Yesterday, while motoring across the Pamlico River, I looked up at the rigging and saw hundreds of fine filaments streaming from all the rigging on the boat. The sun was angled just right so that they shined golden; streamers between 5 and 10 feet long. All up and down the stays and shrouds and halyards they were flying about 3 or 4 inches apart. Later, after anchoring, I investigated and learned that small spiders will get to a high place, stick the appropriate body part in the air, spin a strand, and cast there fate to the winds as a way of traveling. They have been found at very high altitudes (16,000 feet) and far out at sea. They call it spider ballooning. The fact that I could see hundreds of these filaments begs the question, "Do I now have hundreds of vagrant spiders aboard the boat?" If so, they must be very small because I don't see them. Perhaps they just briefly visit a fellow sailor and then spin another web and off again. Walt Whitman even wrote a short poem about these spiders:
A noiseless patient spider,
I mark'd where on a little promontory it stood isolated,
Mark'd how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,
It launch'd forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,
Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.
And you O my soul where you stand,
Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them,
Till the bridge you will need be form'd, till the ductile anchor hold,
Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.
