Nightmare

When we were kids, my neighbourhood friends and I cut a maze of trails and treeforts through the woods and undergrowth on the bluff overlooking Lake Erie. We had our own wilderness. Fantasy adventures took shape there. Whenever the neighbours' Uncle Louis came to visit, he chased us around The Jungle and performed grass torture if he caught us. Nobody considered me an athletic boy, but in that beloved place I was nimble and elusive.

These big black and yellow spiders liked to spin webs across the trails. I never actually ran into one, because each was marked with a glaring white zigzag pattern, which the spider would shake vigorously when it sensed a large creature approaching. So they managed to scare the crap out of me two or three times a summer.

Hurrying home today for my shift at the library, I parked beside a marsh along the way for a quick walk.

The canvas of any new landscape seems unremarkable at first glance. These walks always begin in doubt: "There will be nothing interesting to photograph today." I try to compose something from the textures of foliage and shapes of trees. On a day like today, I have only 15 minutes to spare.

I waded into the goldenrod. Then suddenly, right in front of my face, appeared this nightmare demon, shaking its web at me, scaring me to the depths of memory.

We called them banana spiders, but that is actually the common name of something else. I never found anything about them in books. But Wikipedia offers more than I ever hoped to know about Argiope aurantia. This Internet age is a wonderful time to live for natural history geeks.