A Northern Boy's Tales of the Deep South, part 3

Arachnophonic

It’s interesting, really, what events I find I’m able to sleep through and what events I’m not able to sleep through. As it goes, I’m not able to sleep through the sensation of something crawling into my ear while I sleep.

Again, it was while I lived out in the boonies behind the pecan orchard in Bumph Huck, Georgia, when earlyearly one dark morning I awoke in a terror as I felt some THING crawling into my right ear, and was overcome with a dread worse than that of death as I realized it was in too far for me to stop it.

I slapped at the side of my head, tilted my ear downward while pounding on the left side of my head in the hopes that, whatever it was would fall out.

The entire time, I was in a full-body shudder of spastic proportions, a full-blown panic as I didn’t know WHAT it was or what it was DOING in my ear! All I could think of was that episode of (I think) Star Trek where all those Enterprise crew members you never saw before had their brains eaten by some insidious insects that entered hungry and exited sated through the ears of their host buffets.

And then the sensation of crawling in my ear stopped, followed by quiet, and then followed by a purring vibration. OH GOD! It was DRILLING! It was going to punch through to my brain any second now and start gorging its little self on my grey matter and by daylight I’d be babbling non-sentences at my dog!

After a few minutes the purring stopped. Returned intermittently, and then stopped all together.

I made several futile attempts to look into my ear using only one mirror. If I had an ear syringe I would have used it, but I was fresh out of ear syringes.

I debated with myself. Does this warrant a trip to the emergency room? Is whatever it is sucking brain cells through a straw-like proboscis as I think, my capacity to do so ebbing ever so unnoticeably away? Has it already left my head?

With the quiet in my ear, I calmed down and thought rationally. Whatever it is is now resting contentedly…or died in there. So I decided I would go back to bed, try to sleep, and if I could feel it moving around again in the morning, I would go to the emergency room and have it extracted.

Surprisingly, I fell asleep. When my alarm went off I awoke and lay quietly to try to hear any movement inside. Nothing. I returned to the bathroom mirror and tugged on my earlobe and pressed a fingertip into the opening of the ear canal, forming a seal and pulling outward, hoping the suction would do something positive.

Still, nothing came out on my finger or into the outer ear. Just as I was agreeing with myself that it was time to go to the emergency room, I looked down to the front edge of the bathroom washbasin and saw a little black dot. Upon closer inspection I could tell that the little black dot was actually a little brown spider, its body all curled and caked in earwax, dead. The poor little thing had crawled into the warm little hole in my head only to be trapped in the secretory quagmire within. The purring vibrations I felt and heard must have been its little legs trying desperately to beat an escape, but, mired in cerumen, the more it struggled, the more thoroughly it was encased, and soon, death.

I experienced one more gentle quivering full-body shudder, and threw the poor little thing in the garbage.

The more I think about it, the more I’m struck that, with all the places I’ve been, in all the places I’ve slept, it hasn’t occurred more than this one time that something has crawled into my head for a look around.

And maybe it has happened more than once, but whatever came in looked around and saw nothing inspiring, and so left again.

And maybe I’m not surprised, after all.

A Northern Boy's Tales of the Deep South, part 2

Arachnophobic Angel


I grew up thinking that animals, though capable of great intelligence, some even more so than we believe them capable, hit a ceiling where reason and sensibility are beyond them. They live at the level of instinct and the drive to eat. Thus, as my thinking goes, they don’t get the creeps over silly phobias, such as needles or the sight of blood or a scalpel slicing open an infected, pus-oozing limb.

Little did I know.

Angel had been playing outside somewhere on "my" 32 acres in Bumph Huck, Georgia, one particularly lovely summer day, but she had grown tired of it, or had become curious about what might be going on indoors (read: what I might have been eating that she could possibly benefit from if some fell on the floor), so she pawed at the door, begging to come in.

I opened the door and she looked up at me. As I looked down at her I noticed a familiar shape on the floor just beyond the threshold from me, practically between Angel’s front paws: a large spider. If memory serves me, its size, including leg span, would have covered most of my palm…had I the balls to let it be there! Say, roughly, 2-1/2 to three inches in diameter – not monstrously huge, but larger than your average live-in-a-hole-catching-flies-in-a-web spider. It definitely was not a "Daddy Long-Legs."

I’m not particularly afraid of or creeped out by spiders – though a story about that is coming later – so I simply shifted my focus from Angel to the spider and marveled mildly at it. Though an intelligent dog, Angel never had the smarts to look in the direction I was pointing, but instead looked at the hand I was pointing with, as that’s usually what held the object of her interest. Imagine my surprise, then, when she looked to where I was looking. She bent her head down and found the spider idling there between her paws.

And Angel S P A Z Z E D !! She frantically lifted one paw, then the other, in an effort to keep her feet away from the spider, resulting in a hilarious little dance that lasted about one second, and then she literally leapt backwards! The spider, on the other hand, never moved.

I burst out laughing at my hapless dog! She was actually FREAKED OUT by the spider just being there. Her little freaked doggie dance was every bit as pathetically hilarious as my snake-induced quivering full-body shudder(s). But I wasn’t laughing at her as much as I was at the realization that she, a dog, displayed an aversion to spiders! Of course, the freaked doggie dance was all hers; pure Angel!

I don’t know if a dog can understand laughter, what it means is going on inside the head and body of a human. They can understand anger, particularly if it’s directed at them, but laughter, I don’t know. She did seem a little embarrassed for a few minutes afterward. Certainly I accept any skepticism at my use of that word, as it ascribes a human emotion to a lowly beast. But she did walk around sheepishly for a little while after the incident.

**sigh** I sure miss that goofy girl.