The Best Time a Tarantula Made Me Feel Guilty

So, I used to be terrified of spiders. I called myself phobic, but I probably wasn't nearly hysterical enough to be technically designated as such. Over the years, though, I think I successfully mind-over-matter'ed the issue: I didn't like it when my family or later, my roommates, killed the spiders in my house so I effectively mastered my fear enough that I could carry the spider out on a piece of paper slipped under a cup. My fascination with living creatures won out, too, so that I could watch closely, in horrified fixation, as a black widow the size of a small child wrapped a cockroach in her web.

But nowhere in this history can I quite account for my new determination to hold, or at least touch, one of the many tarantulas currently questing for mates nightly on the roads of Bitter Creek. I guess they're fuzzy, and generally harder to lose sight of than their smaller relatives. They lack the spindly, needle-like legs that so unnerve me on other spiders. I thought if I could get one to just walk on my hand, then, I don't know, I could prove something to myself. I knew one of my colleagues had done it. Why couldn't I?

Driving back from taking signals on Hilltop this evening, I spotted something in the road that might have been a tarantula but might also have been coyote poop (an easy mistake, trust me). Pulling over, I confirmed that it was indeed a tarantula. This was it. I was going to do it. I was going to hold a tarantula. I moved toward it slowly, crouching down, talking to it in the voice I reserve for puppy dogs, usually. I put my hand flat down on the ground in the direction it was walking, palm facing up. No backing out now. If anything, I was sure I'd be the one to chicken out first. But, no.

The tarantula eyed me, eyed my hand, and then began to shrink back from both. Step by backwards-step, it retreated until its legs found a hole in the ground. Slowly, gingerly, not taking its multiple eyes off me, it lowered itself into the hole, then closed its legs above it: impenetrable.

I was mortified. What a monster I was! Scaring this poor beast so badly that it went and hid. That sight--of its two sets of legs, joined together above its head--was the most pathetic. I felt like a big jerk. I practically ran back to the car, apologizing profusely as I went.

I am sorry. So sorry.