My partner was starving, so got her a hot dog and she sat down at the picnic table at our campsite. That was nice, to have a picnic table. And as she was eating, she was leaning on the picnic table and felt a sharp stinging sensation. And it became very clear — she was like, “Ugh, something just stung me!” She did not handle stings and pain super well. I remember when I first met her, we went hiking pretty early on and she got nicked by a thorn and just a little speck of blood popped up on her jeans and she almost passed out at the sight.
Um, and so she was trying her best to be tough, but the sting blew up pretty quickly. We don’t know what stung her because it was dark outside. I don’t know if she put her elbow down on a bee, or… we actually didn’t know what other living stinging things existed in the state of Washington at the time, so it could have been anything. But you know, I — we instantly dropped everything. I took her back to the car. We had ice in the cooler and, you know, she went to the driver’s seat ‘cause the back of the car was full and she wanted to be somewhere that was well lit. She got into the driver’s seat, I got into the passenger seat, and I just sat with her to console her and to make sure she had what she needed.
And there’s, uh — you know, things settled down. And then she kind of turned to me and got this look on her eye, and I can’t remember what she said, I’ll have to read my journal, but something along the lines of like, “Oh my god.” And I was like, “What? What now?” And like her eyes led to the ceiling of our car, and perfectly in between the two of us on the ceiling was this giant spider. Not tarantula size, so not that big. A few scales down. But a spider much bigger in size than you ever prefer to see on the ceiling of your car. We freaked out. We both skedaddled out of the car, and then closed the doors and peered up and saw the spider also got scared and he trotted toward the back of the vehicle, the silver Ford Escape.