Jen Hirt Herculean in Nantucket WhiteIt was June of 1997, I was just graduated from college, and while I waited for something big to happen to me, I was living at home and doing manual labor tasks for my parents.  My mother’s spontaneous decision one hot morning had led to me to that afternoon’s task: lightening the interior of the storage shed with a color called Nantucket White. I was to paint the walls and the ceiling. The walls I did not mind, but the rafters and their netherworld of spider webs creeped me out, and there was no good way to ventilate the space. However, my mom was adamant, as if all our lives would improve tenfold if our storage shed had a clean white ceiling, as if Michelango were on his way to paint the latest Sistine Chapel.

I had been away at college, and things had been left to their own devices in the storage shed. The gravel floor had been scraped away at the corners by critters coming and going. I moved the usual array of malfunctioning and forgotten implements – a riding mower with a flat tire, a shovel with a broken handle, a mangled window screen. There were cobwebs everywhere, with dust so heavy they looked meaty.

I saw an ivy vine which had ventured from outside to forge a life in the dark. It had found a coiled garden hose. Such an illicit courtship, the ivy and the hose, each recognizing the familiarity of the other, with no recourse but to exist as their forms allowed – the hose gradually going limp into itself, and each new ivy leaf caressing the hose to no avail. They would spawn no amorous mutations, even though this space seemed spooky enough for such things – let dust mate with drafts, let centipedes woo worms. But it was a rough place, too. I imagined that there were gangster spiders in this shed, so big and badass that they’d learned to suck blood from oily gravel.

I did not believe for a moment that white paint would improve the visual atmosphere of the shed. Such techniques worked in little bedrooms, not in pole barns. But I had a spray gun. I could tolerate the racket of its compressed-air mechanism, its jackhammer vibrations, and the unnerving confines of the shed because the gun sprayed a thick swath of white, better than the manual brushstroke. I told myself that the shed, creepy as it had become, could be gleaming white in less than an hour. Yet within that hour, I ceased all painting because I accidentally painted a giant spider.

The spider was spread-eagle against the wall, its huge brown body at first no more than a warp in the wood. In hindsight, I wonder how I didn’t see it, since it was wide as my palm. Then again, we often don’t “see” things we aren’t ready to comprehend. I had been ready for lots of medium-sized spiders scurrying to their corners, not one monster king champion on the wall.

The spider, heavy with wet ropes of white paint slogged on him from my electric paint gun, fell to the gravel. It was more than heavy – sodden, doused, moistened, sopping, steeped, saturated. I dropped my paint gun. The spider scrambled upright, Herculean in Nantucket White, eight legs spread wide. It paused to get its bearings, to figure out what in the world just happened. Paint dripped off its underside.

The spider’s leg span was easily four inches, maybe five. Its legs were actually thick. This spider had mass. This spider existed and required space, like ogres and whales. Were it in the sun, it would have cast a shadow. In retrospect, I can exaggerate it to eight inches. Ten, and it hissed. Or a foot wide, like its Amazonian ancestors, with an egg sack like a golf ball, and fangs that dripped acid-black.

I remember my first thought: That is a wolf spider. I didn’t really know what a “wolf spider” was, but my dad had always referred to any large spider as such. In my shock, the identification – wolf spider – was the only defense mechanism I could muster.

Despite my minor fear of spiders and a definite desire never to encounter one of such magnitude, I immediately felt guilty for how the spider would die. That much paint had to be toxic. Eight great legs would curl to the belly, knitting themselves into the underside, balling into peculiar prayer. Would it die slowly? Painfully? Would its death throes befit its notable life, a life that must have been long and virtuous and satisfying, with plentiful insects thick with blood?

I had to leave the shed immediately. I had to inject myself with sun and hummingbirds. Inside the house, I sipped water and stood, clueless, in the air-conditioned living room. Killing spiders went against the proverb -- If you want to live and thrive, let the spider run alive. I was a firm believer in letting things run alive. Many a spider I had coaxed into a cup, transported to the woodpile. For years I had studiously negotiated truce after truce between myself and the spiders. Knowing that I had initiated the final days for a spider worthy of respect did not rest well in my conscience.

I didn’t know what I was going to do. Maybe I could wash it down with the hose. Maybe it would already be dead. Maybe I could bury it. But ultimately, I did nothing – when I returned to the shed, the spider was gone. To where? What secret infirmary? What savages had arrived in my absence, bearing the body to a sacred pyre?

I did not finish painting the inside of the shed. I called it quits, tossing brushes and rags in the trash, emptying the paint gun straight into a sink. I had a feeling penance was in my future.

Everyone is afraid of spiders, for no good reason, so that means I both acknowledge my phobia and regret it deeply. They’ve been demonized, grouped with vampires and other brethren of a Cimmerian lord because they savor the blood of insects, because they build beautiful traps, because they reproduce in the thousands and eat their offspring and their lovers.

The fact that this large spider may or may not have been a wolf spider also contributes, however unfairly, to my dislike. Combining spider with wolf leaves no room for sunshine and puppies. It suggests a spider with fangs measured in inches, or a spider that can run down an elk, or a spider howling at the moon. The secret powers of the arachnid morphed with the canine virtues of the wolf – the perfect animal.

However, the name is a misnomer. Early researchers of arachnids correctly observed that these spiders did not build webs, but instead preferred the ground, stalking and pouncing, like little wolves. So that was true. But the name wolf spider doesn’t come from this predatory style. It comes from the incorrect assumption that the great spiders hunted in packs, like wolves. In packs! Extended families of wolf spiders in dens, Alpha males on guard, spider pups at play with a fly husk, protective mothers on the rock above. A secret call and the spiders massed at moonrise. In a tiny thunder felt only by moss and puddles, they stalked a cricket!

They are, in fact, absolutely solitary. They don’t even eat like wolves. Thrifty wolf spiders can go an entire year without food. When they get old, they lose a leg or two, can’t hunt, and they die, alone and shriveling, with no wolf pack spiders to howl an elegy. Leave the elegy to me – the wrong place is the worst place to be.

That night, I had a terrible dream that the enormous painted spider was in the bed, white between my white sheets, on my feet, up my ankles, my legs, cold and tacky, his short hairs prickly through the Nantucket White. The dream was so vivid that I woke up, startled. I hit the light and kicked away the blanket. My heart pounded like the spider was clutching it, like the spider had known all along about this pure well of warm blood behind my bones.

I shook the white sheets, cursing this newfound camouflage. I was still half-asleep, stuck in the web of a dreamworld. I was sure the spider was here. It was here. It was now. It was revenge, it was undead, it was unforgiving. I snapped the sheets some more and slowly brushed away the dream. It faded like dreams do; five minutes later I could only remember a fragment, a sense of primal fear. As I fell back to sleep, uncamouflaged and guilty, I imagined I could hear a primal tribe chant a song through the ivy as they bore that spider’s body all the way to the constellations.Back to Current Issue