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Mother Nature, Father Time, and their son Self-Loathing Disappointment
PART 2 of 2: Disappointment, Departure, and Spelunking (and spiders)
7/29/05
by Shaw

I spent last week in a cabin in the Finger Lakes with my parents.

When we last met, my story had gotten no further than a basic description of the typical Western New York native, with his eating rituals, his mannerisms, and the mechanics of his birth and raising. As it seems there is still much to tell, I will hurry up and get to the Disappointment, Departure, Spelunking, and (spiders), all unofficially and non-legally-bindingly guaranteed by the title of this column. As a mathematician, I think the most sensible way to go about this is chronologically. As a man with a college degree that cost more than 8 times my annual salary, I don't really care about sense.

First, the departure. After the time for vacation was up we packed and left. That was pretty easy.

As for the (spiders), let me first say that I have a thing about bugs. You may interpret "thing" here to mean "irrational fixation with". If you have ever seen a centipede the size of your thumb in your apartment (see below), then you will probably understand the way I feel.

scutigera coleoptrata

I have had a separate webpage devoted to these things for several years now and I still get several emails a week from people telling me stories about finding these things in their houses. So on a trip, I am already predisposed to be interested in the local arthropod population, and how to kill it. When, upon arriving, I saw that the dock and boat were caked in spiderwebs and moth carcasses, I thought the smartest and easiest way to perform the extermination was to soak the dock and boat in water from the nearby lake to remove the webs and drown the spiders. Well this certainly worked in the daytime. However at night it became clear to my parents and to me that we were in fact not the rightful tenants of the cottage in which we were staying. It would be much more apt to say that we were houseguests, only allowed to stay in the cottage at the whim of the spiders, who if they were inclined to stage an uprising could easily regain control of the house, its occupants, and all facilities within. There were so many spiders at this house at night that I actually believe they collectively outweighed us. A walk through the yard at night would always end in clothes being tragically covered in endless spiderwebs. As my cellphone worked best on the dock, I found myself at night pacing back and forth a few times during several phone conversations. Each time, the experience was the same. As I walked from the shore to the end of the dock, I would feel myself walk through--and sever--about 100 spiderwebs, creating a clear spiderweb-free path from the shore to the water. I would turn around almost immediately and walk back to the shore to find that all the webs--every single one--had been quickly repaired or replaced by some worker spider. This is a level of efficiency that were it to be employed on the city streets in Washington DC, the residents would be so happy they would remove "Taxation Without Representation" from their license plates. And these webs were not simple little crosspieces that connected two bigger webs. These were huge intricately patterned artworks, big enough to catch flying nighttime insects or jumping fish, whichever gets closer.

The Spiders

The Webs

If I didn't hate them so much for being all over me all the time, I would have been in awe of these creatures, but as it was, I mostly felt disgusted for the webs covering me. As if I didn't stick to the furniture enough already. Unfortunately the spiders were not just an affliction at night either. One morning as I was fishing, I caught my line on a spiderweb and it was actually strong enough to hold up my lure so that it got tangled in the posts on the dock, and in so doing, caused my line to snap from my casting motion, and losing me the lure.

Which brings me to: Disappointment.

Every fisherman has a set of expectations and rules governing his fishing haul. The most basic is the ratio test: what is the ratio of fish caught to lures lost? The bigger the ratio, the better the day. (Obviously for you mathematicians if you catch no fish and lose no lures, the ratio is undefined so I ask you to consider the limit, i.e. 1, in that case, and while we're at it, 1/0 := + ∞) Now, for a more experienced fisherman, certainly there can be more complex ways of measuring the success of a trip, but at the most fundamental level, the hard and fast rule among anyone that has ever held a fishing pole is that if the ratio test yields a number which is smaller than 1, you have failed. That is, if you lose more lures than the number of fish you caught, you are a failure and you shouldn't have come out. This is not a monetary issue; it doesn't matter if the lure was a $20 muskie troller or a $.25 jighead with a $.05 plastic worm on it. Losing more than you gain is unacceptable. Thankfully, the one that the spiders took was the only lure that I lost the entire weekend, and I definitely caught more than one fish. However I did break one other rule, which isn't necessarily a fishing rule so much as a fable lesson, and I paid dearly for it: after the first day that I went fishing I sent the following bragging text via email to my friends who were stuck at work: "I just landed a pike in a rowboat with my mom. P.S. My ratio of fish caught to lures lost so far is 6:1." Incidentally I was hoping for this:

huge pike

But I got this (not actually a photo of me):

small pike (again, not me)

Too small to consider, really. Yet that email did the trick, it sealed the deal. No sooner did I push "send" than my magic stopped working. I did not catch another fish that entire week, not a single one. So clearly, the rule I broke was "Don't Taunt Mother Nature." Because that bitch will shut you down.

And finally, spelunking. We stopped at a Howe Caverns in Cobleskill NY on the way home. And that is where we spelunked. Big whoop. As I write this I am packing up my tackle to go fishing this morning so you will excuse me for not indulging you. In truth I just put the word Spelunking in the title so I could entice our edgier, more extreme reader(s). Hopefully I can keep my ratio up on the water today.

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