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A Cape Cod Notebook can be heard every Tuesday morning at 8:45am and afternoon at 5:45pm.It's commentary on the unique people, wildlife, and environment of our coastal region.A Cape Cod Notebook commentators include:Robert Finch, a nature writer living in Wellfleet who created, 'A Cape Cod Notebook.' It won the 2006 New England Edward R. Murrow Award for Best Radio Writing.

Life's Drama Played Out in a Sink Bowl

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One evening, as I was brushing my teeth in the bathroom sink, I noticed a small spider in the bowl.  It was dark-purplish in color, with an extended abdomen ending in a dark-orange tip. It appeared to be one of those “jumping spiders” I have seen from time to time in our house. Jumping spiders, as their name suggests, leap on their prey rather than catching them in webs, but they attach a silk thread before they jump so that they can haul themselves back in if they miss.

I turned off the tap, rested my elbow on the rim of the sink, and watched the spider. What was he doing in there?  What possible prey could he find in a sink bowl?  I suspect he had accidentally fallen into the sink, either from the mirror or while exploring the rim of the bowl. In any case, it was clear he was trying to get out. He began circling the sink bowl, gradually moving up to the rim at an increasingly steep angle. But when he encountered one of the drops of water I had splashed on the upper bowl, he lost his grip and slid back down the slick surface of the bowl. .

I could have flushed him down the drain with a twist of the spigot, or lifted him out of harm’s way on the New Yorker page I was reading, but I did neither.  Instead, I watched. It was not just disinterested, writerly curiosity.  I wanted to see what he could do. I was, in a sense, rooting for him.

And he seemed to be a quick study. After several tries the spider appeared to learn to avoid the water drops at he continued his gradually-rising spirals around the smooth ceramic surface of the sink. But the sides of the sink bowl gradually steepened as he climbed, and each time, when he reached a critical point about 2” below the rim, he lost his grip and slipped back to the point on the bowl where I had originally found him. 

I watched several subsequent attempts, all with the same outcome. It seemed to me that the spider would most likely continue in its useless efforts, incapable of feeling either futility or discouragement, until he died of exhaustion or starvation. But I had other lives to live, and so, more out of impatience than empathy, I scooped him up out of the sink on the page of the magazine and, walking out onto the front porch, blew the spider off into the obscure darkness.

But, it seems, he had one more trick to play and refused to let me dismiss him so casually.  He had, it appeared, affixed a line of silk to the page, so that when I blew him off, he only sailed out a few inches, then hauled himself back in on his safety line and returned to the page from which I had launched him. So I blew again, this time much harder, and so managed to sever his hold on my interior life, sending him out onto the yellow-bulbed porch to take his chances among the creatures of the summer night and whatever arachnid deities would now oversee his fate.

Robert Finch is a nature writer living in Wellfleet. 'A Cape Cod Notebook' won the 2006 New England Edward R. Murrow Award for Best Radio Writing.