Spider Webs: A Geometric Masterpiece

“MICHAEL!!” my mother screamed in a high pitched yet guttural and desperate tone. I knew this name yelled in this particular tone inevitably meant there was a spider somewhere that my father, Michael, had to go and deal with. To little me, That name in that tone meant spiders were scary and ultimately, yucky. Maybe if we lived in Australia spiders would be more scary, but in Ontario, Canada, where spiders are not known to be deadly, a spider is merely an inconvenient roommate. I tried to become more tolerant to spiders when I was a teenager, naming them Boris (see Boris the Spider, by The Who) and telling them to kindly stay over there please. 

My experience of spiders changed again when I was living in northern BC on Haida Gwaii. I would be preparing to turn in for the night and find a massive, furry, black spider right in the centre of my bed. After pleading with the dog to eat the dang thing, getting him all excited and unwittingly creating spider-chase mayhem, I learned to be my own ‘Michael’ and (as casually as possible) capture the spider with a glass, slide a piece of cardboard under, take it outside while intently watching that it was still in there, and never to ask the dog for his assistance in this department again. The bedtime spider-capture regimen repeated itself on a regular basis. I felt like a strong independent woman for being able to handle these massive beasts without screaming “MICHAEL!!” like my mom does (conveniently my landlord, living on the floor above me with an open door policy, was also named Michael).

A spider web reflecting the early morning light, a photo I took slowly wandering my way over to the breakfast tent at bush camp to get disapproving side eyes for being late.

This summer in northern Saskatchewan, my relationship with spiders became even more intimate than maybe snuggling them in my sleep in Haida Gwaii (right? If it is even possible to get more intimate with a spider than that. Well, buckle up). Each day I’d walk through thick brush, which means young, tightly spaced mostly alder and pine trees. Unbeknownst to me, tightly spaced brush is ideal real estate for a spider home (a web, of course) and my face is the ideal surface for a spider home when it passes through them. Yes, I put my face through hundreds of spider webs a day at minimum. At first, it was understandably gross and frustrating pulling spider web strands out of your mouth and eyelashes (okay, it definitely remained a little gross…) but I got accustomed to it and hardly worked up about it over time. At first I tried my best to avoid the webs if I could because I understandably didn’t like them in my face. 

Webs encasing a coniferous frond in the evening's golden hour.

Then I saw them through my camera lens and I couldn’t un-see them from that perspective. What I saw was a profound, immaculate beauty. I was able to see them for what they are - geometric masterpieces. Delicate, intricate art works. The sun catcher crystals of the natural world. I watched multiple spiders spin their webs on the same tree by night and gawked at the beauty of the low light illuminating each strand of web in the morning. I was late for breakfast to capture these wonders and late for bed to try and capture them with the sunset. My opinion of spiders changed dramatically. These small (sometimes relatively large though) beings were artists. Eventually, the feeling of spider webs in my mouth and eyelashes was no longer the reason I tried to avoid them. Spending so much time around (and through) them made me think about how much effort and resources the spider must be using to create said masterpieces. And finally, I allowed my work to slow in order to avoid the webs in consideration of the artist: The spider.  

I don't even know what to say about this one. I am mostly just grateful I stumbled into this area at the right time in the right light to capture this web behind the low plants, backdropped by the early morning lake.