Walking In the Spiderwebs

Yesterday (as I write this), I managed to ruin the homes of at least a dozen spiders on my morning walk. Over the course of two miles, I encountered what seemed to be an endless array of these webs. This has never happened before on this particular walk, and while I feel somewhat guilty about laying ruin to these fine nests, I can’t be held completely accountable. For one thing, what right has a spider to build a web across the paved path on which I was walking? For another, assuming such a right exists, shouldn’t the spider be required to clearly mark its domicile so that one could step around it?

I can only imagine how ridiculous I looked, flapping my arms in front of me as though beating at invisible wasps. By the time I completed the circuit, I felt the way Boris Karloff looks in the 1932 Karl Freund film, The Mummy. I was also certain that in addition to absconding with a lot of web, I must also have at taken on a least a few hitchhiking spiders. That made me feel like Harrison Ford’s Indiana Jones in that early scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark. I immediately showered and tossed my clothes into the laundry. I don’t mind spiders, but I’d prefer them living in their webs than on my person.

Fast forward to this morning (as I write this). It was foggy out but I could tell it was otherwise clear. The sun was trying desperately to make an appearance, the way a younger sibling tries to get into the action when an older sibling is showing off. I was immediately on my guard. If I couldn’t see the spider webs in yesterday’s bright sunlight, how could I expect to seem them in this fog?

Yet, strangely, I could see them. Clearly. And they were everywhere. This time I was more careful, ducking and dodging the webs every few feet it seemed. I felt like Chuck Norris negotiating the jungles of Vietnam in Missing In Action. In one stretch of about 30 meters, I counted 17 webs that crossed the path at one height or another. I felt winded after that and realized that this could be the beginning of a new trend in exercise. Call it: the spider walk.