The summer of 2000
found me at Camp Cooper. This was my sixth year at summer camp and it
was my last. Although I hated Camp Cooper, I am thankful for one
thing, I spent most of my time alone and sober. I lived in a cabin in
the dense coastal woods. My cabin had plumbing and hot water, but it
had no electricity.
I had bought a
manual typewriter in the spring at a church tag sale in McMinnville,
Oregon. Knowing that my laptop needed electricity and my love affair
with the composition notebook was strained due to the recent loss of
one the autumn before, I thought a manual type writer would be
beneficial.
Camp lasted for six
weeks. I was not really writing until the very—very end of it.
There was a back
door to the cabin which led to the trees and hillside outside my
bedroom. At night it was very dark, of course it was dark: no
electricity, dense trees, etc. But I would sit out there anyway and
smoke hand rolled cigarettes. This was a practice I did mostly at
night. During the day, I would either not have idle time for
cigarettes or if I did, I smoked on the front porch of my cabin.
For whatever reason
that day, a change of pace, or not wanting to see anyone, I hid in
the back and rolled a smoke. As I sat there, wedged between my
cabin's wall and the ever slowly encroaching forest, I looked for any
traces of sunlight that may have penetrated the canopy or the
undergrowth of the plant life. What I saw was a gigantic spider and
its web. I want to say it was inches from my face, but that would be
an exaggeration. It could have been possible for me to fall into the
web, especially at night, but I didn't. The spider sat quietly in the
center of the web, and what a beautiful web it was.
Beautiful,
industrious creations deserve reverence and respect.
It started to
become my after lunch ritual to walk up the hill toward my cabin and
roll a cigarette and spend a little time with my spider. And oddly
enough, I seem to remember standing on the front porch of the cabin
at night, a total reversal of the before-I-noticed-the-spider habit.
For as fascinated as I was with the spider in the web and for as
beautiful as I thought it was, I was somewhat afraid of it at night.
I never thought the spider would do me any harm. Perhaps it was the
other way around, I didn't want to cause the animal any harm by
breaking its web. Often at night I would be in my bed alarmingly
close to the back door which was alarmingly close to the spider and I
would think about spiders kiting, knitting webs and banding together
for larger prey such as me. These were thoughts to wake me up.
I wish there was an
allegory here.
I enjoyed the
company of a spider in my final days of Camp Cooper. I watched a
spider at work during my quiet hours during my final days as a Boy
Scout. I lived with a spider and both feared and respected its space.
I started to hammer
away at that old typewriter. It kept me company at night when the
banana slugs were eating the forest which became still like death
when the ocean's fog rolled in. I wrote all sorts of garbage. Again,
what I wrote, the product is not important. The process is.
If we can learn
anything from a spider it may be this: be beautiful and feared, be
productive, industrious and eventually lunch will come to you.
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