Few feelings are as cold as the first taste of empty air on my body immediately following an intimate hug, or the uncertain feeling I get during the first day of winter, or the itching feeling of terror I try to hide when I realize the past cannot be relived. Loss is like the spider whose web, the result of two full seasons of work, crumples and melts under cold autumn rains.
I was visiting my girlfriend, Danielle, in Spokane for the middle weeks of October, and at first, summer seemed to be holding on. Certainly the rotation of the planet had brought on colder days, but my first weekend in Danielle's college town was a warm one: bare skies, t-shirts, our breaths invisible. The first Saturday night after my arrival, Danielle and I decided to walk downtown on Centennial Trail to the River Front Square Mall.
Our trip from Danielle's university apartment to the restaurant took us through her college's beautiful campus. Gonzaga University is a Jesuit college – Catholic, in other words – which means we walked amidst magnificent brick buildings, some topped with monolithic spires , during our journey. Beyond them, the trail ducked behind the campus – turning into a wooden walkway for some distance - and traveled behind hotels and restaurants. Much of the scenic trail was also flanked by a river, allowing us to see perfect reflections in the water at night - including a striking remake of downtown from across the way. We stopped every ten yards to capture the picturesque landscapes on our cameras.
Previously, the two of us had discovered each other to be what might only be termed "camera nerds," armed as we were with our shiny digital cameras and roving eyes willing to see pictorial scenes everywhere we looked. Most of the time, we took pictures of each other, but God managed to distract us every now and then with landscapes and wildlife.
We saw a black-striped spider weaving his web under the red wood rails. Our first encounter with the creature happened just behind a fancy restaurant, maybe a hundred yards from the bridge across the river. The darkness of night cast most of our surroundings in shadow, but the walkway was lit by small lights, not much bigger than my fist, hanging from the guard rails. The spider drew his web beneath the lights.
Danielle and I were amazed by the small creature with his perfect, shining web, and we whipped out our cameras to make the arachnid permanent. As we lingered by the rails, coercing our cameras to reproduce what we could see with our eyes, a couple walked past us. My girlfriend and I were studiously bent over in our task - a comical sight. Danielle noticed the couples' curious glances and spoke up, "We're taking pictures of the spider!"
The couple smiled and laughed. "Oh, okay," they said, watching for a few moments before walking away.
Satisfied, we went on. When we came to the bridge across the river, we were excited to see even more of the black-striped spiders weaving their webs under the bridge's lights. The bridge was home to three different spiders, one per post, which gave us an advantage by allowing us to take pictures of their webs with a dark backdrop. I quickly crouched down and set to my task.
The spiders, each as big as my thumb, hung ominously from their webs. Their black heads featured white trim framing arachnid features and forming a tear drop, starting at the bottom of the head and flaring out around the eyes. A unique pattern drawn out in white spread across their black thorax, and from the thorax emerged eight black and white striped legs. Their webs shone in the moonlight, and I was pleased to find a victim entrapped by one of the creatures. As I approached, the spider scampered across his web and began striking at the webbed insect. I captured the attack on camera.
As Danielle watched me click away on my digital camera, another group of people passed us, and again Danielle answered their unspoken question of "What are you guys doing?" Two people, an older man and younger woman, stopped and came over to see the spiders for themselves.
"They're big!" The old man remarked.
Danielle nodded. "Scary too!"
The woman bent down for a closer look. "Look at their webs," she gasped in amazement. "They're perfect."
Eventually, we all moved on. Danielle pointed out to me later how our interest in the spiders created an interest in the passers-by which they would not have shown otherwise. They would have walked on without stopping to gaze at the beautiful arachnids weaving their webs underneath the red wood rails.
Sunday saw blue skies replaced by gray ones that rained on the city well into the night. When Danielle and I walked downtown to see a movie, the webs were missing, their owners unaccounted for, washed away in the rain. The spiders did not re-emerge for the rest of my visit to Spokane.
We take the warm days of summer for granted, treating each blue sky as the first in a long series instead of the last. Our heavy footsteps scar the wooden walkways of our daily routines, daily treading past the hidden webs of the black-striped spiders. When the rain comes, the silk monuments are lost, and the best we can come up with is a melancholy sigh over leaf-shedding trees and gray skies.
Danielle attends school in Spokane but calls Winnemucca, Nevada, home, a small town nestled in the Great Basin of northern Nevada. I visited her hometown during the summer of 2006 and stayed long enough for the Fourth of July weekend. Half of her extended family decided to commemorate the occasion by driving across the California border to a place called Eagle Lake. The small cabin we rented at the campsite simply could not hold us all, so Danielle and I slept outside, being young and flexible.
When the first night came, the two of us settled down into our mustard yellow sleeping bags - "capable of withstanding temperatures as low as 50 degrees below!" her grandfather assured us – and talked. At first our teeth chattered uncontrollably; the sleeping bags froze us for the first twenty minutes or so before our body heat picked up the slack.
In time, our eyes became adjusted to the dark, and we saw the galaxy spread out above us like a giant spider's web.
"Look at all those stars," I remarked quietly, aware of my cliché line but nevertheless without any other words to say. When a person realizes the extent to which the cosmos goes on without humanity's touch, he is hard pressed to do anything besides gasp and point.
"I feel so small," Danielle replied. Her soft voice sounded timid, as if the weight of the myriad galaxies had crushed not only her humanistic pride but her soul as well.
I felt small too: insignificant, disquieted, terrified. The night sky in Eagle Lake, California, revealed to us a universe beautiful beyond comprehension. I've seen star-filled skies in the Star Wars movies, but the Star Wars galaxies are so random in distribution, so uniform in size. When I looked upon the real galactic tapestry, I was impressed with an intricate beauty in the multitude so sublime I could not help but get lost in the sight. Ironically, if the whole universe blinked out at once, I wouldn't even know what had happened. Humanity could be alone right now, the only solar system left in the entire universe, and over four and a half years would go by before any of us even noticed Proxima Centauri was missing.
Depressed now, I spoke up. "If one of these stars burned out right now, years would pass before we realized the giant wasn't burning anymore."
I couldn't see her reaction, if she had any, because I was cocooned in my sleeping bag. Still, I could hear her pause before saying, "We wouldn't mourn the star's death then, would we? By the time we realized what we had been missing, the burnt out star would just be an accepted fact. Discovering the dead husk would be like stumbling upon a stranger's grave twenty years after his violent death. You just wouldn't care much anymore."
I knew she was right. If we had found water-logged husks and fallen strands from a spider web instead, we wouldn't have given our encounter under the red wood rails a second thought.
I am sure a few of the gas giants disappeared while we watched, but if so, their fiery deaths eluded my observations. How many celestial deaths do we witness? Blink, and you'd miss an entire solar system wiped out of existence: a black-striped spider's web washed away in the storm, a constellation of perfect, white silk - gone.
In the morning, our trapped body heat turned against us, and we climbed gasping out the sleeping bags."It's like sleeping in a pressure cooker!" Danielle complained, panting as she stripped off her sweatshirt.
Danielle and I held each other in a tight hug. We were standing on the prefabricated, factory-made floor of the Spokane International Airport about a week after our encounter with the black-striped spiders. The usual goodbyes had been exchanged: "I'll miss you," "Have a safe flight," "Take care." Now we simply stood wrapped in each other's arms.
I hadn't blinked. I wasn't oblivious to the beauty beneath the red wood rails. The city lights hadn't blinded me to her blazing presence. I could see her right in front of me, long brown hair neatly dividing her back as I held her. I could feel the beauty in my hands, warm and alive, her nose nestled into my neck. Despite all the warnings, expectations, and foreknowledge, I knew she would blink out of existence when I let go her go.
We both knew letting go of the hug would mean permitting the other person to disappear. Even when your hug isn't to say goodbye, without the intimate contact a hug brings, aren't we all afraid our lovers and friends, parents and relatives, will disappear?
I felt the cold, stricken air of her absence on my body. My flight’s departure time was rapidly approaching. We waved goodbye. I turned and handed the security guard my ticket. I noticed Danielle glance my way as he checked the stub. After the guard cleared me through, I noticed Danielle had drifted a few paces down the terminal. She was still watching me leave. I smiled, waved goodbye again, and walked up the wooden ramp. A few steps later, an unbearable feeling overcame me, so I looked back. Danielle did not blink her eyes as she waved goodbye. I smiled again, not so much out of amusement but out of a sense of belonging. The rain hadn't swept her away quite yet.
We held each other's gaze until the ramp took me behind a wall.
I blinked.
She was gone.
