Bugs, Scorpions & the Existential Spider: A Love Letter to Costa Rica

Los Pargos, Part II – November 26, 2016

Every morning for over two weeks, I placed my coffee cup on the arm of the teal Adirondack chair facing the waves at Playa Negra. It was 5 AM, give or take. The sun was just beginning to rise. The others were still asleep. But the birds weren’t. Costa Rican birds are ambitious. Magpie jays with punk rock feather crowns loudly discussed god-knows-what in the trees above me and a gang of black birds circled the patio like bouncers checking in for their morning shift.

I’ll admit it. I was falling in love with this house. There was a life-force here. Every day was a symphony of nature doing its thing—chattering, crawling, humming, surviving. And every morning, I’d cross the patio from my room to the main house and meet some new bug, none of which I could name. Steve always could and if he didn't know he’d look them up. He’d search his phone with a mix of scientific curiosity and loving admiration.

That's how we met the tailless whip scorpion.

If you’ve never seen one, imagine something from Alien had a baby with a drone and gave it legs. They’re harmless, according to the Internet—and even “friendly” when kept as pets, according to people who should not be trusted with pets. Ours, who we named Whiptail Harry, lived under the bathroom counter. You know that one-eighth-inch gap between the bottom of the sink cabinet and the floor? Yeah. He could “get flat,” Steve said casually, like that was a normal thing for a creature the size of a salad plate to do.

We saw Harry a few more times, always at night and sometimes in the laundry room with his equally horrifying friends and siblings. But this whole 4-month trip was wrapped around my son Steve’s search for property in Costa Rica and he had some rules. No killing bugs inside walls. If you didn’t want it in the house, you kindly escorted it outside, like an overstaying guest at a party. I tried. I really did. But there were moments I had to call Steve in on the job, usually when it was an actual scorpion.

Yep. Scorpions. The Costa Rican kind—big but slightly more chill than their Phoenix cousins, but no less unnerving when found in a shoe. Did you know they glow under blacklight? You can play “Spot the Scorpion” at 2 AM if you hate yourself. Or just… don’t. Ignorance, in this case, truly is bliss.

Then came the spider incident.

I woke up around 3 AM with a tickle on my leg. Something was crawling under the sheet. I threw off the sheet and there it was: a thumbnail-sized black spider, just chillin’ on my thigh like it paid rent. I froze. It froze. For a split second we both just stared at each other like, “Well, this is awkward.”

Then instinct took over—I slapped the spider. Hard. Full palm. I looked under my hand expecting a splattered bug. Nope. He was still there. Unbothered. Entirely intact. My leg, however, had a bright red handprint like I'd punished myself. The spider resumed his journey as if I’d just gently patted him for courage. Honestly? I respected that.

I watched him for another moment and realized—he wasn’t hideous like Whiptail Harry. He was small. He moved slowly. He didn’t bite. And something softened in me. I flicked him across the room, not too hard, just enough to give him a new direction and let him carry on with his weird little spider life.

It hit me later: did I spare him because he wasn’t ugly? Or because I admired his will to exist—to keep going, even in a world built for creatures thousands of times his size? Maybe both. He reminded me that we are all out of place in this foreign land—me, the spider, the scorpion, the chickens, the monkeys, the cows—just doing our best not to step on each other.

And that’s Costa Rica: raw, alive, full of unexpected teachers.

Even the ones with eight legs.