Oh, what a tangled web we weave

A meme showed up on line recently in which a woman says she judges a man by what he looks like after walking into a spider web.  That answers a lot of questions about my life. I am sure I did the spastic ninja dance a few times myself after such an encounter. But I also schooled my nephew so maybe he learned better than I ever did.

It went this way. He spent a summer with me.  He was a nice enough kid but a little clumsy and not well educated in the common sense of things. It seemed everything we did together, he fumbled somehow. There was the day I got a fishhook through the flesh between my thumb and forefinger with a four-pound pink salmon writhing on the end of the line. Mixed in with my cursing, I managed finally to convince him to hand me the dikes so I could cut the hook and get rid of the fish at least.

Another time I borrowed a second four-wheeler and we took a trip to the East Pole. The trail as usual was severely rutted and at one point he got his machine sideways in the trail, rear wheels in one rut and front wheels in the other and unable to drive out of there. I stopped and went back and he asked me what to do.  I told him to get off the machine and then I lifted the front with one arm, turned it back onto the trail and walked away.

The rest of the trip went fine and we spent the night at the cabin. The next morning I thought I might have been a little rough on him and so I suggested he lead the way out. That seemed to pump him up a little. He appeared to be so happy about it I held off telling him the downside of going first. You see overnight spiders spin their webs between trees, some of them all the way across the trail. There are days when you tangle with one web after another if you happen to be the first one out that day, and it turned out we were the first ones out that particular day.

I can still see him twisting and flogging the air every time he ran into one, and there were a lot of them after a humid night, wiping them off his hat with a hand and soldiering on down the trail. To his credit he never complained once, suffering in silence. I had all I could do to keep from laughing, wishing only that I had a video camera.

To this day I have never admitted to him that though I did want to boost him a bit, I did it in part so I wouldn't have to battle the webs. So, Sam, if ever you wander onto this site and read this, I do apologize. I also hope you learned so that in future expeditions into the woods, you never again took the lead on the trail if you were the first ones down it in the morning.

And of course turnabout is only fair. Have to wonder if my own spider dances didn't lead to my present situation, the victim of spiders' webs and women’s' judgments.

Photos: Summer trail to the East Pole