Outside the Comfort Zone

By Lewis Dymer

First, let me state up front that none what follows is an attempt to be a Hemingway, a Gilbert, A Kipling, or any other writer that traveled and penned amazing stories about amazing places. I have neither the gift nor the extraordinary tales that those folks spent a lifetime crafting. I have some… pretty decent campfire yarns.

What I do have in common with those aforementioned wordsmiths is a deep appreciation for finding stories that exist outside of my “comfort zone.” While that doesn’t necessarily require traveling away from the familiarity of home and country, doing so definitely thrusts you out into an environment where you will experience the new, the unfamiliar, and possibly even the fantastical.

Or deadly.

Meet the “Camel Spider.”

Alright, the deadly part may be a bit of an oversell (more on that in a moment). Or not, depends on how someone next to you reacts when finding themselves near a camel spider unexpectedly. Flame throwers, machine guns, and nuclear weaponry all seem to be a fairly typical response. If you are between them and the beast? Well, don’t blame me. I tried to warn you.

This lovable little critter is really misnamed and misunderstood. If you head on over to National Geographic’s website, they have a delightful page explaining why we are all so misinformed about these poor creatures. Technically, they ARE an arachnid, but not a spider. (Somehow, that tidbit of information never seems to have much of a calming effect when you stumble across one).

And while they are certainly creepy as hell, they are rarely deadly. Even though they can leave a nasty cavity in your body after chewing on you for a bit, their bite isn’t systemic or deadly to humans. Although, fun fact: Their jaw can expand to one-third of their body length. Sleep well tonight with that new-found knowledge! Additionally, they’re not really as large as many pictures have led us all to believe.  This six-inch spider is still more than capable of making the hair on the back of your neck stand up.

As for all the stories about them outrunning humans, leaping tall buildings in a single bound, etc.?

Listen, we’re talking about an arachnid here, Folks, not Superman. (Note to self: Next time write about Superman). National Geographic states that a camel spider can only reach a top speed of 10 miles per hour. Soooo…. ONLY the speed of a fairly well-conditioned long distance runner then? I guess the rest of us sub-Olympic, pudgy folk are just a tad lower on the food chain. Fair enough.

I’ve only had the pleasure of meeting these charming little guys a few times. My first discovery was in an abandoned porta-john. I cracked the door open, and there were about twenty or thirty camel spiders piled in there, dead.

Unfortunately, neural response times being what they are, the “dead” part didn’t register in my brain until slightly after my vocal nerves triggered, revealing my glorious tenor falsetto to the friends who were with me. A few of them expressed regret afterwards that they didn’t have a notebook handy to record for posterity (and possibly linguistic professors) a new language I invented on the spot, cleverly interwoven with a torrent of colorful words they were already much more familiar with.

Not long after, I had a chance run-in with a very-much-alive one of our “non-spider” friends at 2 AM in a concrete bunker, which was dimly illuminated by a single blue light-bulb. The eerie, blue-washed room had no windows and only a single door as a point of escape. Of course, when entering the bunker with my buddy, I wasn’t thinking in terms of needing to escape.

However, when a flittering shadow caught my attention, and I glanced over to see a camel spider staring me down from the doorway… the ONLY doorway… no other need had ever seemed so obvious or immediate to me. Cue the tenor falsetto again. My friend’s gift for the arts instinctively kicked in as he heartily joined me, adding a piercing harmony over top of my haunting melody.

I was so focused that I didn’t even mind that he had horned in on my solo aria. The beast showed its appreciation for our performance by leaping up about two feet onto the nearest wall and running laps around the room (at approximately 10 miles per hour, as I seem to recall). This only prompted us to achieve even greater volume as we reached the crescendo of our masterpiece.

The third and final chapter to my little campfire tale involves yet another porta-john. Yeah, I get it. I really need to work on finding more diverse settings for my adventures. Anyhow, I was in a fairly remote location, and the only usable “facilities” within a mile or so were these two porta-johns that had been left behind together at the end of this long driveway when the rest of civilization vacated the area.

To make a long story short, when you are attempting to conduct your, ahem, “business” in a porta-john, the last thing you want to see crawl out from under a urinal mere inches from your leg is a six-inch, Olympic-qualifying, non-spider of almost-death.

My reaction is probably best visualized through the eyes of my friends who were at the other end of the driveway when I kicked open the door and barrel-rolled out of the stall and into the road…. Or at least, that’s what I intended to have happen.

However, in my haste, I didn’t bother to take the extra second or two required to pull my pants all the way back up (or ANY of the way back up, for that matter). So instead of my on-the-spot, cool-guy barrel-roll, my legs got tripped up and I executed the decidedly inferior “sprawl-into-the-street-with-your-pants-around-your-ankles” maneuver.

Apparently, I am a natural at that particular move.

Having had interactions with camel spiders themselves previously, my friends were surprisingly sympathetic and supportive (after a thorough explanation as to why they just witnessed what they did), with only minimal mocking and laughing afterwards.

It goes without saying, that blue box of certain death only ever had one occupant for the remainder of our time there. I would like to point out, however, that this time there was no impromptu vocal performance. Apparently, my previous interactions had steeled my nerves sufficiently enough to maintain at least that small shred of dignity.

But really, what’s dignity anyways when you are staring a roided-out, athletic, jumpy, peeping-tom arachnid square in the face after it has successfully ambushed you?

I don’t care what you say, Nat Geo. Instinct over information, every time.