This is a recollection, i.e. true story. If you get jumpy, this isn’t a story for you! My super fun (sarcasm) childhood home story. You know how people want to return to the happy days of their childhood? That’s not me. That’s not this story.
I see spiders. Spiders find me. I have nutty interactions with spiders almost every week. They will slide down a web in front of my face. Come over and sit beside the mouse while I work at the computer. They’ll come and do dishes with me. Spiders are my spirit animal and it’s horrific. Why not owls? Or birds? Maybe a sharp billed Raven. I would take a possum or even a grasshopper. Why Spiders oh’ Universe?
It’s early 1980’s and the land is utter shit. Nobody had ever cleared it, hoed it, or done a thing with it because it was nasty brutal brush. Worse, local pollution from the up stream petroleum refining plants had poisoned Cottonwood creek and potentially the ground water, making it uninhabitable for mammals from mouse to deer. No animal prints to be seen in the thick red mud along the creek. No squirrels, no raccoons, and no signs of life other than a few birds. Thick Black Jacks, Sumac, and Post Oak was all that seemed to grow. It was teeming with ticks in the summer including the Lone Star Tick which at the time was said to spread ‘Rocky Mountain Tick Fever’ and a few other unpleasant illnesses. But this is a story about the god damned spiders which took on a supernatural aspect.
Bellamy. My parents cursed this dudes name often, he was the Tulsa Oklahoma land tycoon who had a vision for putting in the crap gravel road into the middle of f’n nowhere and developing ten acre plots of land and selling them off to those with the true pioneer spirit of the day. I imagined Mr. Bellamy like J.R. Ewing off the television show Dallas. He probably had a really cool hat and boots. He must be smart beyond measure and have a lot of swagger.
From what I could tell at the young age of four, Mr. Bellamy had sold my usually unhappy parents a dream. Had built it up as almost a turn-key homestead. I’m unsure how anyone visiting the location would ever in a million years think: golly gees, I want to live here! But I was four, unperturbed by such matters.
What really grated on my parents nerves was that Bellamy had purchased the property for very little money and had made a profit. Was he supposed to not make a profit? Who knows…my parents were loons for even driving out that way, let alone living there. I digress…
We Move In
“Mom, if we live in Tornado Alley, why do we have a trailer house? Shouldn’t we live in something that can’t blow away?” Shut up and eat your pancakes. Gah, that kid. My parents were married at age 18 two weeks before Dad shipped off to Vietnam to be royally screwed up. They stayed married for twenty years despite very little in common. I’m not sure either believed in love or that love and marriage went together. I thought from an early age that my parents were stars in their own made-for-tv movie that ran in their minds and the world really revolved around themselves. I was a bit actor from time to time in the ongoing saga. They were really into, ‘children should be seen and not heard.’
They would often lament on how spoiled and useless I was – “you should have been a boy” my Dad would ‘joke’ I guess, I’m pretty sure he meant it. My Mom would complain how I never was punished for being such a bad kid. Well I was spanked, my Dad would, you know, throw me down stairs, or throw me across a room and beat the crap out of me but Mom would say, “you’ve never even been hit with a belt! Or a whip, or anything other than a hand! You’re so spoiled.”
I had inquired before like, why not just have more kids? I mean it’s a lottery right? You might get a boy the next do around.
So that was met with one of two answers. My Mom would say when I was really little, ‘I got it right the first time’ but that was a rare answer. The real answer is she was afraid it would turn out just as bad as before. In hindsight, they parented as little as possible usually. But on the plus side, neither drank and they were very strict conservatives. I had friends at school covered in bruises and getting the stuffing knocked out of them or burned or what have you on the regular. I had my own room (which they made a big deal about, although it’s not like I had siblings…) I had some toys and a bicycle and I was told regularly that my life was ideal. So, yeah, life was ideal. I had really good grandparents and I think that saved me all in all.
My parents and grandparents had a big vision for the Homestead, in the Black Jacks full of ticks. They had a ridiculous amount of optimism. My Mom didn’t belong there, her only plan in life was to follow my Dad around, clean house, and paint everything slate blue. She had no inclination to garden, farm, clear, or play ‘survivor’ but she had gone along with it, probably for a change of scenery, maybe a second chance, who knows. Mom always complained she hated cleaning and she hated cooking. “Someday you’re going to grow up and never get to do anything interesting or fun, so you better enjoy your life now! If you’re lucky, you’ll cook and clean for a man, if you can’t find you a man, it’s off to a factory!” I was terrified of factories as a kid… I had so much anxiety.
Mom would say, “when you grow up, I hope you have a kid EXACTLY like you. Exactly, so you will know what I’ve gone through as a mother!”
This wooded waste land was 30 miles from Cushing Oklahoma, and currently as I write this a ‘super fund’ site of petroleum pollution [there are actually 16 super fund sites in Cushing – the way they are classed varies slightly 1 but when I was a child in 1980 Hudson Refinery would have still been operational, “Hudson Refinery is considered one of the worst hazardous waste sites identified by the EPA.” ]
“Cushing, Oklahoma. Home to 7,800 residents and 85 million barrels of crude oil storage. This 7.6 square mile area is the largest crude oil storage facility in North America.”
Medium
Mom didn’t trust the water supply.
We did not drink our well water. I didn’t quite realize the deal back then, but Mom was scared to drink the water. The first twenty-five years of my life I drank only soft drinks, and in particular one called, Dr. Pepper. The amount of sugar and caffeine I guzzled as a kid was tremendous. I had insomnia, heart palpitations, rotten teeth, nervousness, constant stomach aches from dehydration, inability to focus, and depression.
“You’re lucky, you get to drink Dr. Pepper and soda pop. Other kids’ parents make them drink WATER. You want that? You want to go live with a family where you never ever ever get to drink pop again?”
I knew life wasn’t right on the homestead, but Mom won every argument. I whined a lot as a kid.
Everyone I lived with were chain smokers so I always had green snot coming out of my nose, my own smokers cough and chronic bronchitis. So I was given a nickname, puny. My Mom said it was impossible to be sick all the time, so I was making it up. Her belief that I was faking illness and manifesting green mucous to spite her, would come very close to killing me when I turned 16. Anyway…childhood is awesome folks, let’s go on…
With the ecosystem so disrupted, there were huge numbers of arachnids. Scorpions. Ticks. Spiders.
In the nearby town of Mannford Oklahoma, the tick situation was so bad that a dog left outside could be dead in 24 hours from ticks, happened to the neighbors collie when they stayed overnight at a friends house, returning the next morning the poor chap was dead. The collies gums were pure white the people told us, there was no blood left in the poor dog.
There were literally millions of ticks.
I recall a man with a literal fire hose of pesticide spraying down backyards in town to try to control them, he had a regular route of house after house, but he would have to return monthly. Children played in those backyards, “just don’t go outside for a couple of hours”. Imagine a red quivering glob the size of a softball composed entirely of ticks. I was told they had just ‘hatched’ and that they were all baby ticks, but I don’t know, we called them ‘seed ticks’. The balls would undulate and it was mesmerizing and awful. A quick search on Google and I could find no documentation of this at all, possibly they were eating something… but I’ve skipped ahead to fifth grade. Shame on me, let’s go back to the time before we lost the homestead. Childhood good times…
The Giant Tarantulas
So I’m four and my Mom is boring the shit out of me. She sits me down on the couch for a ‘talk‘ and I’m disinterested immediately. I never listened to Mom, we butted head a great deal and she used a lot of manipulation tactics, maybe through sheer boredom. “So out here in the country….there are a lot of …animals… you may have not seen before…” I totally was tuning her out. I wanted to go outside and play. Quit wasting my time Mom. “…giant spider.” Okay cool. Giant fucking spiders. Gotcha. Can I go now? I only recall my Mom’s delicate little warning talk later.
I was playing outside and had to run inside, probably for a drink or a bathroom break — but as I was hastily hefting the outdoor screen door — there it was. It was the size of a dinner plate. It was fucking huge. It was a giant black and orange tarantula. Hairy, bulbous, flattening itself out on our screen door with insanely long legs for some unfathomable reason.
I utter a scream so primordial it was ripped from me. I screamed the scream of utter terror. A scream that said, I didn’t know I was even afraid of spiders until just this instant and this is fucking horrifying and for the rest of my life, I was going to be afraid of spiders.
At this point, you’re doing a quick Google. You’re finding out that the ye ordinary Texas Brown tarantula that is native to this region is not dinner plate sized. The leg size is 4″+ which hey, that’s a big fucking spider right? I was a kid, it probably just ‘seemed big’ … well these weren’t Texas Browns. These were Brachypelma smithi a kind of Mexican spider now endangered that is twice the size of Browns and which have orange knees, we’re talking leg spans in excess of 7″. No worries though, cause’ we had the other kind also. This was an arachnid paradise.
We had an in ground well house (incidentally the ONLY thing protected from tornadoes…) and my Grandpa excitedly called me over, “come see! Come see this! It’s amazing!” He opens the metal door on its metal hinges and at first I don’t see anything…then he takes a stick and pokes at the floor and the floor moves. Scorpions, thousands of them.
He gets one with a stick and brings it up for me to look at. Whoa, on its back are little babies. They’re sorta transparent with blackish-brown on their backs.
(Taking a moment to salute Grandpa who did actually turn a lot of that property into a working homestead and who was great with kids.)
“Damn you Bellamy, this land is cursed.”
–Me old Dad (The community that Bellamy founded later became a town and now boasts a population of 149…)
The stretch of road that had ten thousand spiders.
Every day I walked with my Grandparents the two miles to the Rural Route 2 Box 402 mail box and two miles back. The mail didn’t come all the way down to our shitty homestead. Four mile round trip walks were a lot for my small legs, but I liked the adventure, which comes into play the rest of my life roaming wilderness areas and becoming a long distance runner. The long walks went on for some time before we actually had mail delivered.
I first recall the gravel road curse about the time I began first grade. No bus came out that far so Mom would drive me the 25 minutes into Mannford that had a small elementary school that would later be flattened by a large tornado in 1984.
At the corner at the two mile mark was the mail box and the beginning of the inexplicable stretch of road. It was a rough gravel road, big chunks of gravel, a lot of pot holes, it wasn’t an easy drive. Eventually it let out onto Highway 51 which a person could take all the way into Tulsa.
Mom said later that the curse kicked off about the same time each year and I believe in my mind that was summer. After the right hand turn where the mailboxes were located was a 300ft stretch that we’ll call a ‘migration corridor… the first year that I recall it, we had tarantulas, the Texas Brown variety. That patch of road was teeming with them. There were thousands crossing right there, but just for 300 feet or so, and then no more spiders. Just in that one small stretch was an incredible concentration of tarantulas.
I was a kid, so although I was amazed — I mean, I probably should have asked more questions. Where were they all going? They always seemed to go in the same direction which as an adult I know is East. At no other time have I ever observed tarantulas bunching together to move in a group. If I was an arachnid biologist it would have been absolutely fascinating to study.
Next year, same spot, but now it had changed. We had giant green worms.
In my memory they were like huge inch worms. 4-6″ Just giant bastards. Again, crossing the road. No spiders this time. Not a single spider. But giant green worms. Personally I’ve only ever seen a tomato worm approach that size, but none of us rednecks had ever seen one of these sorts before or since. Like the tarantulas before them a fair number were driven over making the road rather green.
Each year it seemed like something different. Next year it was box turtles, not as abundant as the tens of thousands of worms and spiders, but there would be at least 6-8 on that special patch of gravel road at any time.
The year after we did have a repeat once or twice of the Texas Brown tarantulas. The Browns had no orange on them, and the really big beasties had orange. Is this a good time to mention that tarantulas jump? They’re awesome at jumping… never lived until you startle a tarantula and it jumps on you.
Nobody who lived in my neck of the overgrown scrub and sandstone wasteland had any sort of education and so it was assumed that this was a normal part of nature unfolding.
Sleep Walking, Seizures, Hearing and Seeing Things
I have focal seizures and absent seizures. I would hear my Mom call my name, or a phone ringing – auditory hallucinations. My Mom was worried people would think I was crazy so she told me, “all kids hear things, it’s normal, you will grow out of it, probably shouldn’t tell anyone. No seriously, don’t tell anyone. They’ll think I’m a bad Mom.”
“Focal onset seizures are the most common type of seizure experienced by people with epilepsy.” …”When people have focal aware seizures, they are fully awake, alert, and able to recall events during the seizure. Some are “frozen” during the seizure, so they may or may not be able to respond to others during the seizures. Overall, these seizures are brief, usually lasting less than 2 minutes.”
Epilepsy.com
About that time I started sleep walking and seeing things.
Mom was scared I would get out of the house at night (*see yard full of spiders – I haven’t even mentioned the orb weavers, the giant garden and huntsman spiders…not to mention scorpions…)
One very bad night I was sleepwalking and hallucinating. I wanted to go see my parents because there was something horrible in my bedroom. Something awful and unmentionable, I had to leave. I sleep walked into my parents room and to my eyes they were in bed composed entirely of millions of long legged grass spiders. Each of their long legs reaching out to hook to another spiders legs and they shimmered in a dim moonlight, layer upon layer, making a rustling sound with their chitinous exoskeletons that were always moving a little, adjusting, creating the bed.
My parents didn’t seem to notice or care about the spiders. This did not surprise me. They’re not going to help me, they were going to just lay there in that bed of spiders. I realized with utter grim certainty that my parents were never ever going to come to my aid. I was a little kid. I was alone with no one to turn to, I was invisible. I went back to my room and crawled into bed. I had reconciled myself to not trusting adults.
My Mom was deeply worried with my sleepwalking and coming into their bedroom. To my Grandma she waxed plaintively how I was trying to sneak into bed with them at night, utterly regressing. (Me not living up to expectations was a pretty common point that was brought up as I grew up.)
A bright light out my window. I go to the window and look out. There are small being out there, I don’t like them. They remind me of the spiders, the bulbous heads, the long limbs, the fingers the remind me of the little hooks on the ends of the tarantulas. I would never know if it actually happened or was a hallucination. Keeping in mind that my diet at the time was pancakes for breakfast, no lunch at all, candy after school and a small supper. I was incredibly malnourished and underweight.
“Other children are forced to eat vegetables and gross food! I would never do that to you. You only eat what you want and you get as much candy as you want. You should appreciate what I do for you!”
Mom being fucked up
Most of the night terrors and dreams at that time involved spiders, chemicals or fish although forty years hence I don’t recall them clearly. I clearly recall a strong unrelenting phobia of chemicals that followed me into adulthood, but I did not know why. I had no idea until twenty years later about the petroleum contamination beyond what we could visually see in the creek. In Oklahoma in the 1980’s you could have more easily criticized Jesus Christ than the oil refineries. I always thought I possibly watched a show about Love Canal on OETA PBS channel 11. This is possible, but I am not sure where my phobia of chemicals began.
The seizures were a big problem for me. A few times people would be snapping a finger in front of my face or talking to me and I would kinda ‘come to’ and realize I had been somewhere utterly different for a little bit. My Mom was worried for my sanity but chalked it up to some kind of psychic event, which was a popular idea in the 80’s.
Skipping ahead through a seriously messy divorce, my Dad remarrying a woman with violent schizophrenia and my Mom running off with an alcoholic 26 years older than herself and both of them being utter basket cases and unreliable...
I would see spiders out of the corner of my eye some time prior to having a seizure. What was that shadow? Were those legs? I would shut my eyes to sleep and I would see the spiders and it would get worse until I would seize, but I didn’t know what it was called.
For once I wasn’t living with my Grandparents. I was back with Mom and old man Jim the alcoholic who married Mom eventually, wife #7 – I’m not even kidding. When I turned 13 the seizures started timing themselves with my hormone fluctuations. At one time I lost the ability to move my facial muscles. Usually after a seizure my mood would devolve into black depression and my facial muscles would either partially not move or entirely refuse to move. And… that’s how I almost was admitted to a mental facility but Dr. Lutz said my anxiety was simply too high to endure it.
My Mom, who didn’t believe in bringing me to a doctor, finally did when I was 13 after she kept demanding I move my face and I simply couldn’t. “What’s wrong with her” – was that a note of hysteria? The medical doctor said, “I can’t help her. She needs to see a psychiatrist.” He wrote down some information for a local clinic that had financial aid. I recall the quiet ride over there. Mom was still a little hysterical. What if people found out? What if they SAW US THERE, a crazy person place! She kept going, ‘they’ll blame this on me, that’s what they do at these places. They always blame the mother. If anyone should be going to counseling it’s me. She was terrified people were going to find out.
Dr. Lutz was awesome and although he didn’t figure out I had epilepsy it was nice to go talk to him a couple of times a week. He told me I wasn’t crazy, I wasn’t broken, and I wasn’t stupid. Over time my Mom figured out there wasn’t going to be a front page story implicating her and she calmed down about it and took me to the appointments.
College and Spiders – and I still don’t know I have epilepsy.
As time goes by, more and more strange spider interactions.
The guy I was dating was smart, valedictorian of his graduating class. Hard working and owned a nice car. He was set to inherit a ranch worth millions of dollars. I thought, okay, finally I’m dating a guy with something going for him. But the red flags began day one and just got worse. I didn’t know if I was going to get out of the situation without being killed. Finally, I worked up a tiny reservoir of courage and said, ‘we’re over.’
I went by his house a few nights later to pick up my stuff. He was living in a very nice house with a carport, and when I parked underneath it a snowfall of spiders fell onto the top of my car, and the spiders that fell glowed. They were rather like grass spiders but glowing like those rubber Halloween spooky ring toys that children get. There were thousands of them, thousands upon thousands covering my car.
I took it as a warning and left hastily. I later found out he had plotted with others to abduct, rape and potentially murder me. He had composed a dozen or so paintings of me being vivisected, cut open and murdered. I complained to the art department and they said I was advocating censorship and they wouldn’t pull his art show. Everyone knew those paintings were of me being murdered and the teachers let it go. One more nail in the coffin of me trusting people. Well fuck him, I hope he has long since died of alcoholism and a case of crazy. I dropped out of that college shortly after.
Life as an Adult
The spiders always find me. My first dorm room they had to move me from because of a spider infestation that began in the closet, but they told me later, “we picked up your mattress and there were thousands of spiders!”
I lived in a house infested with brown recluse spiders and filled up 63 glue traps with hundreds of the brown spiders. Was never bitten and more importantly my kid were never bitten.
“I gotta give the spiders a 10/10 reliability score on predicting bad people, bad events, and seizures.”
Despite my Mom saying that one day I would have to conform and live an awful life that I hated, it never happened. What did happen is I moved 2,000 miles away and never looked back, i.e. I have no wish to return. Oddly enough my Mom could never recall her own childhood. She said adults when they grew up didn’t recall their childhoods anymore. I pointed out Grandma and Grandpa did, “hu” she would say absently and move on. My Dad also did not actually recall much “my Mom made sweet pickles” he told me, he repeated the sweet pickle story maybe six times but rarely anything else from his earlier life.
After their deaths I have a lot of unanswered questions. Why were they always and abundantly dead set on living so far away from any centers of population? Isolation was insisted on (live a life of isolation as a kid largely on your own, then try to adjust to society! It’s bananas!) Why were the typical solitary Texas Brown tarantula’s stampeding in a herd across that single section of dirt road? Why were there so many tarantula’s period?
Some people see owls. Some people see eagles or hawks as portents. Others stags or even a Raven. I have spiders. Spiders have me.
