Oklahoma Memories, # 1

The terror and worry I felt had little to do with a looming danger. It was not from a loud noise, a clap of thunder, or a masked intruder. In fact, the frightening circumstance arose not from a personal sense of impending doom, but from the perceived threat of a creature that crawled along the ground. It was an invasion of tarantulas.

Just like the terror that arose from bad dreams after a viewing of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, or feeling frightened by the furry, flying monkeys in The Wizard of Oz, so, a sweet little girl was frightened by a migration of spiders.

It was not just any common spider like we have here in the Pacific Northwest. There were no spiders in Oregon that could compete on size and ugliness with the Oklahoma brown tarantula. Just take a quick look on the computer or in a dictionary, and you would be able to see what I mean. The biggest spiders we get in Oregon are trapdoor spiders about one inch in size. Another large spider in Oregon that you may be familiar with is the giant house spider which can be up to two inches in circumference.

No, the kind I am referring to is the Oklahoma brown tarantula spider. It was a large three-inch plus sized, furry brown thing that, at certain times every year, rose up out of its nest in the ground and crawled its way south.

The terror I felt, as a youngster, had little to do with being poisoned, or jumped on, or bitten. The fright was due to the size, up to five inches of hairy spider body and legs. If those tarantulas had been one inch in diameter, I imagined less frightfulness. But they were at least three inches and up to five inches, which included their four to five inch hairy brown legs.

Then there was the crawling, the silent creeping and unrelenting movement forward. It was the number of spiders all in one place, coming persistently forward, through the fields, across the street, into the yard and around the house moving on, until there were no more.

What caused this migration of fuzzy spiders? It is thought to be the male spiders traveling south in search of a mate. And in that case, I would say, please carry on with your migration! Go your way! Forge your path away from here, and I would be happy to see you go there.

It was true that these spiders were not particularly poisonous, or even dangerous. Just frightening to a little girl who innocently played with dolls and made flowers out of construction paper. The spiders were not a threat to society, and that may be why they are not treated with any more alarm than I witnessed growing up. They were native to many areas in the Southeastern United States and migrated in June and September.

We lived on the eastside of town, at the edge of the suburbs. There were open fields just across the road. This openness likely aided the spiders choice of available routes to go. Whatever the case, when school ended in the Spring, and then started back up in the Fall, there was a chance that soon we would again witness the march of the spiders.

As a grade school child going home, I remember picking my way carefully down the sidewalk trying to get to my front door. But, every few steps, there would be a big fuzzy brown spider in my way. Suddenly, my home seemed like the safest place on earth, but I could not get there because there were twenty or more spiders crawling across my path. Cars would run over them and for days afterwards there would be spider legs and body parts in the street where the tires smashed them flat. The debris would eventually disintegrate and disappear. It was never soon enough for me!

I have now lived in the Pacific Northwest for over thirty years, but I still remember the horror at seeing large numbers of hairy tarantulas trekking across the road. When we lived in Oklahoma, there were many critters I enjoyed learning about and adopting as pets. My family even had a pet tarantula in the kitchen. But, when we moved away, leaving behind the tarantula was a bonus.

I have thought about traveling back to Oklahoma, just to see my childhood home. I would love to see a beautiful sunset and I would not mind experiencing a thunder shower, or even take the opportunity to look for lightning bugs at night. But, I would happily avoid the months of the tarantula migration!