Cobwebs and Ghost Ships

It has been a long time since I wrote anything about spiderwebs.  Not that there aren't many around the Bayou, it is just that you can try to convey the beauty of these natural masterpieces so many times before folks tire of it.  I have invited folks to wander around the hillside, marshes and gardens with me just to show them some web glistening in the early morning light but not one wishes to get up before dawn to see some stringy structure heavy laden with dewdrops.  I do not understand.  Each time I come across one of these works of art, I marvel.  There truly must be something wrong with my brain..or so I have been told.  "Common cobwebs are not beautiful!" is the proclamation that I so often hear.  Perhaps if folks could only view them as I do!

Then finally someone else took an interest!  Not in the predawn webs still bejeweled with dew but a ragtag web cloaked in mud.  Michael and I had been fishing from the pier when he spied the web.  Calling to me, he asked if I had ever seen a web like the one he found.  Yes, it was not that rare but that did not make it nonetheless fascinating.  A spider had created a web spanning two pier posts during the low tide of the night before.  Obviously, the water rose faster than the spider anticipated.  The web was now submerged beneath the murky waters.  Since the Bay was still slick calm, the web held mostly intact.  He and I stared at the web in the dark waters.  Imagination ran wild and the two of us marveled at how much the webbing resembled the rigging of a sunken ship.  He looked at the similarities logically while my vivid imagination ran amok.  I could fully see how the ship had met its fate in a violent hurricane!  The small twig caught up in the web was part of the mast that had been cracked in two by the high winds and turbulent seas.  Although calm now, the roughness of the storm had sunk the massive ship.  Now, the lines lay slack with no sails catching the winds.  A Ghost Ship was all that was left..one to be manned by the denizens of the sea.

My vision soon came to as violent end as did the make-believe ship.   The coming of a thunderstorm whipped up the winds over the Bay and decimated the muddy web.  How fitting that the waves would end the spider's web just as an imaginary hurricane had ended the voyage of my "Ghost Ship"!  At least someone else had taken an interest in the natural beauty to be found in the lowly spider's web and we both agreed that it did, indeed, resemble a ship's rigging!  (Albeit, his was a much more straightforward interest.)  Michael questioned the tensile strength of the web and the logic of the arachnid that spun the web. This was a far cry from what I saw but I am glad he pondered the web.  Personally, though, my view was much more entertaining!