So for a couple of weeks, we marveled at the beautiful spider webs woven between my truck’s driver-side mirror and the ground. Some spider was working overtime to rebuild it after windy days or days where I inconveniently drove my truck somewhere, tearing the delicate hunting ground.
I mused that the spider must be living in the mirror assembly, as it was unlikely that the creature would climb up my tires, through my suspension and body, to the mirror every day. Instead, after building the spider would retreat to its lair and then emerge again to drop down its initial lines and crawl back up to spin the web.
On my recent trip to Kansas, this was confirmed as the spider started rebuilding its web in the parking lot of the restaurant where I’d had dinner.
I took a few snapshots, climbed in, and drove off, presumably with the spider still dangling from its line. Along the road to my hotel, it blew off somewhere into the wilds of Leavenworth. Last seen headed southwest, towards Chez Venom.
As I drove along, I wondered/hoped two things:
- The spider did actually blow off outside my vehicle and did not blow into the truck. Otherwise, every time I clamber into the vehicle in the coming months, I will sit in a spider web beneath a grudge-holding spider.
- That the spider’s species habitat already included Kansas. Otherwise, I might have introduced an invasive species into the habitat, which could bring some sort of ecological apocalypse on the Sunflower State. Worse, I might be subject to some sort of government sanction under some obscure administrative rule. A certain kind of person often thinks about government regulations that one can inadvertently break and ruin one’s life with. I’m special.
The restaurant was an Applebee’s (since it shares a parking lot with the used book store. Do you think the spider saw that and thought, “Yayus! Bees that taste like apples!”?
I once had a grasshopper that clung to the hood of my car for my entire drive from the Washington University School of Medicine to my home in the western suburbs. I thought for sure that the fact that he was still clinging on for 20 miles of Interstate meant he had died from sheer terror, but as I pulled into my driveway, he sprang off the car and into my backyard. I’d like to think that he had an amusing adventure, or that at the very least, I’d contributed (inadvertantly) to the biodiversity of the bugdom of the area.