Shooting the Spider

Having given the introduction to what this blog is all about in the last entry, it occurred to me that nothing is stopping me retrieving some of the old tales from their dust-gathering floppy tombs in the cupboard in my office upstairs. After signing off, I went upstairs and switched on the house computer, which these days seems to need about half an hour to get ready for operation, and began trolling through the pile of little cardboard boxes that hold my memories. You can imagine what followed...

After finding the little box that holds the memories of my days as a traffic policeman in the early nineties in South Africa, I found the floppy disc that I thought held the particular memory I wish to post here. Imagine my surprise when I loaded its contents onto the house computer and saw that there were a number of "memories" that I couldn't even recall writing! They deal with my introduction to the beautiful little farming town in the foothills of the Drakensberg to which I eventually relocated after leaving the state traffic police and taking up a job as "Chief" of the non-existent local police force in said town. This is the same town to which I allude in the post "Forgotten Places". My wife and I both think of this town and the district that encompasses it as being the place in which we experienced the most happy times of our lives. I am so pleased to have found these "forgotten" writings. I look forward to sharing them with you.

For now, this is a story that every single person who has ever read it, or heard me tell it around a fire late at night (after sufficient beer intake...) has enjoyed. Some things need explaining for my readers who don't know me, such as the fact that "Bob" is the nickname of my best buddy since we got to know each other in the old South African Defence Force. By that you can understand National Service in the existing military of the country at the time. We had both been to Officer School in Oudtshoorn (pronounced "owe-ts-hoo-wern") and while I with my loud mouth, overbearing manner and only a matric education had been made a sergeant, he with his Rhodesian upbringing of tea and houseboys, crisp linen shirts and wholesome colonial British inbred authority, not to mention the three year diploma in Human Resources Management, had been made a lieutenant. We had, unbeknown to us, a "past". That, however, is another tale. Suffice it to say that by the time this story came to pass, he was my very best friend in the world, and we had already created a history of our own. I was also known as "Bob", by the way. Just so it doesn't get too confusing.

The style of the storytelling may differ slightly from the blog at present but that's because this was written a long time ago. I hope it's still enjoyable.

Here goes:

Place: South Africa, Kwazulu-Natal, South Coast.
Time: Sometime in late Spring, 1993.



One fine morning I arrived, fresh and healthy for a change, at the testing grounds in Umzinto, ready for another shift of taming reckless roadsters in our beautiful province. Of course, Bob was already there, badges shining and the shadows thrown by the bright neon office lights falling off the crisp edges of the knife blade creases in his uniform slacks.
“Howdy Bob,” said he, “what say we head for the hills this morning, eh?”
A fine idea, I thought. For us “the hills” referred to the inland portion of our domain, stretching up from the back of Umzinto toward the crisp and beautifully green district surrounding Ixopo. This area was covered by an infamous road known as the R612. I say “infamous” because it was a guaranteed source of work for any self-respecting traffic officer. There were scores of illegal taxis, unlicensed private vehicles, overloaded sugar cane trucks and buses, drunken drivers, underage drivers, drivers having sex with passengers while driving, drivers having a shootout with passengers while driving, treacherous curves on which reckless drivers overtook their slower brethren over double barrier lines, etc.

The fun and excitement of working on this route included the fact that it was one of the main routes up which an escaping bank robber or more particularly car thief would escape en route to one of the locations in which the loot or stolen vehicle would be most effectively dissipated among the remote and outlying areas of countryside for a cooling off period before being brought back into circulation. This meant that one stood a quite reasonable chance of being pulled into a high speed chase and shootout with a suspect. Heady stuff for young men, and certainly a draw card for bored traffic officers.

Another thing that particularly appealed to Bob and I was the weather up the R612. While in one direction bright sunshine could shine over green grassy slopes shimmering in the breeze, one could turn through 180 degrees and see the massive storm clouds standing one on top of the other, pierced with lightning bolts and advancing menacingly towards you as they seemed to obliterate everything in their path with a solid sheet of rain slanted at the ground.

Another spectacular weather phenomenon was the sudden bank of thick, impenetrable mist that could roll over the road, seemingly out of nowhere. It would be a cold and cloudy day, though with good visibility, and suddenly one would round a corner and be in thick mist, or you would be driving down a long straight on a shored up stretch of tarmac, the valley dropping away among the hillsides to your left and the dark forest on your right, and suddenly a veil of mist would rush up out of the valley and speed across the road, mysteriously dissipating in among the dark trees on the right. You could drive up a long and steep stretch of road in glaring sunlight, yet it would have that peculiarly yellow tinge that occurs before a violent storm and above and in front of you, filling your windscreen, would be a brooding, black sky. As you crested the hill you would be plunged into a maelstrom of swirling wind and pelting, clattering hailstones, blinding you and turning the roadway into a shifting, shimmering river of icy pebbles.

These weather patterns, so random and violent in their intensity, were the cause of a further reason for us wanting to work this road in particular. Both Bob and I were extremely interested in the medical rescue aspect of our jobs, and had taken to the additional courses on offer in this field with alacrity. We had discovered a reasonably good means of justifying our mundane existence as traffic officers by being able to rescue accident victims and save lives and this aspect of our careers excited us, as opposed to the more common practice of hiding away and pouncing on unsuspecting old ladies who didn’t come to a complete stop at a stop street.

The problem with wanting to work on the R612 was that the powers that be had decided that we were to work almost exclusively on the freeways and not on the more out of the way old national road system. I can only put this down to the fact that freeways were high profile patrol routes, which meant that important people who would demand political accountability from our highest brass would be able to see us standing on the side of the freeway as they whizzed by on their way to the casino down the coast, or their wild coast fishing trips, etc. and thus be satisfied that we were “doing our job”. Of course, one could only really conduct speed controls on the highways and even these weren’t really that interesting because within 20 minutes after setting up the motorists going in the opposite direction would have “flashed” their counterparts going in our direction for the entire length of the freeway all the way up to Durban, and so everyone would be rumbling along at a gentle 120km per hour. This was a good thing, of course, for it led to orderly and safe driving for the entire time that we were parked there without anyone having to pay a fortune in speeding fines, but it was terribly boring work for us. And of course a lot of frustration lay in the fact that at times one could actually hear the more powerful vehicles dropping a gear and accelerating once they had passed us and knew that the danger was over. Being understaffed there was never anyone further down that we could alert either, so all in all it was quite frustrating. Another fact of life in the district was that all the fancy modern cars that were all perfectly roadworthy and legal, as well as driven by legally licensed and not intoxicated people were going about their business on the highways, while just over the crest of the great banks that lined the highway, on the old national routes, there was a multitude of sinners of varying degrees driving rusted out old claptraps that barely managed to stay together, and all of them laughing at the uniformed idiots that were wasting their time standing around on the highway, watching all the rich holidaymakers whizzing by in their new Mercedes’ and BMW’s.

It was quite remiss of the bosses, actually. Here we were, forced to waste our time standing on the side of the highway twiddling our thumbs, when we could have been making a valuable contribution to road safety in the really dangerous parts of the road network and still been within a stones throw of any highway on-ramp in times of need. As it was we would sneak off the highways to get our daily quota of charges quickly on some side road (there was hardly anything to charge on the highway, and we had to satisfy the bosses with an average of about 10 to 15 charges per day, though that was always denied to the public) and then still do a few long patrols up and down the length of the highway in order to show a presence. I think that this was enough but the bosses never did and so we were forced to stay on the freeways, hour after hour.

From time to time though, and especially on weekends when it was likely that the station commander or his second in command who supervised every second weekend were likely to be ducking off at friend’s houses or at home themselves with the patrol car parked outside the lounge window and the two way radio turned up on full volume, we would take it upon ourselves to do a patrol where we wanted to, and not where we were supposed to.

This was obviously going to be one of those weekends, and what with the beautiful crisp predawn air of a dewy spring morning and the prospect of those rolling green hills interspersed with kraals and dams, and luscious green fields filled with sleek and fat dairy cows, I couldn’t agree more with Bob’s suggestion. The R612 was a fantastic place to catch barrier line offenders, and what’s more they were normally the rich and arrogant farmers of the area who assumed that all officers of the law were appointed to maintain the status quo of white over black. This meant that they thought that they could do whatever they liked on the roads while we had to ensure that any black people attempting to use the roads were subjected to the third degree.

Of course not everyone was like this, but unfortunately it was the select few that created the lasting impression of all the rest. Anyway, it was always a pleasure to catch and charge an obviously wealthy and influential person who plainly thought he was above the law and ranted and raved at us for being useless bloodsucking parasites on society. It went a long way toward assuaging the sympathy we felt for ordinary battling people who were just trying to go about their lives and couldn’t afford that new tyre or the leaking oil seal but had to go on using their vehicle to get children to school or to earn a living. What made it worse was that these people were always polite and decent to us. They didn’t earn a lot yet made no fuss and accepted their fines with good grace. In fact, even though we weren’t really supposed to, we often waived an official summons to appear in court or pay a fine in favour of a verbal “warning” which didn’t really achieve much but went a long way toward satisfying our empathy with the ordinary people. The rich farmers and sales reps with their BMW’s, Audi’s and Mercedes’ were quite another story though.

I had recently uncovered the old camera that belonged to the station, having found it in the strong room one day. In the old days, before my time in the force and when they still operated on a more professional basis, keeping good records of accidents and using these to support the investigation into causes of serious road accidents and motivating the implementation of preventative measures such as road alterations and speed control measures, etc. this camera had seen good service. In fact I can still recall a time when at six years old I had accompanied my father on a patrol and witnessed him using the same camera to record an accident scene which was still on display in the traffic training college 13 years later when I attended that august institution.

The camera was a very good one and all I had to do was get some petty cash from the office ladies and buy some film for it. I had taken to carrying it around with me and was trying to revive the old practice of meticulously recording the accidents that occurred. It was also proving to be very useful for other reasons, such as using photos taken with it as a very effective tool in winning court cases against people who blatantly broke the law yet still tried to use their massive financial capabilities to worm their way out of a R200 fine with a R10 000 lawyer rather than admit they had broken the law. There was nothing quite like seeing the light of battle slowly fade and die from a powerful Durban or Johannesburg attorney’s eyes as I nonchalantly pulled a pair of photos out of my file for the magistrate’s perusal toward the end of the court case, when the defendant and his lawyer had already spent considerable energy demonstrating the outstanding character and honesty of the defendant, as opposed to the morally despicable and fascist-like young power freak who had so wrongly accused the defendant. The magistrate would gaze at the photo clearly showing a speeding vehicle fully on the wrong side of the road and brightly painted double barrier lines, oncoming traffic pulling to the side to avoid him while he raced passed a slower vehicle, his face and registration plate clearly visible, and his honour’s visage would take on the dark aspect of an approaching storm. Thundering at the cowering lawyer and his sheepish client he would throw the two out of his courtroom and that would be the end of all argument.

The thought of catching the beginning of such a beautiful morning in the picturesque surroundings alongside the R612 as well as the prospect of finding some interesting cases and perhaps putting an arrogant rich person in their place was a mighty pleasing one at the beginning of a weekend that was to be wasted working.
“Just a moment, Bob”, I said, and rushed into my office to grab the camera. Bob had already fetched the speed-timing device from the strong room and soon we had our vehicle loaded and ready to go. By 05h45 we had left the town and were on our way up the winding old national route that linked the Drakensberg to the Indian Ocean. The road seems to climb from the minute it leaves the coast, and accordingly (or so it always seemed to my coastal eyes), so the vegetation and the very air itself seemed to change. This was a perception that remained with me far into the future and another job that took me down the R612 fairly often but in the opposite direction. However, that is another tale.

Both my partner and I drank in the still dark early morning atmosphere on the ride up. It was a fair while before either of us spoke again, and then we had to decide what to do and where. We liked to do what is today known as multitasking. For instance, while most of our colleagues would either set up a speed timing device or stand and make arbitrary vehicle checks, or conduct drunken driving tests, we preferred to set up as much equipment as possible at one sitting, thereby broadening our net and serving more of a purpose in the process. After all, why allow two drunken drivers to go past simply because they weren’t speeding and you didn’t stop them? Or why sit and watch two speedsters racing by because you were only doing roadworthy checks and didn’t have your speed timing apparatus in place? Anyway, we had come upon a good place to set up shop, and so we pulled over and began to set ourselves up.

The reason we liked the place was that it afforded excellent cover and a superb vantage point over a long and dangerous curve that wound its way out of a steep downhill and into the uphill stretch on which we waited. The roadway was divided by a double barrier line, as any vehicles descending toward the curve from either North or South had no clear line of sight to establish whether or not it was safe to overtake. They also had the advantage of the steep downhill in either direction to aid an illegal and dangerous attempt to accelerate and rapidly overtake any crawling logging vehicle or overloaded sugar cane transporters such as regularly held up traffic on the long haul up or down the R612. Although dangerous it was obviously a very tempting place to do a quick passing of a vehicle that could well hold you up all the way to the next town, provided you were willing to take the chance that no one was coming in the opposite direction.

Our spot was the very ornate driveway of somebody’s farm. There were great big whitewashed driveway pillars, about three meters tall, on either side of the entrance way leading off the main road, and attached to each pillar was a curving wall that started about half a meter below the top of the pillar and gradually lowered in height as it curved out toward the side away from the driveway, culminating in a shorter pillar of about half a meter in height. We could park our vehicle behind one of these walls, between it and the cleared back bush. Bob could set up the speed timing device with a good line of sight down to the curve in the road while remaining out of sight himself and I could walk up the curving wall right up to the top of the pillar where I commanded an excellent field of vision and could zoom in on offending motorists. From there it was a clear shot of both their offending actions and their registration plates. Thus if anybody failed to stop we didn’t have to disrupt our cautiously and meticulously laid out set-up with a mad scramble to pack up, get in the vehicle and commence a usually fruitless high speed chase of the offending vehicle. Rather, we could, after a leisurely breakfast, radio in the details of the registration plate and simply arrive at the person’s home or office where we could arrest him on a charge of failing to comply with the instructions of a traffic officer, as well as charge him with the original offence. So, here we were perfectly set up in a good place and ready to take advantage of a new and unknown hideout while enjoying the beauty of an early morning sunrise over the still dark hills and misty valleys.

Watching the sun come up that morning was one of those rare pleasures that the unfortunate traffic cop gets to enjoy as he begins a predawn shift on the beginning of a beautiful weekend that other more fortunate souls spend at their leisure. Though we were actually visible at the last minute to the passing traffic going in the direction of the coast and away from us, almost everybody seemed more intent on the road and were either yawning as they drove or rubbing their eyes in the glare of the rising sun. We reaped a bounteous crop from all walks of life that morning, all chancing their arm on the barrier lines through the dangerous curve below us. We even caught a few early morning speedsters (mostly the same ones we were about to stop for overtaking in the first place!). A few really decrepit death traps on wheels fell into our net too and all in all it was a rather profitable few hours. Realising that we had satisfied the bosses’ quota of charges in one fell swoop, with a satisfyingly varying and justified batch of charges, and all that before breakfast too, we decided to pack up and make our leisurely way back down to the coast for breakfast at our favourite hotel.

This should have been a quick and easy affair, however it turned out that a nasty surprise was awaiting me. Dating back to my earliest years living on the coast and having large, hairy rain spiders lurking above doorways in the home, or small black jumping spiders which sprang onto little children’s exposed legs and inflicted a painful bite that resulted in large sores full of stinking pus, I have suffered from arachnophobia. Now, in the clear light of the bright morning sun, I was in for a shock.

In my appreciation of the beautiful predawn morning, the trill of awakening birds, the smell of the soil damp with early morning dew and the expectation of a good morning’s pickings, I had blithely walked up the spiral wall that led to the top of the pillar upon which I had perched myself to spy out and photograph offending motorists. This had been done in that half light that precedes the full rising of the sun. Now, as I stepped forward down the curve of the whitewashed wall, a perfectly formed ring like the outwardly spreading ripples on a still lake surface after the rise of an early morning trout showed itself. Neatly attached to the wall I was on and completely filling the half circle formed by the curving wall was a gigantic spider’s web, each strand beautifully illuminated by golden droplets of dew catching the early sun’s rays. Each individual strand looked to be about the diameter of a matchstick, though I think this was merely an exaggeration in the arachnophobic mind I possess.

Instantly freezing in the manner of the proverbial deer in the headlights, I frantically cast my eyes about the monstrosity of a web in search of what would surely be a monstrosity of a spider. True enough, when I eventually spotted him he was about the size of my hand from front foot to back, and he had an abdomen the size of a small plum. Not only was he intimidating in size but he also had a fearful array of dangerous looking colours splashed and dotted about his body. Altogether one of the scariest looking spiders I had ever seen! He was in the quarter of the web nearest to me and steadily advancing. I could even see his trail leading from the centre of the web as he disturbed the dew drops in his path. He had been heading directly for me! I took a fearful step backwards and he immediately stopped his movement.
“Come on, Bob, hurry up!” said Bob from down below.
He had packed up the radar machine and was now waiting for me. I took another step forward. The spider immediately resumed his movement toward me, only this time a little faster. I paused, heart thumping, and so did the spider. This is ridiculous, I thought. Here I am, 80kg of grown man, and he’s just a little insect. I took another step forward. So did he. I stopped. So did he. By now I was breaking out in a sweat and my mouth had gone dry. I was stuck on this damn wall, too high up to jump and too scared to run the gauntlet past the belligerent spider. Somewhere in the recesses of my mind I was aware that Bob was laughing at me, but I was too busy dealing with my fear of the spider to worry too much. I had to get off the damn wall, but there was no way I was going to risk having that great big monstrosity of a spider springing on me! Then it dawned on me what had to be done. Drawing my 9mm pistol, I took a tentative step forward. The spider immediately settled its baleful gaze on me again and resumed its stalking. A trickle of sweat ran down my temple, but I resolutely took another step forward. The spider was now within a couple of feet of me, and steadily advancing. Cold chills were racing up and down my spine as my legs turned weak with fear. As he got to within a foot of my own foot, I raised my pistol in both hands, the camera hanging around my neck. With shaking hands I drew a bead on his massive abdomen, while he paused for one last look before making what would surely be his killing leap onto my quivering body.

With a squeeze of the trigger I dissolved my fearsome opponent into a fine mist of gooey spray, leaving nought but a still twitching leg stuck to the tattered silk waving around the hole in the web. In the aftermath of my fear the silence of my dumbfounded partner and the relief of knowing that I lived to breathe another day were too much for me, and I broke out in hysterical laughter. I wonder to this day what a casual observer would have thought of us had he been watching from afar, these brave policemen that were so afraid of spiders that they shot them...