You know---I don't think I've ever told about this----but I do have the scar to prove it.
    I lived in Palm Springs during the early fifties. And i loved climbing Mt. San Jacinto, an almost shear mountain starting like---you can stand on the desert and lean back on the mountain. No foothills.
    ASt any rate, I was hiking, getting over the latest girl who had dumped me. I was up about (what) 1000 feet. I look out and there is an earthquake coming. You can see it. It's like pond ripples. The San Andreas is out there. So---dumb me---I stick my hand in some rocks to hold on. The quake passes. No big deal. But my finger hurts. I got bit by a rattler. Not a bit one. About the width of my finger.
    OK! I'll cut it short. I did the nasty. Cut the finger. That's the worst part. Sucked the blood. Not nice either. I survived.
    I don't know if this has anything to do with spiders or poison cones or not. But it has snowed here all day----and I got cabin fever.
    From the banks of the Tethys.
       Art
>
> From: John Timmerman <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: 2004/01/25 Sun PM 04:39:51 EST
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Doorstops & spiders
>
> Fossil collecting here is SE North Carolina produces the occasional black
> widow. A chunk of limestone holding a Pleurotomaria fossil for instance, may also
> be the roof of a spider's lair. The spider seeks shelter, it is to say the
> underside of whatever rock they happen to be clinging to. My first encounters
> resulted in quickly discarded fossils. I pick up of a fossil of interest only to
> realize that you know what is headed in haste toward my hand holding the rock
> from underneath, and back it goes to the ground. One also has to be on the
> look out for velvet ants, AKA "cow killers." I do not want to experience why
> they are called that.
>
> The first place I saw a black widow spider was along the vegetation line on a
> beach at Mona Island, Puerto Rico while searching for that "perfect" beached
> Strombus gigas shell. Those were gorgeous spiders, way better than the long
> dead Strombus.
>
> John Timmerman
> Wilmington NC
>
>

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