Down Island Deal Breaker
I fear spiders with every fiber of my being. I know that without spiders, insects would take over the world, but that provides little comfort. Upon entering a room, I immediately search the corners for webs. In Colorado we have wolf spiders, gray and harmless, but freaking huge. In the spring when the wolf spiders can eat crickets unhindered for days, sometimes weeks, they get as large as my hand. My cats bat at them like badminton shuttlecocks while I run the other way. Now I think mice are cute and snakes are smooth to the touch. We have both in our backyard and they don’t bother me a bit, but spiders? No thank you.
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On the Virgin Island of St. John, my husband and I were leaving our Westin villa to find some dinner in Cruz Bay. We had rented a scooter for the week and it was parked out the front door. We opened up the storage space under the seat to retrieve our helmets and put in my bag. As I was putting on my helmet, my husband hopped on the scooter to turn it around when suddenly he yelled, “Holy *!@&!” and pointed to the ground. When I saw what he was looking at I sucked in a huge amount of moist tropical air and for about ten seconds forgot to breathe it back out. In front of me stood a gigantic tarantula; a nature channel documentary come to life. It was parked on the brick driveway of our villa…just a few feet from our front door…black as asphalt. I took a step to my left to put the scooter between us.
My husband put the kickstand on the scooter back down and went to take a closer look. I politely asked if we could “get the hell outta here,” but the 8-year-old in him had surfaced and he wanted to check this thing out. Neither of us had seen a tarantula ‘in the wild’ before. He got within five feet when the tarantula turned to face him. More expletives from both of us followed.
“I can see its eyes!” my husband exclaimed, half excited, half nervous. My husband moved a few steps to his left. The spider rotated accordingly. Then he moved a few steps to his right; the spider rotated again.
“He has me in his sights! It’s like radar! Doo-do-do-doot-doo-do-do-doot!”
We debated whether to take a photo since no one we knew would believe it. Then I imaged myself going through the pictures after we got home and in the middle all those pleasant memories this…thing would pop out. I couldn’t handle that.
“Can’t we just go?” I asked. “It’s creeping me out.”
My husband hopped back on the scooter and started it up. Then I got on the back and none too soon because it made me nervous to stand on the same ground as that beast.
“Maybe it will get into our villa while we’re gone,” my husband said. I smacked him on the shoulder. Then I asked him if he was certain he locked the front door, as if the tarantula could open it. He thought that was funny, but I was irrationally serious.
The only way to leave the villa driveway was to go past the tarantula so my husband made a wide turn and nearly bumped up against the curb as we went around. This turn put me at my closest point with the creature. It was the size of two bricks, side by side. It was black and silky, like fine velvet. I imagined it would be soft to touch, before it sunk its fangs into me. It had a typical spider body with a head and thorax. On the head were two tiny blackberry orbs. It didn’t move as we left, but I was convinced it watched us intently.
Safely tucked away at a corner table in Woody’s Seafood Saloon with a beer in my hand, I asked my husband if he thought the tarantula would still be there when we got back.
“I hope not!” he laughed. “So…do you still want to move to St. John?”
“I don’t know. I have to think about it now.”
“So it’s a deal-breaker for ya.”
“It might be.”
“Something like that could eat our dog.”
“Maybe you can spray for those things,” I wondered.
“Yeah, I doubt that,” he replied.
When we returned after few hours, the tarantula was not in the driveway. That actually bothered me more because we didn’t know where it was. Did it crawl up and over the hill? Or was it behind the bush next to the front door waiting to pounce? Just then, one of the Westin cats came meowing from under a nearby car and brushed up against our legs.
“Maybe this little guy ate it,” my husband said as he gave the black cat some ear scratches. “Lookit the size of his belly!” If he was trying to make me feel better, it wasn’t working.
Talk about paradise spoiled.
* * *
As stated above, I was too scared to take any photos of the tarantula, however, I did include some nice scenic photos of St. John. Looks likes paradise, right? Well vacationers, St. John is loaded with all kinds of creepy crawlies, some that can even kill you. For example, the Manchioneel Tree is so deadly the native Caribs used them to poison the tips of their arrows. Its sap burns the skin and the fruit is poisonous if eaten. The site of a giant black millipede would freak anyone out and even though its toxins are not deadly to humans, it would still be unpleasant to get bit by one. Getting back to spiders, the golden orb spider likes to spin its web, often the size of a human torso, between two trees. Although not deadly, many a hiker has walked into these almost invisible webs on St. John trails or had the spiders drop down on their heads from above. Ew! Had enough? I haven’t even begun to list the creatures below the water, such as the sea urchin, which won’t kill you, but I was told by someone who stepped on one that the pain is so bad, you wish it would.
If all this has creeped you out, then my plan to keep the island to myself is working…
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