Telling of the Scuba Spider & the Slow-Motion Climate Crisis Storm by Jerileewei

How a French Quarter Phantasm Teaches Writers to Stop Drowning Their Audience Read on Substack

Recently some of the Cajun Chronicles Podcast Corporation writer staff enjoyed a well attended writers conference at a ritzy island resort about as far away from Louisiana as you can get. Some of us were aware of the show Mother Nature was putting on there. Not only in terms of their native flowers and fruits, but also the job certain natural Apex Micro-Predators play around the world in the grand scheme of pest control and climate change globally.

Once home, those lessons and lessons about writing creative technical content were sources of wonderment and inspiration. Louisiana is no stranger to all things buggy, nor the climate change side-effects we have always been experiencing with rising waters all around us. Similarly, those among us struggle with solutions to writing and broadcasting the messages we all need to heed on such important topics.

A Fishing Spider Story Exercise In Creative Nonfiction Oddity

The thing about the Louisiana bayou country is that its weirdness is not just for show, cher. It’s a matter of absolute, high-stakes survival. It is an ecosystem that has perfected the art of the improbable. Take the Dark Fishing Spider, Dolomedes tenebrosus, the one whose leg span can cover half your hand. She is one of the largest spiders in North America, yet she operates with the silent precision of a naval scout.

You’re floating placidly in the moss-draped gloom of the Atchafalaya Basin, and there she is, perched carrément (directly) on a gnarled bald cypress knee. Her nickname is Scuba Spider. Unlike her cousin, the Six-spotted Fishing Spider (D. triton), who is a permanent waterside resident, D. tenebrosus often wanders about. She’s basically a French Quarter phantasm land tourist with aquatic superpowers. Uniquely, her front four long legs still rest on the water like silent radar antennae.

Here’s the first oddity: She doesn’t spin a trap-web to catch supper. She uses the very surface of the water as a vast, vibrating, liquid snare. That surface tension, which allows a single droplet of dew to hold its perfect sphere, is her hunting ground. To your amazement, a Yellow Fever (Aedes aegypti) mosquito lands, an unlucky Cocahoe Minnow (Fundulus grandis) minnow surfaces, or you see a mayfly struggling.

Those water disturbances, even a tiny ripple, are all the information she needs. She bolts across the water, comme ça (like that), defying gravity and the laws of physics with a waxy-haired gait, grabs her prey, and retreats just as swiftly. She is an apex-predator extraordinaire! As an Eight-Legged Lagniappe

The truly bizarre part of her story happens when danger comes. If a hungry Great Heron swoops too close, or a massive Alligator Gar glides by, this spider doesn’t run toward the shore. She, as we say in Cajun French, simply plonges (plunges/dives). Happily, for her, she’s not drowning. She’s engaging in a peculiar act of biological brilliance.

Her entire body is covered in fine, dense hairs. As she slips beneath the surface, these hairs trap a thin, glistening layer of air, her personal silvery scuba suit, that surrounds her like a portable bubble. She becomes a living submarine. She can cling to an underwater root, or the submerged bark of a Bald Cypress tree.

There she sits, breathing her little pocket of swamp-air, and waiting out the trouble for up to half an hour. She makes the L’Affaire Fini threat simply disappear. That fact, c’est vrai (that’s true), is a mighty fine trick.

Now, here is where the bayou’s natural spider oddity connects to a deeper, more human reality. She shows how to tell scientific facts about climate change and its effect on nature factually without putting your audience to sleep. That’s because the constantly-evolving existential crisis of the climate often feels a lot like that of the ol’ White Heron. It’s a huge bad case of the vois-là, an inevitable danger that you can’t run away from.

The way some creative technical writers are trying to capture that reality is just as strange as a certain spider species’ scuba dive. When you can’t outrun the misère (misery/trouble), you have to find a new way to tell the story.

This is so much like very act of writing creative nonfiction through the climate crisis has its own set of odd, profound, and fun facts:

Odd Fun Facts of Writing the Existential Reality

1. The “Slow Violence” Problem Demands New Forms

The climate crisis rarely involves a neat, dramatic explosion. It’s mostly “slow violence.” The gradual, almost invisible rising of the water, the creeping salinity, the erosion of the marsh. The odd challenge for the Louisiana writer, is that they have to invent entirely new, often experimental, narrative techniques just to make a slow-motion disaster feel as urgent as a gunshot.

This is why you sometimes see writers like us using techniques like fractured chronology, list-memoirs, or braided essays. They are desperate attempts to make the un-dramatic and continuous nature of environmental trauma feel viscéral (visceral) to the reader.

2. The Rise of the “Carrier Bag Narrative”

Forget the epic traditional story of the single hero conquering the storm. Many climate writers are advocating for author Ursula K. Le Guin’s concept of the “Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction.” The odd fun fact here is that the best climate stories shouldn’t have a single, satisfying plot arc (a triumph!). They should be a messy “bag” full of diverse voices, ongoing processes, small acts of loss, and fragments of hope.

Strive for mirroring the complex, non-linear reality of the crisis. This form rejects the idea that a single person can ‘solve’ the problem, instead emphasizing the power of collective, ongoing endurance. (snip)