Once again in North Carolina, I've resumed the walks with my brother's gentle Rottweiler, Marley, which means dealing with spiders whose webs crisscross our wooded trail every few yards. There are of course spiders in Arizona, too, some of them quite daunting --tarantulas, wolf spiders, and the dreaded brown recluse-- but they live in burrows and do not build elaborate webs at eye level across hiking trails.I have a great deal of respect for spiders, not just for their ability to inflict pain and in rare cases death to humans, but because of the beauty and intricacy of their webs. They are fishers of insects, casting nets in the air. As a child, I watched garden spiders build beautiful orb webs in the windows of our house to catch the bugs attracted by the light on our side of the window. Clever spiders.
Beautiful as a well-constructed web might be, they're a nuisance to hikers and runners. I always carry a small branch with me to clear the way, leaving the spiders all a twitter about the "big one" that got away. As they are critical to the spider's survival, I do not wantonly destroy webs and will take a detour around a web on the trail if I notice it before my branch takes it down.
I suppose if I were a real man, I would walk without the spider branch. But beautiful as they may be, there's still something creepy about a spider's web...
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Have you ever seen the large banana spiders? I always had a very large web or two blocking my way out to my garage office when I lived in Charleston. These are BIG spiders with BIG webs, but they're gorgeous and I never knocked them down. I watched one spider and her web go through an entire summer cycle and felt like I had lost a friend when she sort of shriveled up and disappeared in late fall.
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