From the Archives - Horsefly Spider Smackdown!

Introduction

Here is another bike touring tale from my archives. I had photographic proof of this remarkable incident, but this was 24 years ago and I can’t find the photo. Alas.

The spider and the horsefly – July 1994

Stopped at a town along the way to Iowa, I had one of life’s great unexpected moments. While my wife talked to her aunt and then her mom on a payphone, I waited, straddling my bike, not doing much of anything. Then I saw a tiny lime-green spider on my front pannier. His front two legs on either side were twice the length of his body. When spinning a web, he would wave these front legs about majestically in the air, like giant batons. He was building an as-yet invisible web when I suddenly saw a small emerald-green horsefly land on the pannier, not so very far from the spider.

You can tell a horsefly by its giant, menacing proboscis, which can pierce cotton, denim, and even leather on the way to your skin. “Hideous blood-sucking parasite, I’ll kill you,” I swore. These creatures are mighty hard to swat—they seem to have better instincts than a housefly, perhaps as a result of dodging a horse’s tail all their lives—but I had bigger plans for this one.

Reflecting on the the three-week old scars still left on my body from the horseflies in Colorado and western Kansas, I decided I would catch this horsefly alive and feed it to the tiny green spider, who would slowly eat it alive over a period of hours. I stared at my prey and tried not to think of the tremendous odds against me. Could I possibly execute this plan? No point deliberating on the matter: in a perfect, miraculous Zen moment, I just struck out, as I would for a typewriter key on the home row, and got him.

I had to restrain myself from doing a victory dance and tipping over my bike. I looked at the doomed creature for a moment, sizing up his treacherous syringe, before holding him out before the spider. The green spider instantly recognized the largest buffet he’d ever stumbled across, and groped out for it. He couldn’t get a good enough purchase—the fly was larger than he by several times—and finally I just set the fly down near him. The fly was injured and thus struggled, futilely, to right himself. The spider walked towards him and then—amazingly—walked right by. I guess with six or eight eyes, you could have trouble with depth perception.

So this horsefly was struggling to fly away with only one wing, and finally gave up and crawled towards the end of the pannier and jumped off the edge, as if committing suicide to save himself the horror of being eaten alive. Furious, I picked him up off the ground and set him back on the pannier, and again the spider missed him. I was about to put him in the spider’s path yet again, when suddenly the spider shimmied up an invisible web he’d made, all the way up to my handlebar.

By this time my wife was off the phone, and ready to get moving again. Even on these long summer days, we always get a little antsy in the evenings about finding a place to camp for the night. (We’ve come up empty a few times and had to sleep under a bridge or in a pricey motel.) I was torn about whether or not to ask my wife to wait just a little longer so I could complete this spider-feeding operation.

Well, before I even had a chance to broach the topic, an old man pulled up in an RV, stopped, and jumped out to chat with us. He’d seen us from the road and made a special detour to see what we were about. I expected the normal volley of questions, the expressions of amazement that we’d come all the way from San Francisco, the excitement that with a whole nation to tour around in we’d chosen this little town to ride through, etc. But this guy didn’t actually seem that curious about our trip. What he really wanted to talk about—and did!—was his 20-foot Winnebago Atasca, and what great gas mileage he’d gotten on his trip over from Michigan (or maybe he was headed to Michigan; I wasn’t paying super close attention). He talked and talked, and my wife was anxious to go since we’d miles to go before we’d sleep, miles to go before we’d sleep . . . and there was the fly, and there was the spider, still, but I’d had to suspend my operation so as not to be rude, and my magnificent plan was falling apart before my eyes. Finally, the man drove off, waving, and I grabbed the fly once again. I told my wife, “Observe. I will feed the fly to the spider.”

The spider was doing laps around the circumference of my handlebar now, but I caught his attention, waving the fly before him, its helpless legs groping the air. Now I held the fly right spang in front of him, and the spider groped out for the prey. I swear that I could feel the tiny spider legs brush my fingers as he betook his purchase. Perhaps he was enclosing the hapless fly with a web; in any case, after 20 or 30 seconds he’d pulled it in. I let go, and to my delight the spider wrapped his tiny mandibles around one of the fly’s red eyes. Yes, yes, I thought, oh yes sweet spider, suck his fly brains out his eyeball. This was pretty much the most satisfying moment of my life to that point.

The spider rode on my handlebar for the next 13 miles, feasting on its still living, still twitching, grossly oversized prey. Then we stopped at a country store for ice cream confections and when we came back out he was gone,  and the horsefly with him.

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Fiction - Game Show of the (Near) Future

Introduction

I haven’t seen a game show in at least a decade, and I’ve seen almost zero reality TV, so perhaps I’m not the greatest person to create a story about them.  On the other hand, who’s to say what these shows might morph into?

What follows is pure fiction.  Any resemblance of any character to any real person—past, present, or future—is utterly coincidental and, I might add, extremely unfortunate for all of us.

Game Show of the (Near) Future

Rick Bently, the host, who has the head of hair that Malibu Ken, Barbie’s boyfriend, must have been modeled on, wears one of those almost permanent grins that tempts you to hate him.  But the greater temptation is to fear him.  He may strike you as the grown-up version of one of the popular kids at school.  “It’s time for our first contestant!” he cries.  “Barbara Palmer, come on down!”

Barbara comes on down.  She has straight, mouse-colored hair and glasses.  “Barbara, tell us about yourself!” Rick booms.  Her smile looks a bit forced.  She grips the sides of the lectern and leans in to the mike before speaking.  “Well, I work in insurance but my real interest is mushrooms.  I’m what you call a mycophile.”

Rick touches his chin.  “You mean you eat mushrooms you find in the wild?”  Barbara perks up.  “No, the people who gather and eat them are called mycophagists.  I just like to study them.”

“Tell me, Barbara, what are three interesting things about mushrooms?”

“Well, for one thing, they’re a fungus, not a plant.  Also, they don’t require sunlight to make energy for themselves.  And maybe the most interesting thing is that a colony of mushrooms discovered in Oregon is now thought to be the largest organism in the world, covering over 2,000 acres, and it’s over 2,000 years old!”

“Wow, Barbara, what do you do with all this trivia?” asks Rick.

“Well, my friends all say the only value it could have is making money on game shows, so—here I am!” Barbara laughs.

“Well, that brings me to what’s on tap for today,” Rick says, shifting his attention to the camera.  “And I’ve got some exciting news for Barbara.  She doesn’t even have to compete with anybody today, because she’s been chosen as our Lucky Day winner!  That’s right, we drew her name out of a hat as an automatic winner, no quiz questions required!  Bob, show the studio audience today’s Lucky Day prizes.”

A disembodied, off-stage voice says, “It’s a BRAND NEW CAR!”  A beautiful woman in a long dress glides her hand over the car’s hood and up past the windshield.  “A Buick Regal with custom styling, perfect for date night or taking the kids to soccer practice!  But that’s not all.  The Lucky Day winner also gets … a trip to Belize!  All-expenses paid for the winner and a companion!  You’ll spend six nights at the Best Western Belize Biltmore Plaza!”  We see images of cocktails, the beach, a pool.

The camera pans to Barbara, who is literally jumping for joy.  “But Barbara, before you get too excited,” says Rick, “I didn’t actually say that you won.  What I said is, we picked your name out of a hat.  But the Lucky Winner is notified by phone, and—here’s the catch—the winner has to actually answer the phone to get the prize.  And you didn’t answer!  We tried to call you three times yesterday but you never picked up!”

Barbara’s smile vanishes.  Her lower lip trembles.  “I didn’t answer?”

“No!” say Rick, in the same upbeat tone he’s had all along.  “Why didn’t you answer!?  Screening your calls?  Or can’t you hear your phone?  What, were you in a loud bar?  A stadium?”

“Um, yesterday?  No … I was, uh, at home.  I was doing … laundry,” Barbara says slowly, sadly.

“Well, I’m sorry but this means you don’t win anything!  Not even a parting gift, though twenty randomly selected members of our studio audience will receive … Bob, tell them what they get.”

Bob cuts in, “Well, Rick, won’t they be happy with this Hickory Farms 5-Piece Farmhouse Sausage and Cheese Sampler basket!  Premium meats in natural casing, and naturally aged premium cheeses, individually wrapped to enjoy now, or later!”

“It’s time for a commercial intermission, and when we come back we’ll meet our next contestant!” Rick beams, as Barbara is escorted from the stage.

We rejoin and meet Doug Smedley, a rotund fellow with bad skin.  His face and neck are nicked up from shaving, making you think (oddly enough) of a pomegranate.  “Doug, tell us about yourself!” cries Rick.

“Well, I work … when I work, or when I worked I guess I should say … I’m between jobs … as an HVAC technician,” Doug says.

“HVAC?  What’s that?  Care to enlighten our studio audience?”

“Oh, sorry, it’s heating, ventilation, and air conditioning for office buildings.  Wiring, controllers, that sort of thing.”

“But you’re unemployed now?  How long has that been?”

“Well … it’s been, uh, fourteen months now.  It’s hard.  I guess HVAC is being done in the ‘cloud’ now.  I don’t really know how all that works.”

“Well, Doug, we have a special surprise for you today.  You see, you haven’t actually been selected as a contestant here, but we have a very special person backstage we think you’ll be surprised to see.  Bring out Janet Smedley, Doug’s mother!”

A grey-haired woman in neatly pressed trousers and a floral blouse strides across the stage and shakes Rick’s hand.  Doug, perplexed, gives her a little nod.  “Gosh, Mom,” he mumbles.  “I had no idea.”

“Janet,” Rick booms, “so glad you could join us!  We’ve just been talking to your son Doug.  And I have to say, Doug seems like a bit of a loser, doesn’t he?”  Janet frowns, and now looks as befuddled as Doug.  Rick continues, “When did you first realize he was a washout?”  Janet, her expression that of a drowning cat, says nothing. 

“Well, we happen to have a pretty good theory,” Rick says cheerily.  “It’s time for our special guest star!”

A thick, mustachioed man in a tweed suit strides across the stage and shakes Rick’s hand.  Rick looks into the camera and says, “This is Philip Simms, M.D., a renowned obstetrician, professor, and lecturer.  Dr. Simms, what can you tell us about the benefits of breastfeeding?”

“Well, Rick, as all doctors and most mothers know, a large body of evidence shows that children who are breastfed go on to score higher on IQ tests, and display higher academic performance.  Meanwhile, the closeness and comfort of breastfeeding strengthens the mother’s bond with her baby and is crucial in building a secure, loving relationship.”

Rick turns to Janet.  “You didn’t breastfeed your son Doug, did you?  Why is that?!”

Janet blushes profusely.  “Well—nobody did!  It was out of favor!  The doctors … they said formula was better!  It wasn’t just me!  It was everybody!  Breastfeeding was ... well, it was out of fashion!”

“Oh, fashion!  Of course you had to be au courant!  And, poor thing, you were pushed around by doctors!  But did it ever occur to you to think for yourself?  Didn’t you have any maternal instincts at all?!”

Janet is in tears.  Rick pushes on:  “Knowing what we all know about breastfeeding, I don’t think it’s much of a stretch to say you played a big part in creating the sad sack your son has become.  Frankly, I think it’s disgraceful.”

Rick pauses.  “Now Janet, raise up your arms,” he commands.  “Come on, raise them up!”  Janet, bewildered, does as she’s told, and Rick points to where the armpits of her blouse are dark with sweat.  The audience roars with laughter.  “Janet, it’s time for you to go.  And take your dirtbag son with you!  Bob, let’s see what twenty more audience members get to take home, in Janet and Doug’s honor.”

Bob gushes about a framed Thomas Kincade print, showcased for the audience, and then there’s another commercial intermission.  We return to see another contestant standing at a lectern.  He is thin, sporting an Oxford button-down shirt, and has thinning, sand-colored hair and wire-rimmed glasses.  “Kyle Nelson, tell us about yourself,” says Rick.  Kyle explains that he is a college history professor specializing in—“That’s nice, Kyle, thanks,” says Rick.  “And now, look—puppies!”

Five adorable German Shepherd puppies run out onto the stage.  They’re fluffy, with floppy ears and love-me eyes, and the crowd gives a collective “Awwwwwwwww.”  The puppies line up and lie down, facing the audience, resting their heads on their front paws.  

Then a full-grown German Shepherd wearing a charcoal-colored vest labeled “POLICE” trots out to the stage, lean and taut, the perfect embodiment of discipline and grace.  A moment later a uniformed police officer appears onstage.  He is sturdy, with a square jaw, five-o’clock shadow, and thick, dark hair.  He is so good looking you begin to wonder if he might actually be a male stripper.

“This is Officer Jack Strong of the L.A.P.D.,” says Rick, “certainly one of the finest in the force.  I know I’m glad to have him on our streets.  Officer, I believe you have some questions for Kyle here.”

Officer Strong gets right to the point.  “Mr. Nelson, just after 11 p.m. on Saturday, October 18 you were headed southbound on Highway 405 when you encountered a police road block.  An arrest was being made on the shoulder of the highway, and as you were waved through you accelerated.  You wanna tell everybody what happened next?”

Kyle is speechless.  The cop continues, “You hit something, didn’t you?”  Kyle looks stricken, and stammers, “Well, there was a thump, but I didn’t know what it was, I figured it could be a road cone, or a hunk of an old tire or something.  I don’t know, I didn’t stop—I mean, there was a big bust happening there!”

“A road cone?  Is that what you were thinking when you cleaned the fur and blood off the front of your car?!  You ran over my K-9, you [BLEEP]!”  The audience gasps in horror.  “Scout died in my arms.  He was a good dog.  He was one of the best on the force.  And he was my friend.  You know what you are?!  You’re not just a cop-killer, but a hit-and-run dog-killer!”

Rick, who has been approaching Kyle, suddenly steps back as Kyle slams his fist down on the lectern.  “Wait a second!” Kyle cries out.  “You just wait a second!  Look, okay, I made a mistake!  But I was scared!  Fine, call me a coward—but look at yourselves!  You’re even worse!  Sitting there all smug, gaping at me and getting off on my humiliation!  You should all be ashamed!  This show is a travesty!  How would you like it if your lowest moment was put on display for a bunch of judgmental strangers?!  What is this, Tower Hill in London?  The Colosseum in Rome?!  Where would you be if you weren’t here to see this?  A cockfight?!  You disgust me!  You all disgust me!”  He turns to Rick.  “And you’re the worst of all, making your nut shaming people.  You can go straight to hell.”  Rick turns and begins to stalk away.

But Rick grabs him by the shoulder.  “Stop,” he says.  “I have to tell you something.”  Kyle turns and glares.  Rick leans close and, in a low tone, hisses, “You think you’re the first guy to try turning the tables on us?  Don’t make me laugh.  Sure, we film this thing life before a studio audience, but it’s not shown live.  We can cut it up all we want, and you can be sure your little tantrum there won’t be hitting anybody’s TV screen.  Don’t be a twit.”

“You think I care?” Kyle shoots back.  “Screw your show.  None of the rest of your footage is usable either, since I didn’t deign to follow your stupid script.  I’m glad I wasted your time.”

“Whoah, whoah, whoah.  Not so fast, mister.  Yes, we do have a script, and you’re going to follow it.”

“Oh yeah?” Kyle sneers.

“Yeah.  Because we have your teenage daughter backstage, and if you don't go back up to that stage and finish out this show the way we intended, I’m going to bring her on the show and confront her about her recent abortion.”

A blood vessel is bulging on Kyle’s forehead, and he stands fuming for a full minute before walking back to the lectern, lips pursed, and taking his licks.  Rick, when he’s done smearing his guest, concludes, “It’s time for Kyle to go.  And no, he won’t be getting a parting gift.  But Bob, show the viewers what Officer Strong and the rest of his precinct will be getting.”  Bob sings the praises of a beautiful hip flask—“Timeless, yet practical, in brilliant chrome or beautiful brushed stainless steel, covered in genuine cordovan leather.”

“But you, Kyle Nelson, you get nothing!” Rick shouts.  “That’s how we do it on”—and here the entire crowd shouts it out, in perfect unison—“NO CONSOLATION!” These words appear on-screen, in a giant blocky font.

The credits roll.

From the Archives - Nevada Road Tour

Introduction

How old does something have to be before it can be called “archival”? I broke my own albertnet record in April by posting something I’d written less than a year before. And now, because I’ve run out of handy archival pieces, I’ll break new ground with a tale that’s only two months old. I wrote this for my bike club pals.

Why should you read this? Because it’s short, it’s funny (I think), and it’s full of suffering and disappointment: a story of a bike ride gone wrong. Not spectacularly wrong, but just basically and essentially wrong. I met up with a couple of cycling pals near Lake Tahoe to do a Saturday bike ride before watching, with our families, the first stage of the Tour of California bike race. (That endeavor went about as well as the ride, which is to say not well at all.)

Nevada Road Tour – May 14, 2011

The tale begins, of course, with dinner the night before. On the way up to Tahoe our family dined at a rather good taqueria called Talavera. It’s on Solano Ave. Yes, you read that correctly: this was the little taqueria less than half a mile from home. We got such a late start, we ended up setting a new record for how soon into a road trip we stopped for food. I had a carnitas burrito with cheese and guac. It was big and, well, tasty enough. (The quality control isn’t the greatest at Talavera. If you’re there when the cook is on, or the right cook is there, it’s SF-Mission-worthy.) My daughter Alexa had the mushroom quesadilla which was really the star of the show. Happily, the mandatory Parental Tariff policy stood me in good stead.

The morning of the ride, at 6 a.m., I had a PBJ (Alvarado bread with Adams organic peanut butter, the salted kind of course—not like the heinous Deaf Smith unsalted brand I grew up with, which came in like a 5-gallon drum and was so runny we called it Quicksand because you’d lose knives in it, every time you got to the bottom of the drum there would be like six of them and it was practically inedible due to no salt—and my mom’s homemade apricot jam, which is nirvana).

It was pretty chilly at 7 a.m. when Craig, Ed, and I started our ride, and the spray from riding through several large puddles got my leg warmers wet. We tooled clockwise around the lake and then headed into Nevada and took a left on Highway 431 at Incline Village. This highway took us up over Mount Rose, the summit of which—at almost 9,000 feet—is the highest pass in the Sierras (and higher than the Col du Galibier in France, though you shouldn’t for a moment think that Mount Rose even deserves to lick the Galibier’s foothills). My form was, as we in the suffering industry say, “El Crappo Grande” (perhaps in part because I’d given two units of red blood cells a couple weeks before). It’s always a little sad when you’ve planned an epic ride and discover your legs are no good.

We spent just long enough at the Mount Rose summit for Ed—who had arrived before us and thus had been waiting around in the cold wind for awhile—to take our photo. It was 41 degrees up there but not raining. I know Craig and I look fat in this photo, but it's just the wind filling out our jackets. Honest.

Toward the bottom of the descent, following Craig’s detailed directions, we turned right on Joy Lake Drive, which was supposed to connect us to … well, I never actually got to find out how it was supposed to connect up, because at the gate to a, well, gated community we encountered a stubborn security guard who wouldn’t let us through. He had a walrus moustache and a walrus physique and immediately made me think of the Pink Floyd line, “It’s too late to lose the weight you used to need to throw around.” He gave an impassioned speech about the filthy rich people living in the McMansion compound, and how they were so tired of the thousands of cyclists streaming through their community, burning their homes to the ground, enslaving their wives and children, and littering, that they closed the gates and won’t let any more cyclists through. The guard gave us directions to a trail we could use instead. These instructions showed the guard to be either dyslexic, stupid, right/left colorblind, or maliciously unhelpful. I am confident that his body will never be found.

So we had to backtrack, up the No Joy road we’d come down, and then continue on to Highway 395, where we headed south into a brutal headwind. We stopped at a gas station where Craig studied a map. Useless as ever, I hung out outside and tried to learn something from this distinguished fellow.

We took a ninety degree turn which should have ended the headwind, but it seemed to alter its own course and continued blasting in our faces. Of course, to make up for the detour and not keep our families waiting we felt the urge to ride faster. My strength by this point had decayed from hopeless to lugubrious and it was all I could do to suck Craig’s wheel, shamelessly and parasitically.

It was criminal how little work I did breaking the wind for the others, but that’s okay because Craig has been training a lot and seemed to be punching through the wind just fine. We got into Carson City and Craig had a general idea there was some really cool bike route to take, but we couldn’t find it, and then we saw this cyclist. “Which way do we go?” Craig asked him. The guy responded, “Where are you going?” If there’s a such thing as the polar opposite of a tautology, this was it—a notion I pondered for the next hour or so.

So we ended up riding right through the main drag in Carson City, and a drag it was. The wind was ripping the flesh off our faces. As we passed a used car dealership with all its balloons, straining against their strings in the wind, I wondered if there were a convenient way to end my own life. Falling off Craig’s wheel would have probably done the job, but not swiftly nor mercifully. I’d have died hating doing something I loved, which just seemed wrong, so I chose life. Life without parole, it seemed like. We stopped at a mini mart for water and some guy said, “You guys heading over 50? You got a long haul there.” We acknowledged that indeed we were totally screwed (though we used a more polite term). As he headed through the door he said, “Have fun in the race tomorrow.” As if.

So we headed west on Highway 50 over Spooner Pass, which those familiar with Spoonerisms might call Pooner Spass, thinking they’re funny or clever or something. It started off pretty badly because the wind still seemed to be in our faces, but then it shifted and we had a tailwind. Wow, what a relief. It didn’t help so much, but it left me free to drop off both Ed’s and Craig’s wheels without dire consequences. I’d have liked the company, of course, but at least I didn’t have to hear this squeaky chain that one of the bikes had, which was almost loud enough to drown out my wheezing. At one point I had to turn around because I accidently littered. Eventually I reached the top. Don’t we all?

There’s not much else to say except the ride went on and on. I started to feel okay by the end, probably only because I know I was almost done. I was barely coherent. When I tried to talk, often I would say the same word twice, like a strange form of stuttering. Craig pointed out that on this bike path were painted instructions saying “Ride on this side, Walk on this side” which he felt was a very poor idea as it would lead to head-on collisions if heeded. At first I didn’t even know what he was talking about—I thought he was warning against slime in the puddles—but when I finally heard him right I thought his point was that the instructions were backwards, that you should ride on that side and walk on that side, and only after several minutes did I finally grasp the lunacy he was pointing out. Dang. Anyhow, at 117 miles, with 8,400 feet of climbing, this was my hardest ride of the year.

During the ride I consumed four large bottles of energy drink, two energy bars, and four doughnut holes. The doughnut holes I bought on a whim at 7-Eleven at our last stop. By definition doughnut holes have zero calories but I bought them anyway because they looked kind of tasty in a grotesque guilty-pleasure—nay, shameful-pleasure—kind of way. Ed looked hungry and also sick so I can’t tell if it was in the spirit of helpfulness or schadenfreude that I offered him some of the doughnut holes. He declined. I saved a couple for my daughters. Oh, and I had a 20-ounce Coke.

Dinner was the gastronomic equivalent of a ten-minute hip-hop mash-up where every single rapper on the planet jumps in to freestyle on the mic. While the men were out riding, the womenfolk had spent the day cooking. (This probably sounds sexist, and it’s an exaggeration, but after the beating I took on the road I need to take steps to rebuild my masculine dignity.) There was spinach lasagne, two kinds of enchiladas, salad (though I didn’t eat any), fruit salad (ibid.), a big ham, and some other stuff I think.

Then there were individual pumpkin pies with whipped cream, two kinds of ice cream, those cookies with big chocolate disks pressed into them, and the mandatory parental tariffs I took of my kids Hostess fruit pies from earlier. I just sat there for like two hours straight eating plate after plate. (My wife Erin has pointed out that if I weren’t so thin this kind of eating would be a truly disgusting spectacle.) As if Craig hadn’t done enough work on the ride, he did the dishes while I just sat there. I’d like to take this opportunity to thank him for organizing the weekend and doing all the work.

The next morning, it was snowing. The snow fell hard and steadily and the Tour of California race was first postponed, then eventually canceled. More than a foot accumulated, and I-80 was closed. We did some sledding.

Eventually CalTrans reopened the highway, but required tire chains. This was May, remember. By the time we got on the road the chain control was lifted, and we made our way uneventfully home. It had been a great weekend, actually.

dana albert blog