The Bee and the Spider

This piece originally appeared in The Racket.

We live in places where man has encroached upon the natural world, and so we vacationed in a cabin, way at the end of a dirt path that the neighboring brush had almost finished reclaiming. The flora under the deck sprouted up between the wooden planks, and you could only eat your breakfast out here if the fauna didn’t decide they wanted it more than you. Here, it was the natural world that had encroached upon the trappings of civilization. Here, in one of these encroachments, is where I saw them, the spider and the bee.

The others had gone on a hike, and I, craving solitude, had stayed behind to bask in the quiet of the empty cabin; to be, once the others had been out for a good bit, the only human within a mile or more.

We had fled the world of man, but it had predictably followed me, and as I lay on the bed trying to read a magazine, my mind wandered to the same questions they wandered to when I was trying to read work emails on Front Street. Questions like: Am I resisting the anti-capitalist fervor of my generation due to genuine intellectual reservations, or just some bratty urge to be a contrarian? Am I really going to live to see my favorite cities inundated by rising seas? Why do I never trust that I’m right about anything?

I awoke with the magazine on my chest and rose to go to the bathroom. There I stood, watching my urine stream carve canyons through the continent of bubbles it had created seconds earlier. When the stream dwindled, I looked up at the double-pane window above the toilet. Between the panes, a spider had formed a web and had caught more than she’d bargained for: a bee, ensnared in the mesh, attempting to writhe himself free.

Food is food, and the spider had little control over who bumbled their way into her web. And so I watched, hypnotized, as she attempted to approach her outsize prey, who, for his part, was thrusting his stinger at all sorts of angles, testing the flexibility of his hindquarters in a desperate campaign of self-defense. It was working: the spider could not find a workable angle of approach. Anytime she got near, his poisoned barb swept by her face, sending her fleeing to the edge of her web to contemplate another strategy.

I became aware of my own breathlessness. I noticed, too, a conflict of ethics and allegiance in my heart. Who was I rooting for? The natural thing would be for the spider to win. And you couldn’t say she hadn’t earned it. How long had she toiled to build her web? Then, how long had she spent waiting for an unlucky visitor? When had she last eaten? The notion of the bee escaping, and of her facing the prospect of starvation despite all her hard work, was heartbreaking. I projected devastation onto this creature that does not visually emote. I loved this spider, and I wanted her fed and nurtured.

But I had never seen a will to survive like the bee’s. And being in imminent danger of being devoured is an emotional ordeal I’ve never come close to experiencing. I could not empathize with the bee, because his lot was beyond empathy. He deserved to survive simply by virtue of having paid for his life in abject terror, and fought for it harder than I’ve ever had to fight for mine. From my privileged position of safe remove, rooting for the spider was too easy. I loved this bee, and wanted him free and safe.

A thump of footsteps. The others had come back from their hike. Someone opened the door and their voice amplified as they finished a sentence. I met them in the kitchen, and we started drinking heavily. Later, I returned to the bathroom. Again the urine stream dwindled, and, remembering the bee and the spider, again I looked up to the window. They were both dead, suspended in the web, the spider’s legs akimbo, the bee half-mummified. The biological hierarchy had glitched out. I had been drawn out here by the lure of the simplicity and reliability of nature. The water flows to the ocean; the birds sing at dawn. What I had found was this tragic reminder that even in nature there is blunder, that even in the absence of man there is mutual destruction and systems gone awry.