By John Randolph
When I was a kid, I was terrified of spiders.
My darkest moment came while on fifth grade summer vacation at my friend Jack’s cottage. We had lugged his raft — a sturdy, homemade bundle of wood and foam and cordage — from winter storage to the beach and launched it into the lake where it bobbed and drifted in the still water. I reached it first and lied flat on my stomach to balance it as Jack clambered up after me. As our combined weight caused the raft’s underbelly to dip below the waterline, legions of dock spiders emerged from their subsurface lairs through the raft’s crannies to swarm the deck.
I shrieked and flailed into the lake and didn’t stop swimming until I reached the shore. I never went on that raft ever again.
Thus passed my youth. There aren’t a lot of spiders where I grew up, but those that I did encounter left an imprint of anxiety in my mind, meaning that over the years I formed a heat map of spider likelihood in the world as I traversed it. Places where my eight-legged nemeses were more likely to lurk (winter hobo-spiders in basement storage, late-summer orb weavers in the garden), my hackles raised. In the worst of cases, my fears hardened into ironclad rules: Don’t go on Jack’s raft; don’t go into grandma’s cellar; don’t ever, ever go to Australia.
Eventually I grew out of it. One high-school September I stumbled face-first into an orb weaver’s web, freezing an inch from where it was busy mummifying its prey. I was transfixed. My alarm was overridden by pure scientific curiosity. As I walked away, I rethought my relationship with spiders and found my fear to be childish. My next emotion was anger. I was frustrated at myself that I had let my misguided phobia alter my behavior for so many years, for no stronger reason than a vague unease maladapted from an inborn survival instinct. There is, at a base level, some reason to fear spiders — they can be venomous, though encountering one is rare — but why was I letting them rule my life?
That anger at irrational fear-based restrictions is the exact same anger I feel today when I go through TSA.