Wendy vs. The Brown Recluse Spider

I haven’t written much about our time in Kansas, and it isn’t due to the fact that many of you become bored simply by reading the word Kansas. It isn’t that I haven’t written about Kansas, but rather, I haven’t shared anything about it…yet.

However, a Facebook post the other day pulled a memory up in my mind that developed into something that kind of stands on its own and can be shared by itself. It’s all part of the magnificent experience we had in the Midwest. Bad or good, it was all magical, but when it comes to venomous spiders, most of us would agree that we could do without the little buggers.

In the Pacific Northwest, you are much more likely to hear tales of venomous snakes than of deadly spiders. Sure, we have the Hobo Spider that has been known to mess up a person’s life for a while, but it is rare. Hobo Spiders are usually only found around train yards and can be identified by the itty-bitty sticks they carry with tiny cans of beans wrapped up on one end in webbing that looks curiously like a handkerchief. They just aren’t encountered much.

The first time I heard about Brown Recluse Spiders was from one of the landlords I spoke to over the phone when we were looking to rent a place in Kansas. I didn’t know much about Kansas and what to look for in housing. I wanted a basement; lest my family be carried somewhere over the rainbow by, not a tornado, but a twistah, IT’S A TWISTAH!

The conversation went a little like this:

Me: Hello, I’m interested in the two-bedroom house you are renting. Does it have a basement?

Landlord: No, is that important?

Me: Well yes, we are worried about tornados.

Landlord: I would be more worried about Recluses.

Me: Why, do you get a lot of shut-ins hijacking basements out there?

Landlord: Uh, no. I meant the Brown Recluse spider. They love basements.

Me: Well thanks anyway. We are looking for a place with a basement.

What a moron. He probably only lived in Kansas for sixty years. I’ve seen The Wizard of Oz a hundred times. A tornado ruins Dorothy’s house—again, in Kansas—ever single time I watch that movie. I need a basement or storm cellar and maybe a rowboat in case I’m caught in the twister and need a way out. What could that guy possibly know?

It turns out that guy was right.

I did do a quick search on the interwebs on that particular spider and confirmed that they did indeed live in Kansas. “Live” might not be the correct word, nor would “reside.” I think “thrive” would be the better descriptive verb when it comes the relationship between the Brown Recluse and Kansas.

I reminded myself though, on my hunt for a home in Kansas, that Rattlesnakes live in Washington, and this spider thing was just like that: rare and scarce. I was incorrect.

I sought the wisdom of several friends. My friend Todd had spent some time in Recluse country while in the Army, and he said they were indeed nasty, but kept to themselves mostly. They just liked warm dark places and you needed to be careful about knocking out your shoes and shaking out clothes that hadn’t been worn in a while.

Todd said one of his fellow soldiers was bit when he shook his jacket off and flung the spider up onto his body. The soldier ended up in the infirmary for a while, but Todd again reminded me that it was rare and the spiders didn’t like being around people. “That’s why they are called Recluses,” he said.

I felt like I was beginning to blow this spider thing out of proportion. I downplayed the situation to Wendy and rationalized that if the arachnids were that big of a deal, nobody would live in the areas where the spiders were and that simply wasn’t the case.

Wendy did what Wendy always did. She learned everything to know about the species. She practiced picking out Recluses from pictures of other spiders. She learned about habitats and ways to combat them. Then after several nights of cramming information into her head concerning the biggest threat to her family since donuts, she stopped thinking about it altogether for the two months preceding our move to Kansas.

When we met the landlord at our Kansas rental, she downplayed the spider situation immediately. She said it almost as an aside, tacked on to the end of an unrelated sentence and spoken at a much quicker speed than the first half. “We just finished painting up some trim through the house, and Brown Recluses are everywhere but if you leave them alone they will leave you alone…” The sentence also took the defensive ending upward inflection that gave the social cue that the speaker isn’t finished speaking—so please don’t ask for clarification.

My wife is not influenced by those types of social cues. She had waited for an opening to talk about the spiders and this was what Wendy wanted. “Yes, the Brown Recluse Spider,” Wendy began, as if making an opening statement in front of a jury, “Would you be responsible for extermination in this house.” What Wendy meant was that the house should be tented in plastic and a team of six dozen special forces operators should come in and hunt every spider down and chased to the four corners of our lawn.

The house was charming and humble, but had plenty of warm and dark places for the spiders to live. This included the entire garage as well as the whole lawn. The basement also proved to be an excellent habitat as well as the ventilation system that went to the entire house along with the main level of the house. The closets and crawl spaces, closets and bathrooms, cupboards and cabinets and the tool shed… Okay, if you were on the property, and your eyes were open, you were looking at a place where a Brown Recluse was currently standing or had been at one time or another.

The good news was that the landlord agreed to hire exterminators “one time” to take care of any concerns up front, but made me cringe when she told us that they were only responsible for the one instance because she “didn’t know how we lived.” This statement put Wendy on guard as it assumed she was a filthy pig-person that would immediately begin furnishing our new rental in the style of urban squalor, bringing in artisan rats and cockroaches from exotic global locales.

“We are actually pretty clean,” I immediately stated to head off my wife from saying something snippy to our new landlord.

Both Wendy and the landlord looked at me with an almost identical, cartoon-level of sarcastic doubt causing me to amend my statement.

“I should say: Wendy is very clean, I actually won’t be here very much.” They both gave a slight nod accepting this as a more complete, honest statement, that satisfied the landlords fears and redeemed my wife’s integrity as a renter.

The bad news about the extermination process is that unlike 90% of the critters that you would call to have exterminated, the Brown Recluse Spider is hard to kill. You can’t gas them like every other bug, and they are particularly stubborn about making themselves available to the bottom of your shoe.

The trouble is how we kill bugs. When we poison bugs with gas, we tend to believe that the insects or arachnids breathe in the mist and die a la mustard gas in World War I. What usually happens instead is the gas sticks to the outside of the insect. Then the insect decides to clean itself by picking off the poison and ingesting it into their bodies. Then they die. They die of proper hygiene.

The Brown Recluse isn’t concerned with personal appearance. So the poison might stick to them, but they don’t ingest it, and eventually the poison becomes inert. Underneath all that brown gunk on themselves, they are probably white, and they are reclusive because they stink and are unattractive to other spiders. It’s sad.

So instead, the exterminators use a very fine powder that is supposedly sharp and toxic. When the spider walks through it, it cuts them and the poison gets into their system that way to kill them. That seemed like a load of crap to me. When you’re as small as a spider, the “fine powder” to us probably looks like a bunch of big broken glass to them. I would imagine even the tiniest arachnid instinct would tell the dumbest spider that, “sharp bad, no walk on sharp.”

It would be like trying to kill a human by putting frozen, poisoned Brussels sprouts in a freezer and waiting for the person to get around to eating them.

The other ways to kill them is to trap them with little glue boxes or freeze them with a type of liquid Nitrogen. Although I did try to go the cheap route, by pricing lots of Carbon-Dioxide fire extinguishers, we opted for lots of glue traps.

As we settled in for the initial cleaning of the house, let me tell you, those little bastards were everywhere. We use to be a no-shoes-in-the-house family, but that ended quick. Sorry, I meant it ended immediately. Not only do you protect your feet from stepping on the spiders, but by keeping your feet in your shoes, you are preventing spiders from crawling into the warm, inviting darkness that only a shoe has.

I can’t remember clearly during that first scrub down if hazmat suits came up in conversation but I have a vague memory of wondering if it was almost serious or a joke. What I can tell you is that I was sent to the hardware store to by glue traps and I bought out the store’s supply, which was seven boxes of eight traps each. My wife took one look in the bag and said, “why didn’t you get more?”

To which I answered, “because that’s all they had and we don’t have a pickup truck.”

It was a new normal for us. Every errand had a tacked-on standing order of spider traps. Every shopping list included the item which never seemed to fit with the others.

Kale
Toothpaste
Milk
Tomatoes
Soup
Spider traps
Smoked salmon
Bananas

Construction paper
Mylar balloons
Ribbons: red and blue
Gossamer
Scented candles: NOT SANDALWOOD
Spider traps
Glitter

Pizza
Soda
Spider traps
Paper plates

Spider traps
Decorative spider traps?

The cable installer that came to hook us up on the first day added the cherry-on-top perspective for our initial move-in Recluse freak-out. As he was finishing up, I wanted to get a real Kansas resident’s take on the subject, hoping he would provide some ballast to the listing ship toward spider hysteria.

“So this Brown Recluse spider thing I’ve been hearing so much about,” lobbing a juicy, reassuring softball over the plate for him to hit back to me, “is it really that big of a problem?”

“Brother,” he began—I’m not his brother, though we were pretty chummy—tipping his hat back and squaring me up eye to eye, “those little bastards are everywhere.” He wasn’t finished, “Everywhere!” He used his hands and fingers to indicate that we were virtually surrounded by them.

Then, he did something that he absolutely did not need to do, he gave me proof.

“Couple years back, I was installing at a house and reached into the box outside. A Brown falls on my hand and I feel the bite,” he says as he takes off his glove.

“It bit through the glove?”

“Nah, it fell, then crawled under,” he pointed to a scar patch the size of a nickel about an inch-and-a-half behind the webbing of his thumb and fingers.

“Looks like it hurt,” I began, feeling some relief that the patch wasn’t terribly big, or worse, a prosthetic hand I didn’t spot, “but it’s not as bad as they make it out on the internet.”

“That’s probably because I quick-pulled my Buck knife out of my pocket and cut the bite out.” The scar wasn’t from the bite, but the quick thinking of cutting around the infected area immediately. “The doctor told me that I probably saved my hand.”

That’s right. This man was bitten by a spider so dangerous and scary that he quite swiftly and reasonably made the rational decision to perform over $3000 worth of emergency surgery on his own hand with a tool that could have been purchased at any general store in the last 150 years. It had to be done then and there with not so much as an ice cube to numb the cutting area. He would rather risk infection, Tetanus or nicking a vein and bleeding out, than find out what the venom would do to him.

And if painting a picture of savage desperation wasn’t enough of a punch to the gut, the next thing the cable installer said was one of the most terrifying things he could have said to me.

“The Browns are bad, but the snakes are worse. I have more trouble with snakes in my house than Browns.” He said in his house. Snakes in his house. I had urinated just before the conversation or I would have wet my pants right there. He saw my face go pale. “Yeah brother, I live out in the country though so that’s why snakes are all over my house. They don’t come into town much, I don’t think. Anyway, the other day, I go to do my laundry and there’s this huge Brown snake sitting on top of my dryer.”

I’m so petrified by snakes, that I’m pretty sure I blacked that snake part out until we moved back to Washington—I really believe I did. Because I didn’t mention the snake thing to Wendy, but I may have told her about the grown man cutting part of his hand off because of the millions of spiders that live in our house.

We got very similar stories about the spiders with the common theme being, “they are everywhere.” One particularly bad one after my wife inquired about Brown Recluses at the local Bed, Bath and Beyond; the “Beyond” piece in this instance pertaining to venomous spider solutions. The clerk was very enthusiastic and most unhelpful with the information.

The young, Kansas University student explained to my wife that living in Kansas is a never-ending battle of wits and danger with the Brown Recluse. She went into incredible detail about all the incredibly unnecessary steps she takes to protect herself from nightly spider attacks in her apartment. She kept everything in sealed containers, did regular “security sweeps” and left lights on. But on top of that, she said we absolutely MUST wrap the bottoms of out bed posts with duct tape.

Immediately, I imagined wrapping the bottom of all of our beds in the house with the silvery tape, just in time to watch a couple scurry over it like it ain’t no thang. I wondered if it was some kind of folk remedy, akin to garlic for vampires or witches and iron. I had a hard time thinking the spider would get to the duct tape and just be stumped by the strange texture of the smooth and dull shimmer of the handyman’s fix-all.

Then I realized the clerk meant wrapping them with the sticky side out.

For several days we looked at every spider we came upon, which was more than a few, to determine whether it had the tell-tale fiddle mark—or viola marks for the spiders in more upscale neighborhoods—on its back. They did. They all did. Everyone was right. The spiders were everywhere.

They weren’t just inside, but outside as well. They especially liked to hide in the maple leaves that we raked and collected by hand 16 weeks a year. Seriously. Wendy seemed less paranoid picking up the leaves and yard refuse than she did walking through our clean house. I’m 100% positive that she handled at least a dozen Browns while cleaning up the yard, but for some reason, Wendy considered outside to be “base” in their little game.

My home office was in the basement and I was more than a little paranoid before sitting down and getting to work. My chair was a dark, furry-fabric folding job, and although comfortable, it was difficult to detect poisonous spiders on. Before sitting down in it, I would circle the chair three times—like a dog—before sitting down. It wasn’t an obsessive-compulsive thing or a ritual. It was necessary for my peace of mind all day. More than once, I expelled one from the chair, causing me to add an extra trip around the chair for the next week.

Wendy knew the spiders were attracted to clutter and places where they can spin their ugly little webs. (They really are terribly constructed webs. Most spiderwebs people think about are spiral and constructed like they were done with a protractor and slide-rule. The Brown Recluse’s web is spun like a ridiculously tiny cloud, frozen in time and unable to expand out into the atmosphere. They look very much like a used, damp fabric-softener sheet; or like a pre-schooler’s attempt to make a beard from a cotton ball! Nailed it!) Wendy was concerned for our safety, and insisted we did things like organize our shoes, keep laundry off the floor and clean up after we ate or did activities. It was almost like a no-fun, adult myth used to keep us in order like a little kid with Santa Claus. If you don’t pick up your clothes, the Brown Recluse will get you.

One level-headed solution we found on the internet, was the use of scented oils to drive the spiders away. One Harvard study—that doesn’t exist and never took place—proved without a doubt that the Brown Recluse spider is repelled by peppermint oil. So we purchased some extremely expensive peppermint oil and some extremely cheap cotton balls and commenced with operation: Candycane. Little cotton balls of peppermint went under every bed, dresser and table, into every cupboard, closet and room to ward off the little eight legged jerks.

God bless the placebo effect—and the house smelled like Christmas for most of the year.

I tried it with a few other “solutions” too. One time Wendy came home and wondered why I was blasting the song “Hot Stuff” by Donna Summer.

“I can hear this in the street. Why are you playing disco so loud?” She asked, I think more puzzled than annoyed.

“I read that spiders hate the frequencies associated with particular disco songs and this song is one of them,” I relied back as if I were surprised that she hadn’t come across this information herself.

“Really?” She asked as if now she was contemplating the pros and cons between venomous spiders and the irreversible damage long-term exposure to disco can cause.

“No, not really,” I said casually, “I just like this song.”

Eventually, I had to leave Kansasand return back to Washington to work for a of couple weeks before I could return during the Ping-pong year I spent between the two states, but Wendy was there for the duration. That meant I would get the occasional angry call from my wife. Almost every two week break would have us on the phone at least once, speaking frankly about why it wasn’t anyone’s fault (it was mine) that there was a spider sighting in the house.

One evening I was at my home in Washington, when I received the call no husband and father wants to get from their family that live 2,000 miles away. I immediately knew something was wrong in Kansas.

“Steve?!?” She began, highly agitated, “Listen, we just got back home and there’s…” She screamed and the line went cold.

– There are only a few possible explanations as to why that would happen:

– Home invaders are there to steal the only things with street value in the house, which were Wendy and Zach’s kidneys.

– Home invaders are just there to hurt my family because bad people exist in the world.

– Home invaders are there to finish off their alphabet serial killings by taking a W and a Z.

The possibilities are all pretty much home invasion scenarios.

“Wendy?!?” I asked, now on high alert. “Are you okay?” I asked loudly, sure that she had just taken a pistol grip to the side of her head. Seconds passed and I could hear commotion in the background. I could hear Wendy’s voice but the Kansas house had a nasty echo that muddied up any attempt to understand individual words on speakerphone. But I could fully understand the shrieking short screams that rang out every few seconds.

It was absolutely clear to me that whoever had my wife was dragging her by her beautiful hair from room to room in the Kansas house, occasionally popping her in the head with some pawn shop snub-nosed revolver to make her scream. She picked up the phone again.

“STEVEN!” She yelled. “You didn’t answer me!” She said, highly agitated.

“Wendy! Are you okay?”

“No! No I am not okay!” Another scream pierced the phone.

“Is there someone I should call? The police?”

“No! Don’t call anybody,” She said angrily. “There are spiders everywhere in here.”

Too relieved, I chuckled, “oh, okay. Where are they now.”

“We just walked in from the store and there’s a brown recluse in the breezeway, the living room and the living room,” then she screamed and quickly continued, “there are a couple in Zach’s room and one in our room. This has to change Steven.” Whenever Wendy uses Steven, instead of Steve, I’m usually able to pick up that I shouldn’t fool around and make light of the situation. However, I was just so darn happy that our home wasn’t being invaded.

“Well, let me find my spider stomping boots and I will see you in 30 hours,” immediately regretting my words.

“It’s not funny,” Wendy insisted just before another blood-curdling scream, “there’s another one in this trap!”

“Wendy, are you going from spider trap to spider trap, looking for spiders, then screaming like you’re being murdered after you see a spider in a spider trap? Because that is indeed funny.”

“This doesn’t happen when you’re gone Steven.”

“I would like to take this opportunity to point out that I am, in fact, not there. Also, you called me screaming and weren’t very clear about what you were screaming about. There is a percentage of the population that would have hung up immediately and called the Lawrence police department. They would have shown up to kill the intruders, which in this case turns out to be dead spiders trapped in glue.”

“You were here yesterday and all your clutter attracted the spiders,” she said, luckily I don’t think she listened past: “you called me screaming.”

Sometimes a person isn’t really as mad at spiders as they are at messy husbands.

We were in Kansas for 18 short months, and we really did love it. The spider thing just became a regular ritual that we got use to. The neatness and the knocking out shoes is something that I catch myself doing from time to time, and it makes me smile about our time there. Though some part of me worries that in an unpacked box in our garage, lives a nest of one of America’s most venomous spiders, and that’s the Damm truth.