Lessons from an eight-legged teacher

I had no idea what was happening to me that September morning in 2009 when I reached for my coffee pot to start my morning brew. My right arm was suddenly seized in pain, a pain like no other I had ever experienced.

“It’s not a heart attack,” I thought. “That would be my left arm.”

I didn’t have time to figure it out because I had a plane to catch, which I missed. By the time I was rerouted and arrived in Ohio three hours later than planned, I’d sweated through three T-shirts and my entire body from the waist down was in pain. Somehow I made it through the weekend and back home to Santa Fe, where the pain lasted for several weeks, growing steadily less as the days went on.

I still didn’t know what had happened to me until one day vacuuming my apartment I came upon a sticky web in a box of books and there, scurrying away from the vacuum hose, was a black widow spider. All at once I recalled the page from a book I’d recently read describing the effects of a black widow spider bite — and I’d had them all.

I considered myself lucky, especially after everyone started telling me horror stories they’d read about others who’d been bitten. Maybe because I had been bitten, I felt compelled to learn more about the black widow beyond the collective fear around them. As I did, I cultivated a great deal of respect for them and, I dare say, even a sense of kinship.

The first thing I learned about was the single strand of their extremely sticky web that extends out from the main web like a trip wire, alerting the spider by vibrating when something touches it. Clever! I got pretty good at spotting the webs, either by discovering the trip wire or hearing the slurping sound whenever I’d move something it was attached to.

Widows belong to a family of spiders called “cobweb weavers,” so their webs aren’t the pretty things of dreamcatchers. They look messy but are actually carefully crafted with three distinct layers. Each layer has a purpose, and the spider knows exactly what’s going on in each one — organized chaos — just like my apartment.

Widows are solitary. There’s usually only one in a web when you find it (that was comforting), and they only bite if they get stepped on or otherwise threatened. Most of the time they either run away or drop from their web and play dead. I think I must have somehow rolled onto the one that bit me that morning.

The widows’ venom is a neurotoxin that causes cramping and paralysis of muscles, exactly what I’d felt that morning. Although very few human deaths have ever been reported, it can be potentially dangerous to us, and is especially dangerous to our pets. Any person or pet crying from pain, having trouble breathing and/or trouble standing or controlling muscles needs to be seen immediately by a doctor or veterinarian, whether you’re sure it’s a widow bite or not.

Despite my respect for black widows, I don’t recommend getting bitten by one. That said, experts recommend recognizing and cleaning up places where spiders make their nests: dark places with little activity, like corners and behind items in basements and such. If you find a web, be careful and pay attention as you clean it up. I use a stick to wrap up the web and either trap and toss the spider outside if it’s safe to do so, or squash it if not (with apologies).

Spray insecticides along door frames and outside walls to deter the critters entry in the first place (I’ve found this to be quite helpful), plug up holes in foundations outside the home as you’d do to deter any unwanted critters and move outdoor wood piles and other debris away from the foundation.

In his book, “Animal Speak,” Ted Andrews calls spiders “master weavers, walking the threads between life and death, waking and sleeping, between the physical and the spiritual.”

Ironically, the morning I was bitten I was traveling across the country on a “thread of air” to a memorial service for my aunt. In creation stories, the spider’s web is often a metaphor for the world. I’m reminded of the words attributed to Chief Seattle, that “whatever man does to the web, he does to himself” — a lesson often overlooked in our culture these days, but one we would do well to heed.

(Colleen Dougherty is a writer, educator, artist and behavioral health therapist. Her 20-plus years in animal welfare include jobs and volunteer work in veterinary clinics, animal shelters and TNR organizations. She has been a speaker at the New Mexico State Humane Conference and the National LINK Conference in Albuquerque, holds degrees in art and counseling therapy, and graduate certificates in eco psychology and humane education. Her passion is building joyful and respectful relationships between animals, humans, and the Earth. She began writing Paw it Forward in March 2016.)