Ausborne Blog

It was 1995 and I had been home from my mission for about three months.  Summer had just begun and it was beginning to get hot in the South Bay.  As I was in the mood for a drive in my shiny black Acura Integra, I decided to go someplace I’d never been before.  Today I was going to drive Mt. Hamilton Road up toward Lick Observatory in the east foothills of San Jose.

The Diablo Range of mountains are pretty dry and are relatively (compared with the Santa Cruz mountains a little to the west) sparsely vegetated, resulting in a lot of dusty landscape.

As I was driving up Mt. Hamilton Road on this fine warm day, I came around an uphill curve to the left and was surprised to see all sorts of life moving across the road.  I couldn’t believe my eyes as I came upon 20 to 30 different tarantulas running across the road, from right to left, as if it were some mass migration.

I drove through the herd and started thinking, “Man, I wonder if I can catch one of those suckers!”

I flipped a U-turn and headed back down the hill a little ways, driving in a manner that I hoped would not frighten the buggers.  After I had passed by where the swarm was, I flipped another U-turn and pulled over to the side of the road.

Getting out of my car, I looked and spotted about five more of the beasts in the road.  I grabbed a stick and proceeded in my quest to capture a tarantula.

The closest spider to me knew I was there.  He stopped and performed the fastest 180 degree turn I’ve ever seen.  He was looking right at me as I extended my stick toward him in a most non-threatening manner, I assure you.  As I inched toward him with stick outstretched, he raised himself up and lifted his front two legs in an effort to frighten me a way.  Yeah, I was frightened, though my curiosity outweighed my fear.

I backed up and thought to myself, “Self, if we’re going to catch this thing, we’re going to need some sort of container in which to put it.”  Hmm, to the trunk of the car!

I popped the trunk and found virtually nothing in which I could keep the animal.  In fact, the trunk was almost completely empty, only containing a set of scriptures in a black case.

“I wonder,” I wondered.  Would it be possible to catch this thing in my scripture case?  With a flash, I emptied the case of its contents and had the thing opened up and ready to do battle.  Instantly, I had resumed the oustretching of the stick and the spider had resumed the whole “lifing up its front legs” thing.  I approached it with the aforementioned stick in one hand and the open scripture case in the other, hoping that it wouldn’t bite too hard when my attempts at controlling it failed.

In one quick motion, I had it pinned to the ground (relatively gently) beneath the scripture case and was hastily closing the case around it.

I had done it.

For the longest time, I had forgotten about this story.  As I started piecing together the remembrances of it, I realized that I’d never seen the spider again after that.  I never did release it.  I seem to recall overnighting it via FedEx to a friend of mine, Adam Jones, who was still a missionary back in Texas.  I wonder if he ever received it.

Hmm.