Reign Spider

Lurking. 
Waiting.

In control.

Ready to kill, devour, consume...at the most opportune moment...

No no no...I'm not talking about Lana from Three's Company...

Paige and I had been relaxing and recovering from a horrible parasite while on Likoma Island in Lake Malawi: an isolated, obscure, remote place. Our respite was a beach hut – literally on the beach – with a grass thatch “door” and a bed right on the sand. It was idyllic living, minus the frequent vomiting and constant diarrhea.

With no running water anywhere on the island, it was imperative to boil lake water for drinking purposes. The only problem was that during that act of boiling on a huge wood burning fire, the water would get a deep smoky flavor that was impossible to remove. Needless to say, when you’re completely parched and wanting nothing more than an ice cold swig of crisp, clean, clear water, tepid liquid smoke just doesn’t quench that thirst. 


Bleh.

The lake water itself was actually pretty clean; in fact, the locals simply wade into the water and drink it straight from the lake. But, after watching the local women washing all their clothes, pots, pans and bodies right at the shoreline, we enthusiastically embraced the smoky drinking water.


We’d actually planned ahead and had packed a virus filter from home that finally came in handy at the perfect moment: extreme sicknesses. Nothing more important than forcing water down when it’s coming out everywhere else, and if it doesn’t taste good – tough. We found that filtering either lake water straight or the smoky boiled water produced a decent enough tasting water, especially when mixed with salty orange rehydration packets.


We woke one morning at dawn underneath our mosquito net to the sound of the locals at the lake. Our hut was a bed and mosquito net surrounded by four grass-woven walls and a woven roof with sand as the floor. The “door” was a grass mat that rolled up and down – this was primitive at best, but perfectly suited our miniscule needs. We had filtered a bunch of water the night before and left a pan with about an inch of water on the sand in the middle of our hut


As Paige got up to go out, she noticed something inside. “What the hell is that?”


Not exactly the best sentence with which to wake one’s husband.


I crawled out of bed and looked inside the pan. It appeared that some huge skinny crab-like thing had somehow ended up in our shallow pan and drowned. It had eight legs and two enormous claws, resembling something in-between a crab and a giant daddy long legs spider.


But how could a crab drown? This thing was about as big as my head. We brought the pan with us over to the kitchen hut by the mango bar and grabbed Peter, the cook.


“What the hell is that?” I asked, deciding that Paige’s wording of the situation was appropriate. He leaned his head over the pan, smiled, and, reaching inside and grabbing the thing by one of its pencil-long legs, held it up in the air.


“Aw, it’s just a rain spider,” he proclaimed, tossing it over his shoulder and turning and walking back into the kitchen hut.


He was obviously non-plussed. But as his words sank in, we started to get a little freaked out, thinking that we had narrowly avoided a nasty confrontation with an enormous spider inside our hut. I mean, how the hell did this thing end up in the pan? 


Do they drop from the roof? And why did it drown in the shallow water? Wouldn’t the name “rain spider” indicate that it was associated with water? But the more we pondered this, the more we both agreed that Peter had probably not meant “rain” spider, but “Reign” spider, with a capitol “R.”


One of the owners of the backpackers’ haven also shrugged it off when we told him the story. “That’s nothing,” he nonchalantly said, “you guys should hang around until mango season. That’s when the mango spiders come out. They’re as big as plates and you can hear them running around on our roof under the mango tree. They’re incredibly poisonous and they can catch birds. A lot of times you can hear them fighting large rats up in the branches – you never want to have one of those things jump on you.”


Personally, I felt that last statement was superfluous.


Still, any spider that fights rats and eats birds is just not right. We suddenly felt pretty fortunate to have only a measly little Reign spider visit the confines of our hut.


Russell is a spider...kind of alternating between an angry, dangerous mango spider and an all-bark, no bite Reign spider. 


In the beginning, he was simply annoying: misogynistic, vitriolic, distrustful...clearly a short-timer. 


What happened?


Now the kid may be the single greatest contestant ever. Three times finding the hidden immunity idol - and all three with NO CLUES? Amazing. (By the way, how does Russell lose Dave when Dave is trying to tail him, but a CBS cameraman with huge, heavy equipment has no problem keeping up? Isn't Dave even a personal trainer?)


On one hand Russell is simply hanging on by his fingernails from tribal council to tribal council. As soon as the dust settles around the old tribes worrying about numbers, won't he continue to be the main target, the main threat, one of the first one's off?


Sure, he's like that mango spider right now, aggressively attacking, pouncing, sinking his fangs in his opponent and joyfully sucking the life right out of them.


Who wouldn't?


But now that he's on the side of power again after John flips in a second tribal council vote and boots Laura, leaving Foa Foa in control, won't he end up like that Reign spider: ominous and scary, but ultimately tossed by Probst over his shoulder when the tribe realizes that it's better to get him out of the way rather than have to inevitably encounter him somewhere down the line?


Won't they be setting their proverbial pots of filtered water around camp in the hopes that Russell will step in and drown himself?


Look, Russell is fantastic, without a doubt, and he's singlehandedly made this season one of the best ever. But his real test is coming soon. Has he peaked too early? There are nine contestants left; there's a lot more scheming to come.


Which one will you be Russell?

  

Until next week...

PB