A clarification: You can hail from Deutschland and travel the desert southwest your entire life and never once be a German Tourist. The condition is not genetic. I have traveled the country with some fine people who happened to be from the old Holy Roman Empire. I have come to their aid in remote places, and they to mine. Just because you are a tourist from Germany, that does not make you a German Tourist. Let’s get that straight right up front.
What does make you a German Tourist? An odd, misplaced enthusiasm for being in the desert that is somewhat more than the desert will bear. A set of social and ecological preconceptions as airtight as the high-tech thermos in the lumbar pack. A Disneyficated notion that as wild as it seems, the West exists with the intention of amusing you. A complete lack of comprehension that the other people camping nearby might enjoy a little quiet one night out of five. A blank look when someone suggests departing slightly from the official itinerary, punctuated by an occasional disregard for official signs saying things like “fragile rock outcrop, do not climb” or “kindly refrain from smearing your cheese-oil-saturated hands on the ancient petroglyphs.”
Contrast this species with the placid tarantula. Fearsome of visage, large and hairy enough a spider to give some people the screaming willies, a more pacifistic, laissez-faire creature it would be hard to imagine. Pick one up, and it may bite you, or not. Mainly not. Its bite, when delivered, packs no more wallop than a bee sting, often less. This is what I hear. I have not yet been bitten by one. The tarantula’s main defense is irritating hairs, which it casts at its attackers in the manner of the mythical porcupine. The hairs on a Fremontodendron are far more irritating, and people plant those in their yards.
Fifteen or so years ago I found a small California tarantula, Eurypelma californicum, in a patch of Algerian ivy that was going to be bulldozed the next week. I coaxed it into a cup, took it home, put it in a vivarium with a cricket, turned my back, and when I looked at it again the cricket had killed it. That is how inoffensive tarantulas are, as a rule.
I come across them in the desert now and then. Usually when I see one it’s crossing a road. I swerve to avoid it, stop in the middle of the road blocking both lanes of traffic, and go lay myself on the pavement to commune from a respectful distance, a yard or so away.
This is not to say that tarantulas are innocent eaters of leaves. They are hunters, like other spiders, and they use stealth and venom and cover of night to cloak their approach. Everyone has to eat something, and tarantulas are no exception. But when not hungry, or if you are not very much smaller than they are, tarantulas are shy and retiring, a distinct pleasure to enoucnter in the wild even at close range.
And if the existence of German Tourists were not enough to prove there is no God, consider this: the main predator on the gentle tarantula is the tarantula hawk, also called the pepsis wasp, whose sting is quite likely the most painful in the insect world. From the Wikipedia entry on tarantula hawks:
The sting, particularly of Pepsis formosa, is among the most painful of any insect. Commenting on his own experience, one researcher said, “You will curse your mother for ever having you.” Another described, “...immediate, excruciating pain that simply shuts down one’s ability to do anything, except, perhaps, scream. Mental discipline simply does not work in these situations.” Yet another said, “It’s not like things that make you swear and say bad things about somebody’s mother. These things, when you get stung, you might as well lie down and scream. Why not? It takes your attention off the pain.”
Imagine how it would feel were you a fifty gram spider stung by a pepsis wasp instead of an eighty kilogram human stung by a pepsis wasp. Imagine then that the pain did not ebb after a few minutes, but that instead the wasp dragged you to a hole in the ground and laid an egg which would hatch out and burrow into you as you watched, still alive but paralyzed. Nice guys finish last.
Still, enough tarantulas escape that painful end for long enough that they are relatively common throughout the suthwestern US, represented by about fifty species. They are an evocative denizen of the landscape, seemingly representing that harsh wildness for which the American West is most widely known, and that is where the German Tourists come in.
We got to the visitor center at Mesa Verde at around nine in the morning, and went inside to get some interpretive literature for the Anasazi buildings we’d be seeing. Becky was thrilled. She’d seen Ancestral Puebloan sites only once before, and that was a few days previous at Canyon de Chelly, a nice way to celebrate the quincentenary of Columbus’ invasion of North America. She’d always found the notion of the sites fascinating, and seeing them was a realization of a long-held dream. We were in a good collective mood, she and I. We’d stayed in Cortez the night before, a town with which we fell in love at first sight. We missed the rambunctious year-old dog we’d left with a sitter, and fretted that he missed us, but aside from Zeke not being there it was a perfect day. We picked up a few maps and headed for the car to go check out some ancient masonry.
Outside the Visitor Center was a ring of German Tourists facing inward and bent over, presenting a circle of German Tourist Asses to the world. I thought for a moment of musk oxen, perhaps hornless musk oxen who had resorted to an alternate defensive strategy involving flatulence. The German Tourists were exclaiming loudly, and every so often a camcorder would flail from the center of the ring. I walked over to investigate.
In the center of the ring of German Tourists was a big tarantula. It ran back and forth, seemingly panicked, looking for refuge from looming threats and finding none.
I got angry and strode over, planning to clear my throat and politely inform them that it was illegal to harass wildlife. I spoke with one or two, and each of them nodded and walked away. Unfortunately my actions had the opposite effect from the one I desired: as German Tourists left, the ring contracted, constricting the tarantula still further. Something had to give! After a moment, the increasingly desperate spider made a break for a gap between a videographing German Tourist’s feet, and I breathed a sigh of relief.
A premature sigh of relief, as it turned out: one of the German Tourists reached down casually with a brochure, and swept the tarantula back into the center of the ring.
Rage.
There was only one thing to do, I thought. Time to find out whether what they say about tarantula bites is true. I shouldered aside two of the German Tourists and reached for the spider, intending to pick it up with my bare hand and carry it to safety, no doubt earning myself a bite in the process. It would be worth it, I thought.
But no. Or, more precisely, “nein,” which is what one particularly pasty and anemic German Tourist yelled as he grabbed my wrist, certain he was saving me from lingering toxic death. I glared at him, his hand still clenched around my arm, and the ring of German Tourists turned in unison to stare at me dumbfounded. Who was this insane Amerikaner der Wüste who would pick up a tarantula? Was I one of those colorful snake-handling Christians they had read about in their Frommer? Were those in the Southeast, or Southwest? They could not remember.
As I lectured them in my best condescending environmentalist tones the spider slipped through their legs, over a low retaining wall, and out of sight.
Note:Many old comments were lost in a database crash in 2008. Some conversations may seem to make less sense than they would have. A few will make more sense now.
10 comments on "Tarantula"I love this story. As angersome as the German Tourists are, the image of you defending the furry beastie from them-and them defending you from it-is just delightful.
My casting instructor in jewelry school was kind of a jerk as a teacher, but one quirk of his warmed me to him. He was an amateur entomologist, who saved his specimens (all collected post-mortem, he said) by casting them in bronze-which those who know a thing or two about casting will recognize as a tricky spruing puzzle even for bugs with relatively simple body designs. The prize of his collection was the deceased pet tarantula of a former student. I’ve never had the opportunity to meet a tarantula in person, but they’re awfully appealing, what with the fuzzy and the shiny black eyes.
=v= Wow, maybe environmentalists should adopt the pepsis wasp as our familiar. Sort of like your embrace of poison oak, only fauna. ‘Cause I ain’t scaring anyone with this whole Lorax thing.
amazing. just bloody amazing. both tarantula and blue inner.
thanks.
I just flashed a mental image of a circle of 6-foot tall tarantulas surrounding a 6-inch human scuttling back and forth, looking for a way out.
great story.
when my son was in 3d grade, he fell in love with a rose tarantula, and we adopted harriet so she could be a classroom pet at school. that leaky old aquarium made an OK home for her, with gravel at the bottom, a screen top, and part of a flowerpot to serve as her cave.
we read up on tarantulas. she had a sponge in a shallow dish for water, because they can drown easily. she had a heating pad to warm the habitat, because she needed heat. we learned they rarely bite, but the kids weren’t allowed to hold harriet because she might die if she was dropped. all the kids understood their responsibility to not drop harriet.
harriet was a classroom superstar. all the other classes would come to visit and say “wow!” and “ewww!” kids bravely fed her crickets and cautiously filled her sponge; sometimes she was hungry, sometimes not. when she shed her exoskeleton, it was carefully saved so everyone could see the wonder.
9 months after harriet began her career, while home on summer break, she furiously set about spinning a web. it covered the whole front of her habitat. she finally made an egg sack, and carefully guarded her babies. it turns out that tarantulas can store semen, until they decide conditions are right for reproduction. on the other hand, there were no surviving hatchlings; she ate some, and the others died.
[my son and all the friends he had lined up to adopt the babies were sorely disappointed, but it was perhaps to the good that we did not need to find homes for a few hundred spiders—the greater el cerrito area is not prime habitat for rose tarantulas.]
harriet spent 9 years in the classroom. not the best life for a tarantula, but maybe not the worst, either. she died a natural death, having taught a whole lot of kids awe and respect for a different species. she is buried somewhere near the butterfly with a broken wing, whose short life broke the hearts of some former second-graders i know and love.
I was so happy one summer a few years ago, that my youngest son was able to witness the death struggle that i had seen so many times growing up in the pre-1960’s Santa Monica Mountains wildernesses. We were up in a saddle pocket of the Santa Ynez in one of our favorite campsites, where the year before i had been face to face with a small pacific diamond back who graciously rattled at me, rather than strike, as i reached down to pick up someone’s remnant sardine can. Well not all that far from the previous year’s snake incident, a young tarantula was moving across the dusty clay, trying to move quickly from one low plant to another heading to what we could see was a small hole. It was less than a foot away, when that loud angry buzzing sound grew intense and close. Sure enough the pepsis wasp had seen it and was ready to take it on. My son wondered what would happened, startled as he was by the size and intensity of such a wasp (he had grown up in the mid-range Sierra foothills-3500’). I laughed and told him to watch as i went and got two chairs. The whole thing took half an hour. The skill with which the wasp struggled yet achieved the pulling down of the spider into its original home was really worth the patience. We could hear occassional buzzing for another hour or so. The next morning we observed the wasp climbing up and out of the hole and fly away, not returning.
Mesa Verge is awesome, more so in the old days, when there weren’t rangers around in the winter.
A delightful story, especially given that I’m a temporarily-transplanted American living in the Black Forest, Germany’s natural wonder in its own Southwest. I (of course) have moved into a rather exceptional bit of city, given that the largest for-profit solar development in Germany is across the street (it produces a net transfer of electricity to the network over the course of a year) and that we just elected a Green Party representative to the state parliament (for the first time ever) but your characterization of the German Tourist doesn’t match up with the Germans down my street.
On the other hand, it does sort of match the American Tourists i’ve seen in churches throughout Europe, walking in front of the altar, ignoring the signs asking for quiet, even entering during services on Sunday mornings - and all the warning signs here have been re-written in Americans’ native tongue, since they have the God-given right not to learn the language of the places they travel. I think we all have blind spots, ways of acting disrespectfully and damagingly to things we don’t understand. It’s not German Tourists in Germany that take offering candles without paying and take flash photography where it’s not allowed.
It’s really rather depressing to think that humans roam the whole world and treat it all with that kind of disrespect.
First-time commenter, long-time reader.
Morgan is depressingly right, at least in my experience. I recall being on a tour of the Blue Mountains, in Australia, with a professor of anthropology at the University of New South Wales. He was great. He took us to an archeological site and explained that it was an Aboriginal trading area, that artifacts had been found there which had originated from all over Australia. Of course, he asked us to remove our shoes and walk respectfully through the area. The only person to object to his request was a kindergarten teacher.
Well hey, every culture has its Texans.
And, for some strange reason, they come from the South in just about every country (including Germany).