Creek Running North

Some spiders don’t spin webs or lurk and lie in wait beneath the leaves. Instead, they roam the countryside and stalk potential meals. Wolf spiders are an example, named as much for their habits as for their furry exoskeletons. There are wolf spiders outside my house, and I greet a few of them for every hour I spend in the garden.

Inside the house, it’s jumping spiders you’re more likely to find ranging the veldt of the living room rug. Jumping spiders, members of the family Salticidae, can leap several times their body length to catch their prey. The family name has its root in the Latin word “saltare,” to jump or leap. There are more than 4,000 known species of jumping spider in the world, with 300 or so in North America north of Mexico.

The one that swaggered across my desk just now was probably of genus Sitticus. I was without reading glasses or hand lens, and the spider moved too quickly for me to go get the field guide. But its relatively short legs and stocky body made me feel more or less confident in identifying it at least to the genus level.

That, and the fact that it jumped three inches from a bottle of naproxen sodium to a stack of CD-ROMs.

It was dark brown and fast. It swept back and forth across my desk, and Becky’s next to it, like a dog hunting a tennis ball in an unmown outfield. One pass, and another, and then four more in succession just five inches from my keyboarding fingers, and I called it to Becky’s attention. She said “hey, that’s the same one I saw across the room ten minutes ago.” “I guess he lives here,” I said, making a risky guess as to the spider’s gender.

Twenty years ago I was in the habit of stopping at the local suburban chain bookstore near the Rockville, Maryland nursery where I worked. I suspect I spent at least a fifth of my income on books in those days. I’d punch out, pick up a book or two, and read them on my long train ride home to Arlington. I usually chose gardening books, but a good title on wildlife or politics or history would often catch my eye. At most two days later I’d have finished it, and would return for another book.

One evening I picked an interesting new arrival on the shelves to take to the train station. The book was Natural Acts, a collection of essays by David Quammen, first published twenty years ago next month. Quammen had a voice I found utterly engaging, informative and almost intimate, appealingly self-deprecating but deeply learned. He wrote of places he’d lived in Montana and Arizona, of the startling intelligence of octopi and crows, of the strange life of Tycho Brahe and the reproductive strategy of agaves. He wrote a natural history column in Outside Magazine, and I subscribed almost on the spot.

It’s exaggerating a bit to say that reading that book changed my life. But only a bit, as if I hadn’t I might not have read his next book, The Flight of The Iguana, published two years later in 1988. And that book changed my life. More specifically, the first chapter of that book changed my life, and much of the impact the chapter had on me was due to its first sentence:

One evening a few years ago I walked back into my office after dinner and found roughly a hundred black widow spiders frolicking on my desk.

Quammen was living in Tucson, black widow heaven. A female had built an egg sac toward the back of his desk and he dithered over how to handle the situation, and then the babies all hatched. He revered diverse and wondrous forms of life, but was stricken with arachnophobia. The essay explored his reaction to finding the poppy-seed-sized baby spiders, some of them already rappelling off the sides of his desk, and went on from there to discuss, without a hint of sanctimony, the proper human relationships toward creatures that can hurt us.

It wasn’t so much that reading that essay made me want to become a writer. It was more like this: By the time I finished that first chapter, I knew I was a writer. Something in his tone, in the deft way he wove one theme with another, tying them all up at the end, but not so much that it felt tidy — suddenly I had to do that too. It took about a year for me to actually start writing, a mere technicality. And so this disreputable avocation began as I read his books on the Red Line train somewhere beneath Bethesda.

Me, I’m not particularly afraid of spiders. This is not necessarily a good thing. We have a mortgage on the territory of at least a thousand black widow spiders, and their preferred habitat is the space where I am always about to stick my ungloved hand: undersides of wind-blown trash, garden tool handles, under the barbecue grill lid. We have an uneasy detente worked out, but clumsy as I am I’m certain to violate that treaty one of these days. A dose of arachnophobia might make me less likely to get black-widowed.

Jumping spiders, on the other hand, are both significantly more aggressive than black widows, and far less dangerous. The one on my desk was antic, leaping again to the pill bottle and then to a slip of paper with a phone message written on it. It ran behind my monitor. I lost myself momentarily in work, switching between word-processor and web browser. It is nearly an automatic movement these days, bringing the cursor up to the top of the screen to switch between programs, scrolling left and then right, so it took me a moment to notice that the Sitticus was pacing on the top margin of the monitor frame, chasing the little black arrow back and forth across the screen. I have a wide flat panel monitor, and the spider chased that pointer from one end to the other three times.

I changed direction, and brought the pointer up close to the spider. It started a bit, then tried to grab the arrow with its forelegs. I teased it for a moment or two as if it was a kitten fixated on a length of string. At last it leapt for the kill, an inch down onto the screen, right atop the cursor. A cat will attack the same piece of string, or the bright spot from a light pointer, over and over again. Sitticus learned faster than any cat I’ve known. I tried to tempt it again, making the pointer move slightly and quiver like a dying fly, but the spider was no longer fooled. Instead, it ran straight down the monitor’s sheer cliff face, rappelled without a moment’s hesitation to the monitor shelf, and ran straight for me and to the edge of the shelf, a foot and a half from my nose. It stared me down, eight eyes to my mere two. For a full minute it waved its forelegs at me. Spiders use a small set of modified legs, pedipalps, to “chew” their food and examine small objects, and the males of many species, including jumping spiders, use these pedipalps in often-elaborate sexual display. This spider vehemently waved its pedipalps at me, gesticulating as though cursing me roundly. It was close enough that I could see the individual light brown hairs on each palp, which moved up and down with some vigor. Was this a threat display? Or — the notion slowly dawned — was this a male spider that had mistaken an unrelated arrangement of black pixels for a female? Had I cruelly aroused the poor guy with computer porn, with no chance of release any time soon? I guess I won’t find out, as the spider darted behind the computer and out of sight.

On the old nature show Wild Kingdom, host Marlin Perkins was saddled with the responsibility of straightfacedly reciting clumsy segues from the show’s content to the main sponsor’s advertising. They were uniformly broad and embarrassing. “The elephant’s thick hide protects it from the harshest elements. You can protect your family from disaster with Mutual of Omaha’s five-point coverage plan.” Even as a child I imagined him wincing inside as he read them into the camera. Writing about the natural world I keep bumping up against what I think of as “Mutual of Omaha Moments.” A piece of animal behavior, or a trait of some plant species, or the geological history of a mountain range will suggest some clunky metaphor. It takes all my determination to avoid it.

Layering human metaphor onto the natural world is a risky pursuit. There are no crabs, no queens, no hunters in the night sky. Frustrated in a world without appparent meaning, we fill it with stories as if it were a blank slate. When challenged, we will admit that the constellations are mythical, that the patterns are merely random pinpricks of light, as if a “mere” unimaginable immensity of insanely violent balls of fusing gas, hot and large enough to bend Newtonian physics, the light now reaching us thrown off by them before we had learned to bang rocks together, was somehow more prosaic than a dog or a bear. There are layers within layers of remote, unattainable meaning in the most commonplace events, a housefly landing on a rock wet with rain, an aspen leaf flickering in a momentary breeze. They little need our assistance in freighting them with meaning, and yet I do so anyway. It is a constant discipline to restrict the metaphor to just that amount sufficient to carry the image to the reader. I do not always succeed, not the way I’d like to, and yet I still run breathless after that frustrating goal.

And Mutual of Omaha will try to mate with your illusive female jumping spider with its comprehensive range of homeowner’s insurance policies.

About ten years after I bought Natural Acts — ten years ago this April — I went to hear David Quammen read in San Francisco. He read from The Song of The Dodo, his then-newly released book on island biogeography, still the best work for the lay reader on that subject. As he signed my copy later, I handed him an issue or two of Terrain, hoping he’d be impressed enough to offer to donate some writing. You can’t fault a guy for trying. He looked at it for a moment, this gift of an amateurish, low-budget magazine he’d never heard of, said something gracious, and put it in his briefcase. There was a long line of readers waiting behind me, and he faced many repetitions of near-identical short conversations before he could relax. I thanked him, started to leave, and then stopped.

“I really ought to tell you,” I said, “that an essay you wrote had a strong influence on my writing.” He was a little taken aback. “Really? Which one?” “The first one in Flight of the Iguana, about the spiders on your desk in Tucson.”

He got quiet for a moment, and just a little wide-eyed. “I’m really glad to hear that,” he said. “I really… thank you. Thank you for telling me that.” We shook hands.

Black widow spiders live for about a year, and may breed twice or more before they die. Some black widow spiders now living in Tucson may be fifty generations removed, or more, from the intrepid poppyseeds that rappelled from Quammen’s desk. Dispersed by competition, or wind, or flashflood, or by climbing into the rear seat of a car driving to Phoenix for dinner, the descendants of that egg sac on his desk could range from here to New Jersey. Who knows how the world would be different had he killed that first spider? Life and fortune and the elements are inexorable engines of saltation. A friend sent me a note a few weeks back to tell me she was enjoying my book. She was reading it on the way to work and back, she said. Words I laid down in a hurry or idly amused, a dozen or a hundred at a time, and she enjoyed them, and I was glad to hear it, imagining her reading of pruning saws and poison oak as her Red Line train rolled beneath the streets of Chevy Chase.