There is a profusion of beetles, greenish-blue in the crisp, dry, afternoon sunlight, flying around. I feel like I'm at the airport. Beetle International. They seem to have specific flight plans, some of them follow the same route as the one before them through the tall grasses, between the limbs of trees, narrowly passing through the strong lines of the webs of the crab-like spiders. They seem to have a purpose, not stopping unless they run into a window screen, and then only for a moment, to change directions and be off again. In this moment, their frantic wing-flapping sounds like a discontented buzz, a little "Dammit!" in bug language.The spiders -- which are also quite prevalent of late -- don't bother to move from their central position in the web when one of the beetles grazes a line. These bugs are too strong to be caught and eaten, and the spiders seem to know this. They're waiting for mosquitoes and moths and other papery insects which are easily ensnared, paralyzed, wrapped up like spider burritos, and left for bragging rights and/or a later meal.
These spiders really do look like tiny crabs (from the sea, not from the crotch!), and they come in a variety of colors, red, yellow, orange, and white, all of them with the same pattern of black marks on their shell-like bodies, kind of like a smiling face. Their webs are strong enough to stretch over spaces of five feet or more, from limb to limb or to the corner of any available structure. They build them fast; attaching to a car parked in one spot for only a couple of hours.
I remember from my childhood great long strands of spiderweb blowing in the breezes across open fields in the late summer, like lost cords from a kite, with no kite at the top end and no child at the other. Rich and I used to chase after them and spin into them so they would stick to us. We had a contest to see who could catch the most on us, yelling (pretty unimaginatively) "Spider Man!" every time we caught ourselves in one. Rich always won the contest. Rich was better at everything.
