I’m an anti-social web designer working from home in the Coromandel.
I had spun my web about 160 metres up, well away from the pigs, possums and goats down below. No one could make it up here. I’d seen a lizard or two at the top, but they hadn’t even noticed my web, strung between the spiny alpine shrubs. It had been an idyllic place to have my 50 babies. They’d just left the nest that morning.
That afternoon, I was checking my web when a large, fetid-smelling beast smashed through the spiny shrubs at the top of the cliff. Without warning, it tore straight through my web. It seemed to be attached to some kind of giant blue cord.
This was a spider I had never seen before – only four legs and two eyes. Seriously? Four clumsy limbs and a mere two eyes – how did it even survive up here?
It was crashing through the alpine shrubs, moving down onto the rock below.
Something red sat on its head, and shiny things hung from a strap around its middle. With horror, I realised one of my legs had gotten hooked onto its top leg, near its head.
Now I was stuck to it, travelling down to a rocky ledge below.
At the ledge, it inserted something into the rock. Then it looked upward and made a loud noise, as if to communicate with another beast. Just then, its two eyes swivelled toward me, and it let out a terrifying, high-pitched sound.
In desperation, I bit it. I just didn’t know what else to do.
The creature began breathing faster. It picked up one of the shiny things hanging from the middle strap and suddenly swiped at me with it. I fell onto the ledge below and scampered quickly out of sight. It took me a long time to catch my breath.
My idyllic home was no longer safe. I would be hard-pressed to find another spot so far out of reach to build a web.
Recently, a giant sheet-web spider bit me out of terror. The poor thing was clearly frightened by my embarrassingly banshee-like screams when I spotted it on my bicep. I’d just rock-climbed 160 metres up a cliff – and I was having a meltdown over a spider.
No one had done this rock climbing route before. It was an achievement to be proud of, but I got completely derailed by this tiny beast. To be fair, it looked like a spider that had escaped from a science experiment gone wrong – and it was very close to my face. In my defence, I was also extremely tired.
We were in the Coromandel, near Hikuai. The walk just getting to the base of the climb was hard. It was a rugged two-hour walk through dense bush, with a brutally steep final uphill. Now we had finished the climb and were beginning the long abseil descent.
I felt terrible for screaming. My climbing partner still had a touch of the PTSD I’d inflicted on him the previous year. I’d selfishly fallen unconscious – after being struck by a falling rock – when we were 300 metres up a rock face in the Southern Alps. That incident had forced him to activate my emergency locator beacon and figure out how to get me to safer ground for evacuation.
In the Coromandel, when I screamed, we couldn’t even see each other. It really wasn’t fair on him to react like that over a spider.
I quickly started yelling up to him, over and over: “I’m safe! I’m okay!” – giving him the reassurance he needed to come down and the chance to roll his eyes in disbelief.
The spider was gone. I’d knocked it off with a piece of climbing equipment. All that remained was the sound of strange breathing and the shaky presence of someone feeling quietly ashamed.
In the following week I had an allergic reaction to the spider bite, which I took to the medical centre to learn that antihistamines would quickly deal with it. Three weeks later I learned it was a giant sheet web spider that had bitten me, out of defence. It was not a small spider. I have always felt a slight fear of spiders, but now understood that my fear of heights had strong competition.
Author: Climbing regularly for 33 years. Still fearful. Still hooked.
Words by Rachael Mayne
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