Arachnophobia Past and Present

Logan is crouching over the shower drain with a homemade spear, waiting for me to pour the gasoline. As I tip the can and watch the source of many of the world’s problems sluice down the drain, I have the irrational thought that a Sewer Cam would be nice so I could monitor the situation in the septic tank.

As a single dad I know I don’t always set the right tone for how to live, but I mean well and though I’d like to think today’s lesson is something like “Meet your fears head on and if possible, be armed,” I think in reality it has more to do with my past than it does his future.

For the second time this week, Logan has come to whichever room I’m in and calmly announced “Dad, there’s a scorpion in the tub.” Both times
 it has awakened not so dormant anxieties in me, because for most of my life I’ve had a full blown terror of scorpions. I think it should be labelled “Arachnaphobia” except for the fact that spiders don’t bother me and I go out of my way not to hurt them. One night last week I was out in the pasture and every where I flashed my Maglite I saw little points of light glittering in the darkness. I’ve seen this plenty of times and always thought it was from mice or some other small rodent, but this night I investigated and was surprised to find it was the eyes of hundreds of spiders shining back like so many tiny stars. But back to my point. I thought it was amazing and kind of cool that there were that many spiders out there and so I went back to what I was doing out there in the first place, which is a different story entirely. Had my inquiry revealed the same—or even a lesser—number of scorpions, I’m not sure what I’d have done. Set the pasture alight maybe. When I lived in Abilene I incinerated at least two cords of mesquite wood in my front yard because I ran my chainsaw through a nest of scorpions; everywhere I looked I saw one. So I did the only sensible thing; I set my entire front yard on fire. Problem solved.

I know I’m making too big a deal of all this, but you have to understand. This latest situation is particularly unsettling due to the fact that the scorpions are coming up the drain. Again. By that I mean not only this week, but in this lifetime.

My first brush with scorpions came when I was about seven or so and happened in Thorp Spring, Texas. My family had all converged at the site of the old Thorp Spring Christian College, a small school that winked out of existence in 1928. My mother’s parents, Richard Wilkerson and Vera Ewing had met there in the twenties, fallen in love and then created us. I have an old photograph of them when they were in college, sitting outdoors on a small boulder next to a creek. They must have had to walk some distance and what I’ve always found striking about it is that the young man who became my grandfather was wearing a suit and tie; the beautiful, slender girl with him was dressed like a Flapper. When I was a child, Thorp Spring Christian College had been closed for going on 50 years, but the property was still used for Church of Christ summer camps, Ewing/Wilkerson family reunions and I don’t know what else.

The campus was small and the two main buildings, Rutherford Hall and the Clark House faced each other across the parade ground. Rutherford Hall was an enormous, Victorian style house and was where everyone slept. And it was in one of the giant claw foot tubs where I was luxuriating in a bubble bath after a long day of swimming, fishing, feasting and otherwise basking in the love and company of my kith and kin that the scorpion struck.

I guess I screamed, because my mother burst into the room and when I told her what happened—though of course didn’t really know—she ordered me out of the tub. She then took a rag and began to draw it slowly back forth under water, the length of the tub while I peered over her shoulder. After a couple of passes the scorpion momentarily floated into view, upside down and disappeared again.

And then my mother went berserk. I had never seen anyone, let alone my mother behave like that. She was flailing the water and howling threats which she very quickly made good on. In short order the scorpion was dispatched via blunt force trauma and I had a whole new perspective on a mother’s love.

One of the benefits of a liberal education is that it gives one a framework with which to classify the world in general and the actions of individuals in particular. That doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ll have any insight that is useful or even accurate, but it can be oddly comforting to see patterns in events, even when you suspect those patterns exist only in your head. Years after this, when I was taking Western Civilization at ACU, we studied the Spartan stand at Thermopylae and it was also in that class that I read about Xerxes ordering his men to whip the Hellespont for its impudence. I probably should have been thinking about hubris and maybe I was, but in my revisionist, alternate reality I was also thinking about my mom beating a scorpion to death through eight inches of water and Mr. Bubble.

As for the sting itself, it’s plain that I’ll never forget it. It was as if I’d been stabbed in the tip of my big toe by a very large, dull needle, which is to say it wasn’t excruciating so much as just intensely unpleasant and terrifying. Regardless, it made an indelible impression on my psyche, so much so that I occasionally dream I’m in some compromised situation where I’m attacked by hordes of scorpions. Three nights ago I dreamt I was scaling a rock face, just barely clinging to it by the tips of my fingers. As I clawed my way up, I began to feel a tingling in my legs that crept to my lower back, then higher. I finally hazarded a glance over my shoulder to see that I was covered in tiny blue grey scorpions, hundreds upon hundreds; I couldn’t stop and I couldn’t let go.

So now it’s come to this; standing in the tub with a can of gas. My son and I watch the drain for activity and I’m wondering what would happen if I dropped a lit match or maybe a road flare down there.