they are beautiful, spun works of buggy art that are both wonderful and terrible to behold. Because, in the center of each was a very large black widow spider. In the mornings, the spiders would be gone, but every evening, they’d be back, horrible sentinels posted just outside my windows. Of course, I’m hard-pressed to complain -- much, anyway -- about spiders outside the house. But inside, well, that’s different.

I’ve nearly stepped on a black widow while getting into the shower. I’ve found inches-long centipedes hanging out in the dining room. I’ve stumbled into the bathroom at 3 a.m., and perched on the toilet, sleepily glanced down, only to be jolted awake upon realizing that I’d narrowly missed treading on a scorpion by mere millimeters. I’ve gone to put dishes in the sink and found it occupied by what looked to be a cross between a centipede and a scorpion. The important point, here, is that it didn’t resemble any insect I’d ever encountered. I wondered if all that nuclear testing at the Nevada Test Site had yielded some new breed of creepy-crawly.

“STEWART!!! WHAT IS THIS??? I’VE NEVER SEEN THIS BUG BEFORE!!!”

And Stewart would matter-of-factly stroll into the kitchen and ID it as a vinegarune. “So named,” he informed me in his Wow! Isn’t this cool? scientist’s tone, “because when they sting you, you taste vinegar.” Great, a venomous bug that reminds you of a douche.

I’ve also discovered mysterious piles of bugs that look like sesame seeds, all up and down the hallways. They’re dead, but still. Stewart, who knows every critter out here, hasn’t a clue what they are, and well . . . just what are they? And why do we keep finding piles of dead ones around the baseboards?!?! Of course, Stewart just smiles at me philosophically. “Would you rather find piles of live ones?” he asks while vacuuming them up. Which is really not the point.

My Vegas friends just laugh at me. When I relayed the Black Widow In The Bathroom tale to my friend Scott, an editor at Las Vegas Life, he blew it off. “That’s nothing!” he said dismissively, waving off my fears of dying a horrible death from a spider bite. Then he one-upped me with a story about how his three-year-old was digging around in a cabinet for a video and came up with a gossamer-thin strand of web, from which was dangling a none-too-pleased black widow.

So how lame am I? A three-year-old thinks they’re cool and I run shrieking.

But even black widows are nothing compared to the sun spiders. Stewart assures me that a) they’re not actually spiders, they’re in the scorpion family, which doesn’t really make me feel any better about them b) they’re harmless and c) that they eat other even more disgusting bugs. I suppose I should welcome their arrival. But understand, these are not cute Charlotte’s Web spiders. Oh nooooooo. These things have heft . . . and hair. They are the Saint Bernards of arachnids. They are so monstrously large you could slip a leash on ‘em and take ‘em for a walk. I’ve even caught them staking out the cats’ food. Some days, living here really is like living on the set of Eight-Legged Freaks.

Naturally these big beasties only come out when Stewart is out of town. Somehow they just know when I’m all by my lonesome. And I’m certain they can smell fear.

I found one, trapped in the sink one morning. At first, I tried to ignore it. But even from my office down the hall, I could hear it trying to claw its way out, unable to get any traction on the stainless. Oh God, I couldn’t leave it there. Stewart wasn’t coming home for days. I needed to use the sink. And I couldn’t take the scratch-scratch-scratching any more. It was like something from Poe. ‘Twas the spider, never more.

But what to do? What to do? I couldn’t kill it. Not out of any lingering Charlotte’s Web- it’s bad-luck-to-kill-spiders guilt. But because I’d discovered earlier that spraying them with Raid did nothing but piss them off. And the thought of cleaning up big spider squish was just too nauseating to contemplate. Then I thought of the fly swatter. If I could coax the beastie onto the swatter, I could carry it outside where it could roam free, enjoying the rest of its big, hairy spider life. Away from me.

So, I barricaded the cats in the bedroom and opened the kitchen door to the backyard. The door was just a few steps from the sink. I took a deep breath, and lowering the fly swatter into the sink, like a rope from a chopper to a drowning man, invited the spider to step on and be rescued. The spider stepped up and then . . . Whoa!!!

I hadn’t counted on how fast the beastie could move. Eight is a lot of legs and when they all got moving, this beastie hauled ass. Whatever thought I had of it sitting demurely on the swatter while I airlifted it to freedom, evaporated as it raced up the handle at me. I shrieked. And panicked. Then naturally dumped the spider on the floor. Fortunately, I dropped it right in front of the open kitchen door. I had one shot. Before it could scuttle out of sight, I swung the swatter, and in my best Tiger Woods move, putted it swiftly out the door, slamming it shut before the beastie did an about-face and charged me again.

Gone! Phew!

I truly hoped that that would be my last close encounter with sun spiders. But as you know from numerous horror movies and Fatal Attraction, the villain always returns for a last hurrah. So it was that one night while Stewart was -- again -- out of town and I was up late finishing an article for Fitness magazine that something, something moving reallyfast, caught my eye . . . high up . . . near the ceiling. I wasn’t even sure I’d seen it before it disappeared behind a quilt we had hanging on the wall.

Two guesses. Right . . . another sun spider.

I couldn’t believe I lost track of it. I kept watch for a while. Even poked around, cautiously, under my desk to see if I could discover where it went. But I can’t. It’s vanished. Not knowing where this beastie went is slightly more troubling than having it parade across my keyboard. But I have a deadline. And for once, work trumps fear . . . and squeamishness. The fact that I can’t actually see the spider right this very minute means, I rationalize, that it’s gone elsewhere. Maybe even outside.

This is what I tell myself.

I willed myself -- willed myself! -- to believe it was gone. A serious case of out of sight/out of mind. Every so often I’d glance around the room just to be sure. Coast clear. I kept working. Hours later, I finally finished the article and crawled into bed.

In the morning I discovered just where the spider had gone to. There it was, curled up like a small -- eight-legged -- kitten. Under. The. Covers.

It had spent the night right next to me.

AAAHHHHHHHHH!!!

If ever there was a time I wished Mom had been right.