Spider Season

The Pacific Northwest is not particularly known for spiders. Those honors belong to equatorial countries where the beasts are swollen to great sizes by water and heat, or they belong to deserts where heat and dust seem to have the same result on them. Believe me I have respect for the spiders of the desert.

I still remember my lonely drive along a deserted strip of road in Arizona. In front of me, the road reflected the moonlight and I could see a quarter of a mile ahead a dark animal was in the road. With nothing else to think about, I watched the animal and as I got closer my brain sorted through animal categories as I tried to figure out what it was. A coyote? No, too small. A mouse? No, too large. A rat? No. A mole. No. Wait…are there moles in Arizona? I don’t think so. Not like they have in Washington, anyway, with the rubbery little noses.

Mole photo by Michael David Hill, 2005, from Wiki Commons. (For a little fun, do a google image search for ‘star nosed mole.’ Trust me, it’s worth it.)

Okay then. So there was a mysterious creature in the road visible from some impressive distance. What was it? A rabbit? They don’t have cute bunnies in Arizona, they have those long-nosed hares. A hare? The closer I got, the more I was sure it was a hare of some sort. For bunnies were fluffy but this one had a kind of boney hunch.

The famous painting of a Hare looking suitably boney from Albert Durer, 1502. Thanks to Wiki Commons.

The closer I got, the darker and more shadowy it looked, and the more strangely shaped. But it wasn’t until I was almost over the creature with the tires that I realized… It’s a spider! I am pretty sure my eyes bugged out as I watched it hurriedly scuttle out of the way and I zoomed on by.

Creepy spiderlegs crawled up my spine as I shuddered to think of a spider that big and what it might mean if my car broke down and I had to do something as dusty as camp on the ground for the night. How many of them could be lurking? And that made me wonder where, exactly, a spider that size could lurk? For I’m pretty sure the thing would be visible to satellites.

Anyway. Enough about the horrors of Arizona. What I really wanted to do is share the arachnoid horrors of Washington state.

Like I said, spiders aren’t exactly associated with western Washington. Here on the wet side of the state we mostly get little forest spiders and a few larger wolfs that make it into the house to frighten you at midnight. But most of them run away as fast as they can and are too small to worry about too much except if you come across them in quantity.

With one exception.

There is a type of garden spider here that is very disconcerting. You see them beginning in spring, but they are small, then. But by the beginning of fall they have been busy eating each other (and everything else) and some of them have grown large enough to give you the willies.

Now everyone on the planet seems to think that if there is a creepy garden spider in the yard it must be the yellow and black Argiope aurantia (or Corn Spider or Writing Spider), which, believe me is plenty creepy in its own right. But though we do get those here, it’s not all that often that I see one. I’ve seen maybe three in the last ten years.

This is a yellow and black garden spider. This is emphatically not the kind of spider I am talking about. Photograph by Deisy Mendoza, from wiki commons.

What we do see, and see lots and lots of, is the European Garden Spider, Araneus diadematus. The European Garden Spider (which just happens to be in my non-European garden) is not yellow and black like the Argiope or Corn Spider. And it does not lie with its forelegs and hindlegs clasped together as if it were a four legged creature.

The European Garden Spider is instead brown and white with numerous markings including a white cross on its abdomen from which it gets the name ‘diadem.’ And it hangs not with its legs together, but resting apart.

This is the spider I am talking about. Photograph by Andre Karwath, from Wiki Commons.

Its web is extremely firm and sticky. You cannot pass through the web of the European Garden Spider or through strands of the anchoring silk without hearing snapping noises as the web breaks and branches of shrubbery previously roped into submission are suddenly released and spring backwards. What I’m trying to say is that the European Garden Spider does not build a fluffy dust-bunny kind of web. Its web is like spun glass, and it sticks to everything.

Look how the end of this fern frond is curled back. It is attached to the anchoring thread of a spider web. Photo by me.

Worse, the spiders can be quite large, to my eye they can reach two and a half inches long. The other main problem is that this spider is…well…meaty looking. I think I prefer my spiders small and wiry, rather than appearing like a portion of meaty pork cutlet too large to chew all at once. The meatiness lends a kind of fleshy vicerality to the whole business of encountering one—and significantly ups the creep factor.

The other trouble with the European Garden Spider is that around here there are a lot of them. They really, really, love it here. The climate must be absolutely perfect and the meals plentiful because a single bush might harbor eight or more of them. A few bushes together are a minefield.

And if they stayed in the bushes, that would be better. But another characteristic of this spider is that it likes to spread its net out across open spaces. In other words, it would rather spread a web across a walkway than stick to the bushes. (A few more years of evolution and this thing will be netting and eating small birds and maybe antelope.)

I have to stop for a moment and acknowledge the beauty and giftedness of this spider. They are the most gifted webmakers I have ever encountered. Their webs are picture perfect, high, round, arched, like meticulously woven sails tacked by slender anchoring ropes. In the dew they glisten. In the sun they sparkle. And otherwise they are almost completely invisible. A perfect net for to catch a meal.

The web isn’t just ornately pretty—spectacular, even. The web is large. Anchoring strands of rope-like web can extend many feet. I’ve seen a web-rope extend from the eaves of the barn to the nearest Japanese maple tree branch—that’s 24 feet. Yesterday while I was out watering the new rhodie I encountered a web stretched between the trunks of two small trees, a span of 16 feet with the web in the middle. And I want to know: how the heck does a spider between 1 and 3 inches long stretch and anchor a strand of web-rope sixteen feet and use it as a suspension bridge to build a web?

Here are the two trees. That black plastic stick on the ground is what I used yesterday to destroy the web. (One point to the human.) Photo by me.

I knocked down that web yesterday, because I am tired of being netted like a bug by meaty creatures with too many eyes. But this morning I thought of writing this article so out I went with the camera to see if she rebuilt it (the females make the webs). I didn’t find her at first, but there was a new web up near the deck over the bushes, so I got a couple of photographs of that for you. You can see how intricate it is. I took a few different angles so that you could get a sense of how suspended it is up there… How do they do that?

I used Photopaint to add an opaque circle so you could see the web better.

Same web, different angle.

Same web, different angle. All three photos by me.

There was another web in that bush, as well. The webs can be so invisible that you literally do not see them until you walk through them. I had taken a number of pictures of the top web before I even saw the one right beneath it.

This web was slightly lower and clearly well anchored in the bush. The spider was at the center of the web, which is typical. If you mess with them, though, they will rear up with their front legs, or run. Or sometimes they make a weird little noise—again, creepy. My son uses the big ones for Airsoft target practice, which I’m not sure I like very much. But to be fair they are big, and creepy, and hang over you… Photo by me.

I also found this other web as I was moving around—again it was invisible until the light hit it. I believe this web belongs to the spider whose house I trashed yesterday. Notice how the web is anchored well off the ground and spread out across an open space.

It is this spreading across open spaces that really makes them so creepy. See this nice walkway in the garden?

Thank you to our cat Figaro who helps bring the cuteness factor to the photo.

By late summer and through fall it is like an episode of ‘Fear factor’ every time you go up or down those steps (or anywhere around the house). The spiders build webs right across the walkways, and they build fast. In the morning it might be clear, but by the afternoon a previously clear section is now booby-trapped. And you will not see the web until you either brush against it or you are nose to nose with the spider herself. It’s awful, I promise.

And if you don’t see it you will walk right through it and the web will stick to you, spider and all. The spider will hang on you, that web is strong. And if you run, it will only bounce along behind you. (And here is where the meatiness really freaks you out because you can feel it hanging and bouncing back there.) After a while you get Post Traumatic Spider Disorder and flinch often and you learn to carry a big stick.

Another spider, this one near the front walk. Notice how difficult it is to see the web. Photo by me.

Around our house we have a name for these spiders, we call them the Booglies. This name is especially perfect at Halloween, when all things creepy seem to press out of the shadows. By October 31, if there hasn’t been a good frost, these things are as big and plentiful as they get. In some years there will be ten or twenty to a large bush, and, as hard as they are to see in bright daylight, in the dark you won’t see them at all. There could be one stretched right across the porch. So close your mouth when you run.

I need not say, then, that it is better if there is a frost before trick or treating, because the first good frost kills them all.

One last story for you. A day or two a week, I get to drive along a beautiful narrow private driveway to a lovely place of rest on the Columbia River. The drive is lined with cascading ferns and small bobbing saplings, and the vegetation is always threatening to overgrow the road. It’s like Jurassic Park, and breathtakingly beautiful. In the middle of the drive, you might be seduced into rolling down your windows and taking in a breath of that magnificently lush, oxygenated air. Don’t.

By late summer there are thousands of spiders and that drive has become a river flowing with spider webs. Those talented Diadematuses will have stretched web after web after web across the road. And by late August and September the spiders will be big. Trust me, keep your windows up. (And your doors locked.) Listen as you drive along the road and you can hear them. It sounds like thwap, thwap, thwap, as your car breaks through the webs and meaty spider bodies hit the front and sides of your car. You will see the forest move as when the webs break the ferns and saplings spring back, catapulting diadem-decorated spider bodies this-a-way and that, and flinging up leaves and dust and a few startled squirrels in the process.

As your car shudders along, thwap, thwap, thwap, thwap, pray for frost.

New Directions

Hm…

It’s been a while! Can I plead “Seminary”?

And for those reading this who have been to seminary, you will know exactly what I am talking about, here. I am working on my ‘Masters in Divinity’ (yes, there is such a degree, lol! No hubris there, eh?) and it is the longest most in-depth masters degree you can get. It’s an all-encompassing, overwhelming, amazing process. Compared to seminary just about everything else seems trivial. I get it why Orthodox Jewish boys learn nothing but Torah (The book of Instructions for Jewish Life given to Moses by God) in school. Spending 24-7 with “the God Question” is an amazing thing to get to do.

BUT. I will also say that such exclusive study has decided drawbacks. “Life” is an ongoing and unfolding gift. If we engage scripture exclusively, we lose the richness of the realities of Life itself and therefore miss vital opportunities to better understand “the God Question” in context. We were not created in exclusivity: the land under our feet and the doings of our neighbors has always framed, informed, feed, infuriated, frustrated and inflamed us. And all alliteration aside, if we are going to dare to ask the “what are we, what is God” question, we have to talk to each other to really get at the subject.

SO. After a while of Seminary study, regardless of how glorious it is to sink deep into Iraenaus—and to be fair I haven’t sunk into Iraenaus that deep, yet. His book is on my to-be-read pile—you surface in desperate need for some 2010 perspective on how things are going around Earth in general.

AND FINALLY, I can read for myself that what I have written here is mostly Blah Blah Blah so, let me get beyond excuse-making and say that I’ve been missing Saltwater Scrolls and I am attempting a comeback. Over the last 15 years I have encountered a lot of great books. First in the writing of my novel The Saint and the Fasting Girl, then in my return to school. As such, my plans for Saltwater Scrolls are to shine a light on great books and the authors who have contributed so much in writing them.

Let me mention that this new direction will not lead to a book blog for fiction—there are a lot of very fine book bloggers out there who do this already. Instead, this will be a blog for the source material. The researchers, academics, trouble-makers and miscreants who dig, compile, translate, photograph and interpret the rich history of our human endeavors. My emphasis will be medieval and/or religious history and subject matter.

IN CLOSING please let me say I hope this new approach has value for you. And if not…well…there are a lot of other fun things to do on the web.

Methodist Minute

Oh, man! Has it really been two months since I’ve posted to my blog? Lame! This is serious problem, because if I can’t keep my blog up during the summer, I don’t have a hope of doing so once school begins.

And even as I sit here I realize I have nothing interesting or newsy to offer you.

Seriously not good.

Wait…
I do have something.

It’s a ‘history nugget,’ a story told to me by one of my Methodist instructors, name withheld for the moment… :)

Methodism has always been supportive of the temperance movement. Women have long been a force in Methodism and women Methodists were among the first to identify problems caused by alcoholism and organize to do something about it.

Alcohol and drink, in fact, were monstrous. Whisky and the like were considered a “hell-born evil.” (See William Link page 33. I recommend you read some of the rhetoric on this, lol.) As a consequence, Methodists celebrate communion with grape juice instead of wine. The idea is that by using grape juice, everyone can share communion, even those struggling to deal with alcohol addiction.

Anyway, this ran so deep that Methodist clergy (and members, as well) were themselves asked to swear to abstain from drinking alcohol, ever. Some were happy to make this promise! Others? Not so much. And for years the Methodist Book of Discipline (book of governing rules and principles) outright forbade use of alcohol by clergy all together.

The day the language of the discipline changed from forbidding the use of alcohol to just condemning it, there were probably a number of celebrations across Methodism. In particular, the Methodist students at Yale Divinity School ordered a keg of beer and had a party on the school steps that included a ceremonial burning of the page in the Discipline that prior to that had kept them from doing exactly as they were doing at that moment.

Thus ends my ‘Methodist Minute.’ lol.

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Annual Conference

Thank you University of Puget Sound for hosting the Pacific Northwest Annual Conference again! This was my first year, but wow, what a beautiful campus. I confess that my only prior knowledge of Tacoma was the stretch of I-5 that squishes traffic past the Tacoma-Dome. And, well, I didn’t think much of the place. I was proved judgmental and uninformed last week at the conference. There are some beautiful areas of Tacoma, and the University of Puget Sound is one of them.

The coolest thing about the campus was the architecture. It was kind of monastic looking, and, well, hobbity. Check out this set of doors, one of many like it:

I stayed in Schiff Dormitory, which for some reason (is it 2009? or am I imagining that?) did not have wireless. Bummer!

The dorm didn’t have wireless, but it might have had something else. I stayed in room 020. Well, that was what the room number was supposed to be. At some point, though, some young college waif had changed the room number to reflect something else.

An interesting room to house visiting Methodist clergy! lol. Once inside, however, the room looked innocent enough.

And it was really nice to stay on campus and leave the CO ₂ emissions to someone else for a while. It was also wonderful to spend time on the campus. If there wasn’t wifi in the room, at least there was in the Student Center and that was open late. And the campus was beautiful.

The landscaping was absolutely gorgeous with blooming rhoddies and hostas and carefully manicured shrubbery. There was also a lovely central square—back to the monastery thing—which reminded me of a monkish promenade.

As well as mysterious archways that led who knows where.

In all the campus was a picture-perfect place for a conference.

The conference itself was held in the field house, a huge high-beamed athletic venue we transformed into worship centers and a legislative chamber.

There was also the requisite presence of Cokesbury Books. As a newbie to the process I was let in on the secret of using the blue bags. You start a bag on the first day of conference and add to it as you go. By the last day, if you can lift the bag without a forklift you get a free vial of anointing oil. :)

This nifty system proves how devoted the clergy is to improving their sermons, their bible study classes, and their support of congregations. Not to mention their love of any healthful exercise that consists of lugging, hauling, and dragging books. I bought a few…I admit it. But they looked great. I also bought a Methodist Book of Resolutions which is…thick. I’ll need it, though, because I’m headed for Pastor Boot Camp next week.

A few things to lift up from the conference. One is just how cool it is to be Methodist Clergy. I am so grateful to be surrounded by like-minded folks who care about our world and the people in it. We affirmed a lot of stuff at the conference, not the least of which was that the environment matters, that it matters that people have access to health care, and torture can never be permitted anywhere, especially not where we are party to it.

We also are committed to real welcome, of all people, at our Methodist churches. There are still some who worry about power, who gets it and why. We are all human, after all. But even so we are on the right road. Discernment and Love are a powerful combination. Our challenge will be in true practice.

Finally, I want to lift up the Jamaa Letu Orphanage in Lubumbashi, Congo. This orphanage is sponsored by our conference. At the conference our churches together with the Methodist foundation raised over $60,000 to build housing for the boys who live there. The challenge went up, could we raise the funds needed? And could we do it in 24 hours? Could we call our churches and families and find money to put to this worthy cause?

And we did!

I would encourage you to help, too. Here’s the link: Hope for the Children of Africa.

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Manuscript Hoard

Gratitude!!

I want to prance with joy at the feet of those who digitized and complied the Catalogue of Digitized Medieval Manuscripts through UCLA (with the help of an international academe). Pages and pages of Medieval manuscripts—complete with holes, ink blotches, dirt, and marginalia—are catalogued and linked to fully digitized books.

Here, for example, is a Hildegard of Bingen manuscript page from the book Sciuias siue Visiones ac reuelationes .

It is a book of dreams, visions, and revelations, written in Latin and digitized courtesy of Merton College in Oxford, England, and complete with a hole in the parchment that the scribe had to work around.

Talk about material culture! Look how the scribe had to squeeze to write around the edges of the hole, and you can even see the fibers coming through. The number of holes in this book and the fact that there are shadow lines coming up from underneath convinces me that these parchment pages were being re-used after have been scraped clean of some earlier text.

(Who is Hildegard of Bingen, you ask? She was a Saint and Abbess, a visionary and mystic nun who lived from 1098 to 1179 in Germany. Here’s an article from the Medieval Sourcebook by Kristina Lerman.)

Here’s another page from the same book, this one shows marginalia.

If a scribe forgets something while writing, it is usually to be found in the margin in the same color ink, an extra word or letter or something. This marginalia is in red.

The scribe used red in the manuscript, so he (and likely it was a he, though women copied manuscripts as well) might have come back through the book to write additional comments on the text—or add in bits that he forgot. This marginalia might also be someone else’s commentary on the text, maybe a tonsured Prior looking over the scribe’s shoulder as he was writing it out.

This is so awesome, I can smell the tallow. All I need now is a little ink on my fingers.

And to conclude our adventure in manuscript happy-land, all we require is—

for someone to figure out how to read this! (Curious, curious! )

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