The Blaisdell Blog

The question was light-hearted.   Whimsical.   The kind of query that is intended to lift the mood in a world that seems quite heavy these days.   The answer turns out to be enriching, sensible and metaphorically satisfying.   But first, lets consider the spider itself.             We don’t have to go any farther than Stephen King’s It or Tolkien’s character Shelob in The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King to know that spiders are a favorite monster among the literati.   The most terrifying monsters are always the one’s for which we have an emotional frame of reference.   Godzilla is almost laughable, but the parasitic neo-forms of Alien makes our skin crawl and our gorge rise.   As a rule, people take Ms Muffett’s attitude toward spiders.   Personally, I allow them to live if they stay out of my reach.     My largesse stems from the fact that I hate what spiders eat (flies, moths et. al ) even more than I hate the spiders.   But woe betide the arachnid that leaves my

I wasn’t stuck so much as petrified.   I was wedged between the walls of an 8 feet tall smooth lava fall.   The top of the fall was within an arm’s reach.   I could see where I wanted to go but moving forward meant willfully giving up the friction with the walls that was holding me up.   It meant counting on the lift of one foot, tentatively pushing against a small, smooth node of lava and hoping it would give me momentum.   I was experiencing a moment of panic and it was stalling me in the one place I could not stay.   In August of 2004 Tom and I were exploring the Mt. St. Helen’s area and heard about a lava tube called Ape Cave.   The Cascade Range volcanoes are not known for their basaltic flows (typical of Hawaiian volcanoes).   The Cascades explode rather than ooze.   But about 2000 years ago a fast, liquid, basaltic flow ran down the southern flank of St. Helens.   The surface cooled, but the interior continued to flow out of the interior creating the third longest lava t

They were lawyers, doctors, career politicians and farmers.   Eight of them were immigrants.   Gwinnett Button and Robert Morris were born in England.   Francis Lewis was from Wales, James Wilson and John Witherspoon were from Scotland.   George Taylor, Matthew Thornton and James Smith were born in Ireland.   The oldest was 70-year-old Benjamin Franklin of Pennsylvania.   The youngest were South Carolinians Edward Rutledge and Thomas Lynch, Jr. who were both 26.   They were sent by their respective states to Philadelphia where they clustered themselves into oppressively hot quarters, locked the doors and shuttered the windows.   They worked alone and without press coverage because they did not want to be pressured by the emotions of the mob or the threat of exposure.   By creating a country, they were also committing treason against the King, punishable by slow, painful and torturous death.   Accountability was all too apparent to them, so they wanted to be accountable for something