The Spiders Web

As I passed by my bathroom window this morning, a flutter of motion caught my attention. I stopped and focused for a moment and noticed that it was a butterfly fluttering; no, flailing violently in the shrubs directly across the courtyard against the south wall of our garage. The pale yellow and deep black of its wings stood out boldly against the butterfly bush’s dark green leaves and purple blooms. The poor creature had gotten snagged in a spider’s web.  Not entirely; it was caught by just one wing. Now the insect was trying desperately to free itself. I watched for a few minutes, mesmerized and unaware of the passage of time. This inattention to time is a trait that is troublesome to my wife. It is also a trait that my wife insists that I have passed on to my twelve-year-old daughter. My mind bounces to and fro. I think of one of Gary Larson’s Farside cartoons where a wide-eyed butterfly that had just emerged from a cocoon only to fly into a spider’s web. I thought of life and death and how the end of one creature benefits another. Then my mind settled on the memory from about a year or so before.

I raise chickens; not the backyard variety but a commercially grown variety that you will find in the meat department of most markets. I host over 20,000 chickens two times per year from day two of their lives until they are approximately twenty-two weeks of age. At twenty-two weeks, these breeding-age chickens move their party to laying houses where they will copulate and lay eggs for the remainder of their lives. In poultry nomenclature, I raise pullets.  During one particular morning, I had finished feeding these birds and was waiting for the feed bins to refill for the next days feeding. I noticed a giant bug crawling across the concrete floor of the workroom. The workroom has no chickens, only four walls, a small bathroom, a large sink, and a work counter across one of the walls.

The remaining walls are dedicated to plumbing and electrical panels, valves, and switches controlling everything in the chickens’ environment.  Temperature, humidity, light, ventilation, feed, and water are all controlled from this room. On the floor of this room, I noticed this bug. It was about one inch wide, two inches long, and stood about one inch high. This beetle-type bug had wandered too close to the wall and had gotten one of its legs entangled in a spider’s web. It was now crawling away from the wall in an attempt to free itself. The problem it was having was not the web itself but with the spider that had determined that this bug would be part of nourishment for that day. At regular intervals, as the beetle was about to pull itself free, a tiny spider, no bigger than my thumbnail, would race down the web, wrap several more stands of web around the leg of the beetle and then retreat up the web to safety. The funny thing was I didn’t even know if the beetle could even see the spider as he was facing away from the web, pulling with all his might. With its heavy armor, large size, and formidable-looking pincer jaws, the beetle probably could have disposed of the little spider with ease. But the bug was too busy trying to free himself from the free of the web. The beetle was too preoccupied to notice that the web wasn’t the problem. The problem was the spider.

I remember that vividly. This random memory is another problem of mine. I can recall the bug, but I forget to take my cell phone with me when I leave the house in the morning. I believe this to be a charming eccentricity. My wife and my mother agree that it is not.

To bring this rambling to full circle.

So when little things bug me; little things that shouldn’t matter.  I need to look for a bigger cause. Because where there is a spider’s web there is, most likely, a spider.

-Darrin Carrigan; May, 2012; Rev May, 2019