Spider, and Lizards, and Snails - Oh My! (Part One)

When you think of Hawaii, most people naturally think of a tropical paradise - sunsets on the beach, beautiful rainbows over Diamond Head, hula dancers, Mai Tai cocktails, and Don Ho singing "Tiny Bubbles". What a nice postcard that makes, but living in Hawaii on a daily basis as a resident and not a tourist is a completely different story.

I lived in Hawaii, or rather Oahu, for three years from 1967 - 1970. Hawaii had only been a state for 8 years, so I think a lot of the native people still had some negative feelings about that. And, we were in the military - somehow they didn't like that either. We were called "haole" or "stranger". We were from "the mainland" and not to be trusted. All of that aside, there were plenty of other things that made my stay in Hawaii less than idyllic.

We lived in a house near the sugar cane fields in Ewa Beach - completely on the other side of the island from Waikiki Beach. Periodically, they would burn the sugar cane fields before harvest at which time the cane spiders would come out and into our yard/house. These were not just a small house type spider. They were about 4" in diameter. That is a big spider.

If that wasn't enough, there were giant African snails that would come out at night and strip whole shrubs completely bare in one night. These snails were about 8" long and their shells were about 3" in diameter. The first time my husband took the trash out at night he was bare footed. He never did that again. Even after 40 years, he still remembers the feeling of giant snails being smashed under his feet and the crunching of their shells.

But, the pièce de résistance were the geckos. They were everywhere and there was no way to keep them out of the house. They made a clicking sort of noise at night and I would lie in bed wondering where they were and when one of them was going to fall or jump on me. They had tiny suction cups on their feet that allowed them to walk along the walls and ceilings looking for bugs. They were inside the windows, on the screens, on the sliding patio door, and one very adventurous one lived in my kitchen cabinet and would terrorize me every day when I reached in to get any pot or pan.

These were not small, cute lizards. They were big and ugly and revolting reaching up to 10" in length. I would find lizard poop and eggs all over my house. Everyday when I would go out to get the mail, there would be at least one waiting for me in the mail box. I finally learned to bang on the mail box before reaching my hand in. The mailman thought I was very comical and would sit there every day and laugh at me as I would go through my lizard routine.

The locals didn't mind the geckos because they said they ate mosquitoes, but I would have preferred if they had eaten the mosquitoes outside, before either the mosquitoes or the geckos could come into the house. My theory then and now is that I don't go into the bugs/lizards houses and mess with them and I don't want them coming into my house and messing with me. They have been warned. If they invade my turf, they will be dealt with severely. I have a zero tolerance policy when it comes to things like that.

One night, I had just about had enough of the big guy who lived in my kitchen cabinet. My husband finally decided he would do battle with it. There was a channel that ran up the backside of the cabinet and the lizard would run up into that whenever it felt threatened, so it was very difficult to capture and/or kill him. This night, my husband sent me to the bedroom and told me to close the door and not come out until he sounded the all clear. He was armed with a broom stick.

I heard all kinds of loud clattering and banging, but I stayed put. Finally, after what seemed like two weeks, there was silence. I opened the bedroom door and went walking into the kitchen before my husband had told me to come out. (I'm not very good about following directions like that.) There on the kitchen floor was the biggest gecko I had ever seen and, a few feet away, there was his still wiggling tail! I screamed and just about passed out, but somewhere deep inside I was doing a victory dance. That monster had terrorized me for the last time.

That was, of course, not the last gecko to make it into our house. There were plenty that got squashed in between the sliding patio door when I would open it. Too bad - they were stupid. They shouldn't have been there. But, after three years of doing guerilla warfare with the geckos, I was permanently scarred.

When we finally left Hawaii and came back to civilization, we stopped in Louisiana to visit my parents before reporting for duty at Offutt AFB in Omaha, Nebraska. After about three days, my mother asked me, "Why do you look up at the ceilings every time you walk into a room?" Without missing a beat, I replied, "I'm checking for lizards." (to be continued)