Spiders and fires: A most dangerous letter
Letter #50 - Margaret River, WA
G’day!
Welcome to Letters From the Road, and letter number 50. This letter features two of Australia’s finest dangers, spiders and fires. If I’d been able to include some snakes, or maybe some stinging jellyfish, I would have, but two things are enough danger for one letter.
Letters From the Road is the story of the road trip around Australia that I took with my wife and two boys back in 2019.
The story comes to you in weekly installments, featuring the journal entries I wrote during the trip. The journal entries are word-for-word, and you’ll see them highlighted in the letter.
If you missed any letters and would like to catch up, you can find the other 49 letters here, in a dangerous pile of laundry.
Be careful out there,
Luke
When the smoke came out, so did the people.
Most people would, when there’s a thick gray haze in the air that changes your surroundings into something out of a dream world, and the scent of burning in the air. In Australia it’s no different, but we have a special relationship with fire.
Bushfires have been a part of life since Australia became Australia, and even long before that. Here, Black Friday isn’t a fire sale, it was a major bushfire in 1939. So was Black Thursday, and Black Saturday too.
On that Saturday in February 2009, bushfires fuelled by bone dry vegetation and whipped up by 100 kilometre per hour winds, swept through country Victoria just north and east of Melbourne and killed 173 people. 400 more were injured. Julia Gillard, Australia’s Prime Minister at the time, called it “one of the darkest days in Australia’s peacetime history”.
So it’s just a fact that most people go on red alert when something happens that portends fire, like one warm Sunday morning when we were at the Big Valley Campsite.
We were lazily sitting around our camp, trying to motivate ourselves to get out and go see some of the sites, when an eerie blanket of gray smoke quietly moved across the valley and covered the campground. The sunlight dimmed and the smell of fire was in the air.
As quietly as the smoke, people started to emerge from their tents or caravans, and we all came together around the dark fire pit outside of the camp kitchen.
We’d seen some small burns during our trip when in the Kimberley, but it was more noticeable was how dry everything was. The bartender in William Creek, a dirt road town in the middle of South Australia, had told us that the nearby Anna Creek Cattle Station had received only 4 millimetres of rain in the last 2 years. An outback track called the Gibb River Road had closed because it was in terrible condition due to lack of rain.
We were 75 days into our trip, and it had rained three times at most, and each time there was not much more than sprinkles - barely enough to dampen the road. So it wasn’t surprising that smoke was in the air, but that doesn’t mean that alarm bells weren’t going off in our heads.
Most of our little group from the north side of the campground were there, Dave and Ben, the old woman, and even a few people we’d never met. We huddled together in solidarity, everyone asking questions and sharing information. There are no secrets when it comes to bushfires.
Does anyone know what’s happening? How close is it? Should we be evacuating? Are we in danger?
Someone had information - they had an app on their phone which reported on bushfires. Bushfires: in Australia there’s an app for that.
A few kilometres away there was indeed a fire happening, but reportedly it was under control at the moment. We continued to quietly discuss until one of the owners of the campground walked up to confirm that they’d received the same news.
Our little group stayed congregated for a few minutes, chatting and laughing nervously and wondering at the strangeness of the situation.
And then, the community meeting over, people slowly wandered back to their homes. Sunday would not be our day with fire, but whether it was under control or not, the potential gave us all the motivation we needed to get in the car and go have a drink.
Driftwood Estate wine tasting.
The place is dead empty. Restaurant closed. Wine only ok. We felt guilted into buying a 25 dollar bottle. Shame on us.
Went to the Beer Farm, a brewery out in the country.
It’s heaving. Live music. People lying around on the lawn overlooking the countryside. On this Sunday afternoon, the Beer Farm is where the cool kids are hanging out. At least I think they are cool. Since when did cutoff jean shorts become popular and useful and fashionable again?
The band just came back on after a break, they’re playing a bluesey rock, heavy on harmonica. They’re pretty good. I’ll happily listen to them over a beer. A girl with long straight hair who was sitting on the grass has gotten up to dance, just her. Barefoot, hippy stylings.
Then things took an interesting turn. A perfectly coiffed girl, hair long and straight and glowing like cornsilk, is now turning to pose for that perfect selfie in front of the live band and quaint locals dancing. She’s checking her hair, her boots, selfieing, readjusting, then a new selfie, all the while standing awkwardly close to the band that’s working hard and the hippy girl who’s twirling around in her long cotton dress.
By the time we returned to the campground in the late afternoon, the smoke had cleared and the country air was clear once again. We were all hungry, but there would be no cooking. While we were away, our kitchen had become overrun with ants.
My evening closed by fighting ants who were all over our kitchen because we left it open during the day, forgetting to pack it away before leaving camp. And my ant killa spray had run out.
We had made two mistakes here. The first has to do with our kitchen, a collection of compartments and drawers on one side of our camper trailer.
There’s a long drawer that pulls out to expose a sink with running water and the refrigerator. Next to this is a long door which folds down and becomes your kitchen counter. Concealed inside is a gas stove with a griller that did a useless job of making toast, all the dishes and cutlery, and two more drawers full of miscellaneous small food items.
When we’d left camp earlier in the day after the fire scare, we had neglected to close the drawers and hatches, which left an open invitation to ants to scour the place looking for spills and crumbs and whatever else they could find.
The second mistake happened a few days earlier, when we’d first set up camp.
We’d accidentally put our tent on top of an anthill, or possibly a number of anthills. Shouldn’t we have known better at this stage in our journey, almost a year on the road and the number of days camping too numerous to count? Yes, we most definitely should have.
You could tell something was potentially amiss, because when we’d first set up, there were a decent number of ants crawling about, a sign that they’d been disturbed. Moving camp, however, was out of the question. The kitchen setup was one thing, but it could be packed up relatively easily. The tent was another story.
It sat on top of the trailer, and folded down onto the side of the trailer opposite the kitchen. The set up was a numerous step process of raising supports, alignging and zipping up enclosures to make it watertight and semi-impervious to bugs, and pounding in stakes.
Then there was the awning. It provided a lovely roofed area along two sides of the trailer, a welcome respite from the sun when we camped out in the open. Lovely as it was, we avoided putting it up because of the multiple poles and stakes to be dealt with, and because no one wanted to pack it up, a nearly impossible task of folding up the heavy canvas with origami precision all while hoisted over your head, and fitting it into a bag that was two sizes too small for the job.
In short, once you’re set up, there’s no moving. So if you make a stupid mistake like we did, and pick a spot where there is an anthill under your tent, you’re in for a battle.
I prefer the catch and release method of dealing with bugs and other critters. But there are exceptions, and ants are one of them. They operate in large numbers and are relentless. Stopping them is like trying to plug the hole in a leaking boat - as soon as you take care of one or a couple of ants, more appear and take their place.
I normally used a bug spray, but had run out. So I dispatched the ones in the kitchen using a fly swatter shaped like a guitar and had Elvis’ face on it. After the kitchen, I continued to follow the ants trail around our site. A line of them scaled a guy wire, which provided efficient access to the top of the tent. From there they scattered in all directions, with a long line eventually crawling inside through a small gap in the canvas.
I angrily followed them inside, smashing the whole way. But once inside, they were quickly forgotten.
I followed some of them into the tent and was smashing them on the floor when I came across a pile of Katie’s clothes in one corner. I went to pick them up but stopped short and backed away quickly. It was guarded by a large redback spider sitting in her web.
Fuck me.
Like fires, everyone in Australia knows the redback spider. It’s a relative of the black widow spider, and is easily identified by the shock of bright red on its dark black body. It’s as ominous looking spider as there is.
The redback is also quite poisonous, and not something you want to tangle with for the sake of dealing with a few ants or a pile of laundry.
Henry heard me cursing and came to see what was happening.
Henry came over and provided running commentary. I grabbed a broom and decided to sweep the floor because it was quite messy... dead ants, sand. Needed to be done.
Actually, I was stalling.
I’ve since learned that while the redback is poisonous, it’s usually only mortally dangerous to small children. Usually. But that’s not to say that a bite would not provide a good solid day of pain and suffering, maybe some heart palpitations and some lively vomiting. A feeling not far off from a wicked hangover, from the sounds of it.
The ants were forgotten, and my sweeping was mediocre, considering that one side of the tent was off limits and under the control of the spider. Henry was no help, doing nothing to assist other than standing at a distance and chronicling my pending demise.
It was reminiscent of the scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark where Indiana Jones is being lowered by rope into the Well of Souls, the vault where they believe the ark is hidden. The rope slips and Indy is dropped unceremoniously onto the ground. When he gets up, he’s face-to-face with a hissing cobra. Sallah, Indy’s digging partner, looks down from the vault’s opening above and provides some words of encouragement. ‘I told you you would be alright!’ he shouts with a laugh.
That was Henry, from the opening of the tent.
Indy deals with his problem by spraying petrol all over the cobra - and a bunch of other snakes that were surrounding him - and sets them ablaze with a torch. I considered this option, as we had an unused jerry can of diesel that had been strapped to the top of our car since we’d started the trip. But it likely would have burned down our canvas tent in the process, and the blaze would have no doubt spread to the surrounding gum trees, causing the second fire incident of the day.
Something needed to be done, you know, to protect my family, so broom in hand I decided to simply whack the spider. Whether my swinging broom hurt it or not I couldn’t tell because the spider was gone, lost into the dim gloom of the tent.
I cautiously looked around on the ground, and the spider was nowhere to be found. I decided to bash away at Katie’s laundry pile with the broom, just in case it was hiding amongst the clothes, and then carefully took the pile to the door of the tent and scattered them on the sandy ground, hopefully scattering the spider in the process.
With that, I carefully picked up each sock and shirt and pair of shorts, shook them out again for good measure, and placed them in a pile back in the corner.
Henry and I never found a body, so it was impossible to say whether we’d actually taken care of the spider. You could imagine the black and red devil emerging from a hiding place and creeping around the tent in the darkness while we slept, moving silently like the smoke that had descended over our camp that morning.
But there was not much more we could do aside from fumigating the joint or moving to Plan B, which meant burning the tent to the ground and getting a new one.
Plus we were tired from all the excitement of the day, and it was time to make dinner. I crossed my fingers that the ants hadn’t returned to the kitchen, using the spider as a diversion to reclaim their territory. I took Elvis with me, just in case.
Elvis face on a guitar shaped fly swatter - only in Oz :) The rest was no joke!