Arachnophobia

I suspect I first saw it crawling from place to place and picked up the stick, put it in the spider's path, picked it up when he climbed on his obstruction, and brought it close to see what he would do. It was what we'd do for any crawling bug, easier than trying a direct pick up and kinder to the bug than getting pinched by clumsy fingers.

We lived on the resort at the time, Pleasant Ridge Resort on 2nd Crow Wing Lake, in Hubbard County, MN, just east of the town of Hubbard. I recall myself being four at the time, which is likely correct, since we owned the resort from about when I was three until late in third grade. I was old enough to (mostly) mind Mom's restrictions, and was pretty much given the run of the place as long as I avoided the lake, avoided the cabins since other people were staying in them by the week, and I came promptly when Mom called. If I followed the rules they were confident I was safe, since the biggest hazard those days was poison ivy.

Well, it probably really was me, but that's another story or two.

There was a path which ran all around the lake. At some later point in my life I would follow it in both directions to each of the neighboring resorts, but this day I was down in front of a couple of cabins on our own resort, unafraid, watching this little black spider as it crawled up the stick to the end, then with nowhere to go, down the stick toward me. Oh cool! (Except we said, "Neat!" back in those days.) It climbed onto my hand. OW! Not so cool, as it "bit" me right on the tender webbing between two fingers! It hurt, and continued to hurt for some time. Eventually the pain went away and I forgot about it, until some weeks later a big chunk of skin fell off between those fingers and I remembered what had caused it.

I was fine, but one thing had changed. I was now deathly afraid of spiders. All spiders, even spider look-alikes like daddy long legs. If I so much as saw as spider on the wall or ceiling, I would leave the room. Unless, that is, it was coming down its thread from the ceiling somewhere in the middle of the room. In order to leave my chair I would have had to actually move closer to that spider, and that I simply could not do. I was a prisoner of that chair until I yelled for somebody else to come and kill that horrible spider and clear the way for me to move.

They jump, you know.

One thing I could do, occasionally, was kill them. But only if there were some way I could assure myself that there was absolutely no way that spider could get away and come and attack me in the process! Often that took a big towel or newspaper, or even - sacrilege! - a book.

It was still bad enough when I was raising my own kids that I couldn't even bring myself to touch the pictures in a child's book about spiders while I was reading it to the kids. It was part of a great set that was offered in grocery stores, buy a volume a week for a cheap price with a $___ purchase. They covered cats, wild ponies, dinosaurs, and a whole plethora of topics about the natural world. Unfortunately for me, the kids liked the spider book rather more often than I liked reading it to them. But I couldn't let them know how I was feeling. I had to clamp down hard and pretend nonchalance each time we went through it. After all, I had a PLAN.

That plan was, simply, to get my kids to kill or remove all spiders that came to visit our house so I wouldn't have to deal with them. In order to accomplish that, I had to persuade them that spiders weren't scary, just a nuisance to squish and flush, or - best case - deserving of an outdoor home where they could find proper meals for themselves. It worked for years, and in the process I managed to actually conquer my phobia, getting it down to the level where I find them distasteful but can manage to dispatch them myself without a full-blown case of the screaming meemies.

I actually managed a pair of encounters with black widows when we lived in Georgia and I worked at the garden center. Even after being called over to examine one as an alert from the owner that here was something new to be careful of while handling stock, and days later moving a bush by grabbing the stems and feeling one under my hand (Toss! Fast! Nevermind if you kill the bush!), I managed to come away without a case of PTSD.

Pretty amazing, really.

Occasionally I can even appreciate them - usually with a long zoom lens.