Prodigal Farm Child: I am for the Asking of Questions
by Scout Gabrielle Torres, somewhere in Oregon
I used to be afraid of spiders. Aside from the black widow I found on the inside of a coat I was about to put on (a moment which still haunts me every time I reach for a jacket) I have also had my fair share of surprise visitors in the shower, in my bed, on my clothes, or rappelling slowly from the ceiling like a stunt actor in a heist film. But at fourteen, I was too old to be running out of my bedroom screaming for my mother and a vacuum cleaner, no matter how big the wolf spider that climbed out from behind the poster on my wall. And long after mom rolled out the vacuum and I was in bed, I would stare up at the ceiling in the dark worrying that the spider would crawl out of the vacuum hose and come back, seeking revenge. Or worse, I was plagued with guilt that I had ended the life of even the smallest creature.
Mom brought it up to Jim when he came to visit next. Jim Andersen, a titan of a naturalist who had come to look something like the birds of prey he spent his life studying and rescuing, sat beside me over a stack of freshly-baked cookies and had the same spellbinding effect on me that he has always had. Those outrageous eyebrows waggled and those owlish eyes brightened, and in a voice that has always reminded me of Santa Claus, he said, “You know, spiders are an important part of our wildlife, Scout! Moreso than you could possibly imagine!”
“Spiders aren’t wildlife, they’re bugs!”
“Spiders aren’t bugs, they are arachnids!” Jim schooled me gently. “And they are very important wildlife!”
“Well, yeah, they catch flies.”
“They do more than that! Those wolf spiders you don’t like sharing your bedroom with actually play a very important part in the ecosystem of your own house! Spiders are very territorial. If a wolf spider takes up residence in your room, it will defend it from flies and moths, but also from other spiders. And if you vacuum up all the spiders in your room, then the spiders you don’t want in the house will come up from the basement.”
“… like Black Widows?”
“Like Black Widows.” Jim nodded sagely.
Suddenly, I wasn’t afraid of spiders anymore. Well, not the spiders in my room, anyway. Understanding what an important role they played in my own little ecosystem changed the way I saw them, the way I interacted with them. As long as they stayed out of my way, I left them alone. I only cleared away cobwebs that became dusty and were clearly abandoned. Soon, I began to apologize to and carefully remove most spiders with a cup and a stray napkin or receipt when they were too close. These days I even scoop bedraggled spiders out of the tub drain and kitchen sink and put them somewhere to dry off, with the hope that they can scuttle away and remain part of the household biome. I have come to love the little creatures for what they do, and take them to mean my home is a healthy ecosystem.
When we say life is sacred, I think we are often talking about certain kinds of life, whether we mean to or not. Life that is pretty to look at, life that contributes to society, life that begets life, life that provides food or comfort or companionship. I do not often think we are discussing life as a whole, life as a complex system of interactive living things which all play an integral part. We do not, necessarily, love the spiders in our own homes. (It is here that I would recommend, if you are interested in poetry, that you read the two poems that inspired the writing of this piece: Allowables by Nikki Giovanni and Mercy by Rudy Francisco.)
In our family farm ecosystem, the spiders have returned. Many years ago, wolves were released in Yellowstone as a part of the plan to reintroduce the endangered species into it’s native habitat to breed in the wild again. In 2002, wolves were first recorded in Washington state, but the first breeding pair was confirmed in Washington in 2008. By the end of 2021 there were at least 175 wolves roaming Oregon and 206 in Washington – no doubt there has been exponential growth since then. The wolf reintroduction experiment has proven successful, to the distress of farmers and ranchers across the country. I’ve heard a great number of differing opinions on the matter: from wolf advocates who get tight, humorless smiles when talking about wolf-haters to people who go red in the face from yelling about how awful the wolves (and the wolf advocates) are, it’s a common conversation among agricultural communities. I’ve always found myself somewhere in the middle of the argument, neither here nor there, but recently I have begun to wonder about the spiders in the basement.
Before the wolf became endangered in the Pacific Northwest, they roamed in pairs or small packs following the food (mule deer and elk) and keeping away from other predators (coyotes, bobcats, and cougars). When they mate, they put down roots for a season; the female raises the cubs in seclusion while the lone male hunts for game. His territory becomes truly his, and competing predators move out of his kingdom, sometimes for good. From an objective view, it would seem to me that wolves were, and now are again, the “good spiders.” A small number of them taking over a fairly large territory keeps the basement spiders away. Or at least, they should.
When I was a child, one of the horses used the door to the chicken coop as a scratching post and set loose all my mother’s chickens and some peacocks. The chickens were not very survival-oriented, but we’ve had free-roaming peacocks ever since. That is, until this fall. Three bobcats have been pushed out of wolf territory into the perimeter of the farm and have found the poultry menu to be both exotic and delicious. Meanwhile, the dozens of coyotes who used to roam the ranch have been pushed further away, tending to the rabbit and squirrel populations on the circle of rimrock that runs around the ranch. Typically about this time I see a few scrappy looking coyote younglings stalking through our fields and pouncing on unsuspecting field mice, but the pups are nowhere to be seen.
There has been a change in prey animals, too. When I was a child we could have anywhere between 100 and 300 white-tailed mule deer moving through the property on their way to and from water and food. Now we are lucky to see 30-40 at a time. The same is true for elk. The opposite is true of squirrels, mice, pack-rats, rock-chucks, and starlings: the explosion of the populations of small creatures have ruined our ability to plant a garden or feed our chickens, as we lose almost every seed or grain we spread. I’ve rolled my ankle on more mole-hills and in more burrows in the last few years than all my childhood combined.
The change in who commands what territory reminds me of the concept of desire paths. A desire path is a spontaneous trail that grows when people or animals decide the road most traveled isn’t the road best traveled. City planners, architects, and pragmatists might tell you that these desire paths are actually just the shortest route between two places. They might be looking at the lawns or streets where people cut past sidewalk corners or jaywalk instead of taking the time to reach a crosswalk, but I find that in nature a desire path is a little more complex. The little dirt paths that cut through the fields and woods and desert plains of my home aren’t just the most direct path but also the safest, the easiest, or the most pleasant. Certainly the fastest route to water would be through the muddy low spot, but the elk tracks cut around to avoid the mess. Of course the deer could jump the fence here but they always walk along it to that further point there, where the posts lean slightly, providing an easier leap. The rabbits could cut directly through my yard but traversing the outside of the fence keeps them from the over-enthusiastic attentions of my dog. There is no right or wrong path; there is only the need and desire of the creature who builds it.
Wolves and Wolf-Spiders change the desire-paths of their prey and their competition. Spider webs woven in corners and above door frames force bugs and black widows alike to be caught, to move out of the safe havens and into the blank openness of walls, or to retreat into dark and disused spaces where they will do little harm. Wolf dens move the bobcats and coyotes out of their normal, pleasant, safe travel paths into new ones, exposing them to a closeness to humans or pushing them further back into the wilderness. Forced re-routing of these desire paths is not a bad thing as change is a neutral and ever-present force. The natural world has elasticity and adaptability and new desire-paths will be built as new routines settle into place for these creatures. There is no right or wrong balance; there is only the impact of the creature on the world around it.
To be perfectly clear, I believe wolves and wolf-spiders are, despite their reputation, neutral creatures with neutral impacts. In the question of whether this farmchild is pro-or-anti wolf, the answer is that I believe all life is sacred and useful. I am pro-nature. I am pro-desire paths. I am pro-elasticity and adaptability. I am for the asking of questions. Here are some of the questions I have been asking myself recently.
Who are the wolf spiders of my life’s ecosystem?
What do we stand to gain by re-instating our wolves, and what do we stand to lose?
Is a farmer a wolf or a black widow? Do our practices defend the natural world or overturn its order and interrupt its elastic adaptability? (This in itself could be a whole essay, I think.)
Has the rancher re-written important ecosystem desire-paths in defense of his livestock? And is that necessarily a bad thing?
Is a prodigal farmchild a help or a hindrance – good spider or bad?
In all cases, the answer must be the reaction to the question. Change is, by itself, a neutral force. It is what we think of the changes that are made, and the way that we respond to those changes, that make the difference in how that change affects the greater world.
If Jim Andersen had not convinced me of the positive qualities of spiders, I may never have seen value in their work and may never have had compassion on the creatures that balance my ecosystem. If we’d had that chat sooner, perhaps I would never have found a black widow in my coat sleeve.
As I walk the new desire path I have cut between my home and the hay barn, I think about how I have learned to load the truck in the way that is best for myself. I run four bales lengthwise down the outer edges of the truck bed leaving a corridor in the middle, then add another layer on top of them. I snug the ninth bale into the center and push it back a little. The shape makes a little chair in which I can sit comfortably while dad drives. As I cut into the bales that make up it’s arms and push the hay out the back a little at a time, I am far enough back that over-ambitious cows or my “boyfriend,” Vic (our beautiful and elderly Belgian draft horse who loves hay only marginally more than he loves to be scratched along the neck and behind the ears), cannot reach into the truck and thrust their noses into my stomach or arm as I toss out the hay.
I think about the new desire path I have built in the text messages between myself and my father. Every other day or so, we walk the same path:
Dad: Are you avail to throw hay for me?
Me: Just saw this. Slept in. Yes. 15 min?
Dad: I will be at big barn
Dad: Make it 30 min, just finishing my coffee
In other recent texts is a review of the first draft of this article from my friend – another naturalist who will one day be a titan like Jim. She has not yet come to look like the creatures she loves and studies, but there are days I can almost see the ghost of Corvid feathers growing out of her dark hair, so I will give that transformation some more time. She used a term I had never heard before – Trophic Cascades – which is used to describe the effect one creature or plant’s introduction, endangerment, or extinction has on the greater ecological hierarchy. The wolf introduction in Yellowstone is a Trophic Cascade at its finest, a trickle-down effect that has changed the ecosystem at my home, almost 700 miles away in an entirely different watershed.
This friend was also quick to remind me that even basement spiders are part of the trophic web – that they have just as much a part to play in their own areas. She is right: black widows keep the insect population down in the dark recesses of the basement, so that I have less bugs in my home and fewer rodent pests behind the foundation walls eroding the earth beneath my home to snack on insects. As for the wolves, the crops that now grow in our fields seem to me to be improved. I am not a soil scientist, nor a plant biologist, nor a naturalist, but I believe that the wolves have lessened the damages of the elk and deer in our fields and as of the last few months have increased the number of bobcats within our borders that tread lightly and prefer to eat our overpopulation of rodents and birds. This in turn, I think, has bettered both root quality and grass density – at least, I was surprised by the volume of hay we managed to put up last season when we had predetermined it would be a “light year.”
In the end, we are all wolves to someone. We shake up each other’s ecosystems and establish our own boundaries and pathways within them. I help throw out hay, I shape the remainder of my dad’s morning. I get a text from my friend, I make additions to this article. I find a black widow spider in my coatsleeve, I alter my habits around getting ready to put on my coat. But the changes we make are, by and large, neutral – it is how we think of those changes and how we respond to them that shapes the desire paths of our own lives.
