Friday 28 August 2015: Tonight I saw a giant, dark bug skitter across the room and settle under the dining table. When I got up from my desk to chase it out, it zoomed across the floor under the desk. I opened the front door and collected my broom. Standing well back from the desk, I used the broom to hook my chair and pull it away, and then hook my knapsack by a strap and pull it out, too. The bug fell to the floor as I did that; I guess it had settled on the knapsack oh ick. I swept it, with no effective resistance, outside and slammed the door shut. And locked it, ha!
Have you ever found a gigantic black beetle in your first-world
home? I have, several times. There were two kind-of noisy ones behind my
futon on Park Drive in the Fenway, around 1985, that I was pretty sure I
wouldn’t be able to kill with a single shoe, and there’ve been plenty more
since. Big bugs are not exclusive to
Namibia. Occasionally I remind myself of
things like that. The electricity failed
more often in McLean, Virginia, one summer than it has in my six-and-a-half
months in small-town Namibia.
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| It just would not pose. |
I did not want it wandering around while I was trying to get to sleep,
so I fetched an Indian take-away container wide enough to trap it, and got as
close as I dared, container poised, cardboard ready, front door unlocked and
kicked partly open. As soon as I began
my swoop, that thing skated off about 90kph and vanished in the vicinity of the
back, across-the-hall bedroom door.
Maybe it went in the room; maybe it was camouflaged elsewhere; I do not
know. I pulled that door closed, sprayed
Doom bug repellent all around that door, my bedroom door, all the baseboards,
my bed, the bathroom window, and the front door.
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| The one in this picture looks much spottier than mine. Key point: "Harmless to man." |
October 2015: When my PC boss, her assistant, and our new country director stopped in
town to deliver a package for me (TWO cases of Kind bars; thank you, C&K!),
I showed them around my house, explaining that the back, across-the-hall
bedroom door stays closed because a big ol’ wall spider ran in there one night
months ago. They all understood. Ephraim, assistant boss, opened the door and took a look around, but closed it up again kindly. (Actually, a streetlight shines in through that window and illuminates the whole hallway, and even into my bedroom, so I'd keep the door closed anyway.)
November 2015: I invited several PCVs to my place for Thanksgiving, informing them that I have lots of bedrooms, a couple of mattresses, an oven and a microwave - and that I had seen only one spider in four months. In the week or so after I sent the e-mail, I spotted two or three tiny ones that the spider book did not identify,
because they could not have been
highly cytotoxic, six-eyed sand spiders that, despite being about the size of
my thumbnail and living (very well camouflaged) in desert sands where they
occasionally poison and consume an insect unlucky enough to step on them, can kill an entire human being with one tiny
bite. What evolutionary sense does that
make? Anyway, while I refuse to
believe these
tiny bugs are those most dangerous ones, the spider book says nothing
about small, harmless spiders. So I accord them considerable
respect and stay well back. Mostly I
catch them in a take-away container and liberate them in the glorious outdoors,
where I believe they will be much happier.
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| Key points: "leg span up to 30mm" (roughly one inch); "Strongly cytotoxic. Can be fatal." Not mentioned: whether it can bite through a hiking boot. |
J. arrived around mid-day on the Friday after Thanksgiving, and
A. and Y. in the evening. I had soup
to stir when the latter arrived, so I asked J., who’d had the house tour,
a desert walk and a showing of 'Dr. No,' to show A&Y to their room, and as I stood in the kitchen their distant
murmurs changed abruptly to shrieks of, “Jesus!” “Don’t chase it!” “Mother,
that thing is fast!” and such. Oh, no.
It really is the spider’s room.
There've been a couple more since. Here is my technique for wall-spider removal: Spray it with stinky Doom; the repellant kind
not the killing kind. That will mess the
poor thing’s central nervous system up enough that it gets a bit slow and staggery, and you can trap it in the
take-away container and escort it to a more agreeable location. Wash your hands really well when you get back
inside.
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| Peace Corps issue! I do not display them in a beautiful Omba basket (a Christmas surprise from the M'ville family, arranged I know not how), but usually keep them hidden under other books. They are full of grisly photos and info. |
Seriously, the spider book is not good bedtime reading.
Woa, am I glad that I don't have to deal with possibly poisonous bugs. The weirdest bugs hopping around in my appartment were soft-looking flesh-coloured grasshoppers that had escaped from a basement storage room, four floors down, where a former tenant had bred them as food for the animals he kept in a terrarium. At least, that's what we were told. Spotting them on my carpet was extremely difficult because they were almost the same colour. One year, I had a nest of wasps under the eaves above my bedroom window, not a comfortable thought, but they stayed outside. :o)
ReplyDeleteawesome post. great encounters. very funny commentary! my favorite post so far! K&K (the second one)
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