‘There’s a spider in the tent, right above me’
An arachnophobe goes camping. What could possibly go wrong?
By Frank Robson
The image remains for a moment after I lie down and turn off the torch: something large and dark on the tent ceiling directly above my head. I turn the torch back on.
Credit: Illustration by Simon Letch
No f---ing way! Spiders don’t grow this big! It’s so big I can see the spiky hairs on its head and legs twitching; I can count its multiple black eyes – eight! – and see its long furry jaws writhing like a pair of tumescent testicles.
It’s a massive, biting huntsman an arm’s length away on the inside of the poky little dome tent, and I know – as a veteran arachnophobe – that one wrong move will bring it down on top of me. I can hear surf breaking and smell the embers of my campfire on a soft onshore breeze. But I can’t move.
I’d talked about my solo camping trip to this isolated Queensland island for months. Just a few days with minimal equipment, high on a wooded dune beside the sea. I’d fish the surf, dig pipis, hike bush trails and revive memories of long-ago family adventures on the same island, when I was a young man with hair and hope and supple knees.
It was the knee thing that made me slow to set an actual date for this year’s trip. (Mine are generally OK for an old dude, but the last time I did rough camping – a few years earlier – they complained so much when I tried to rise from the ground that I took to crawling everywhere.)
In the end, I’d told so many people I was going camping that I had to go.
On a perfect winter’s day, I roll off the vehicle barge and point the 4WD towards a little settlement where, decades ago, fishermen were known to trade blows over rights to the last stale pie at the store. Today, thanks to the influence of tourism, the much-expanded store offers freshly baked frittata “pies”, two of which I share with an ancient labrador before following a rough sand road to the island’s surfside.
It takes a while to find the perfect campsite, poking in and out of narrow tracks until all the requirements line up: elevated with breezes, level tent site, view of sea, no one else around. It’s almost sundown by the time the camp is set up. I light my little campfire, devour a pre-cooked curry and settle into a folding chair within arm’s reach of the wine-bearing Esky.
Heart thudding, I inch sideways off the mattress, keeping the spider in the light.
Almost immediately, biting ants rain down on to my bald spot from overhanging branches. I don my new brown bush hat, adjusting the angle so that incoming ants bounce harmlessly (at least for me) to the ground. Just to be sure, I apply repellent and put the dispenser in a bag at my feet, together with the useless phone (no coverage), books, reading glasses, torch, car keys and other mustn’t-lose stuff.
Sweet. Crackling fire, chilled wine, sighing waves, distant curlew calls, blazing stars and a comfy bed waiting in the tent.
Every so often, I rise to make sure the tent’s various flaps and zips are still properly secured. (My terror of large spiders hasn’t diminished since one ran up my boardshorts soon after I arrived in Oz as a teenage Kiwi. It may also explain why their jaws make me think of balls.)
Only later do I realise that at some stage during my fireside reminiscing, a huntsman at least twice the size of Donald Trump’s brain must have lumbered into the open essentials bag at my feet. When I turn in, clutching this little Trojan horse, the cunning Heteropoda venatoria turns in with me.
Around 3am I crawl outside for a leak, zipping the tent behind me, then crawl back in again. Then I see it.
Before finally daring to move, I fix the spider in the torch beam and plan for battle. Striking up wildly with a shoe won’t work because the flimsy tent will yield and the huntsman, horribly fast and born to parkour, will either spring onto my face or rush into the bed-clothes, never to be found. Yeah, spider lovers, I know that despite their painful bite, huntsman venom isn’t lethal and we should leave them alone. And if it was outside, I would. But don’t try to tell me the ugly mofo grinding its mandibles above my face is more frightened than me. Because that is just not f---ing possible!
So … heart thudding, I inch sideways off the mattress, keeping the spider in the light. Near the tent entrance, still inching, I grab my sneakers before rolling commando-style through the door and leaping to my feet. (OK, make that struggling painfully upright with the aid of a low branch.)
With the torch positioned near the entrance, I hold one sneaker outside the tent above the spider’s position, then lean inside with the other sneaker, and – when everything aligns – whack the shoes together, exploding the spider into a mass of custard and body parts that dribbles, still twitching, onto my pillow.
On my last day at Camp Karma, my knees get so bad I become the thing I murdered. I crawl about for a couple of hours packing up and loading the vehicle, then scuttle over to the spot where I threw my squashed bro and peer into the undergrowth. Incredibly, two days after the event, ants are still busy chopping the big protein bomb into portable bits and bearing them off to their larder.
Encouraged by this, and with a frittata stop in mind, I rise in triumphant stages to full height (cue the opening track from 2001: A Space Odyssey) and evolve a new plan for my upright future: I will never go camping again.
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