Jesus Jess is Not A Pig

The hospitality industry is not the beacon of infallibility I once thought it was. We’d booked our room in April, scanned the website photos, approved the amenities, planned our days using Google maps around a day-hike radius. The hotel had a 4.5 on Travelocity. We did our due diligence. There was no advance warning. The only big fat red flag happened when we landed in Anchorage and tried to contact the hotel and arrange the free shuttle.

We got crickets.

Undaunted, we grabbed a taxi. We figured, it being the height of the summer tourist season, they were just too damn busy to answer the phone. Boy were we wrong.

I had never actually seen a building wrapped in police caution tape before. I thought it was just something that happened in the movies. The hotel was not just closed, but CLOSED, DO NOT ENTER. With exclamation points. We were stranded in Alaska, fresh off a nine-hour flight, and believe me when I say every other hotel within a 20-mile radius was booked. With exclamation points. We tried everything.

Finally, my fiancée Daniel got in touch with an old gamer friend who lived in Eagle River, a small town just outside of Anchorage. Coughdr0ps69 said we could pitch a tent in his empty barn for free. He’d even loan us the tent.

“A tent,” I said.

It was just a couple days, Daniel said. It was Saturday night (although it wasn’t remotely dark), and we were scheduled to take the train to Fairbanks on Wednesday. It would be an adventure, he added. We’d have awesome photos to post. Besides, he said. What were our options?

You have to understand that my family was never the camping type. Growing up, when we vacationed – if we vacationed – we stayed in nice hotels with nice beds and clean towels. The kind with room service. I had never slept in a tent in my life, much less a used loaner tent inside a beat-up, run down barn.

“What about bears?” I said. This was a straw I was grasping at and they knew it. I had sort of hoped we’d just get back on the plane. Alaska wasn’t my idea in the first place.

“That’s why you’re in the barn,” Cough said. “It was me, I’d just use the tent. Of course, I’ll leave the rifle with you guys.”

At least we were welcome to use the bathrooms in the house. If there weren’t already family up visiting, Cough said, we could have bunked in the living room.

So at midnight on a Saturday in July I somehow ended up watching Daniel set up a tent in a friend’s barn in Eagle River, Alaska while swatting mosquitos off my face and arms. I was almost too exhausted to care where I slept. Almost. At least, Daniel said, it wasn’t pitch dark like it would have been at home.

At home, I said, I’d be in my nice bed right now.

I leaned against the outline of what once would have been the barn door. The barn itself looked a hundred years old, but Coughdr0ps said it had been built in the 1950s by his grandfather who’d read some book as a kid and always wanted to be a farmer. Buildings weathered ten times faster in Alaska, he said, with all that cold and snow. People did too, he said, chuckling at himself.

I’d almost gotten lost in a daydream about farming in the 1950s, apple pies cooling on windowsills and chickens in the yard when something crossed my line of vision. I screamed and ducked just in time to avoid a large brown spider swinging eye-level on a piece of web. Instinctively I swung at it with my carry-on, but it scrambled up and away before I could kill it.

Daniel looked for it too, but it was gone. The last thing I wanted to do after that was sleep on the ground. Daniel said, “It’s not going to come inside the tent, Jess. You probably scared the hell out of it,” and then spent fifteen minutes explaining how spiders are our friends really, because they eat so many other insects. He swore to God there were no poisonous spiders in Alaska.

“Yeah,” I said, “but do the spiders know that?”

To humor me, or humiliate me maybe, Daniel stuck his head outside the tent and hollered up to the rafters of the barn, “Dear Spider, please do not attack us during the night, my fiancée is very afraid of you but we mean you no harm. Sincerely, Daniel and Jess.” And then we zipped up the tent and we went to sleep.

Or tried to.

When I did finally sleep, I had dreams of walking through spider webs. You know, the kind where there are spiders everywhere you turn and there’s no getting away from them.

We woke up to the ping on Daniel’s phone – Coughdr0ps messaging us to come inside for pancakes. I had to pee something awful and we dressed quickly, leaving our sleeping bags inside the tent but making sure it was zipped up tight. I was just about to head out the door when I saw the spider web sparkling in the morning dew in the corner of the barn window. It said, “T-E-R-R-I-F-I-C.”

“What in the flying …?” Daniel said.

“Wow,” I said. “I mean, wow. That’s really funny. I don’t know how you guys managed to do it without waking me up, but now is really not the time for a practical joke.” I said, “Do I look like someone in the mood for a practical joke?”

“Shit,” Daniel said.

And they would not let it go. Coughdr0ps came out, Coughdr0p’s family came out, all of them taking a million photos and saying, “This is gonna blow up Insta” like anyone would believe it was anything other than a bad practical joke. I had had enough. I went inside and had a long, hot shower while they talked like fools over pancakes with blueberry syrup.

Sunday afternoon I had forgiven Daniel enough to go sightseeing with him. We agreed just not to talk about the web thing. Coughdr0ps loaned us his car (I think he felt a little guilty at this point) and we went for a delicious salmon dinner in downtown Anchorage. We got back to Eagle River well before 10pm but by then the lack of sleep the night before and the jetlag had caught up with me.

Of course Daniel had to get in one last jab. I was settled in my sleeping bag when he poked his head out of the tent and said, “Okay dear Spider Friend, thanks for the message this morning! We think you’re terrific too! Please don’t attack us during the night, my fiancée is very afraid of you but we mean you no harm. Love, Daniel and Jess.”

I rolled my eyes. Just to show I had a sense of humor, I gave Daniel a sassy smile. But I did make sure the zipper was shut all the way.

On Monday, we slept in. Coughdr0ps and family had warned us they were leaving early for a fishing expedition, but true to their word they slipped out without waking us. A decent night of sleep left me feeling like a new person. I was ready for an adventure at the Alaska Zoo and the local museum.

I was closing the zipper on the tent when Daniel said, “Holy shit.”

You would have thought they’d have gotten the message the first time. But no, in the corner of the window, the web spelled out “C-H-A-R-L-O-T-T-E.”

So much for my good mood.

Daniel swore up and down he had nothing to do with it. “Maybe it was Cough,” he said. “Maybe it was his idea of a joke.” Of course he had to add, “But you know it’s not the first time a spider was literate.”

Which led, of course, to a huge fight. I’d always thought the book was silly and overly sentimental anyway, and I said so. I pointed out that Daniel loved bacon – I mean doesn’t everybody, and he said I had a lot of nerve to call him a hypocrite.

Like I said, I wasn’t the one who wanted to go to Alaska anyway. I wanted to go to New York City. Broadway. Where everyone sleeps in beds and goes shopping.

So we missed the zoo but by noon we’d decided to just put things behind us. We grabbed a moose burger and hit the museum, and I bought a lovely pashmina at the gift shop. We called several hotels to see if there’d been any cancellations or no-shows, but still couldn’t find a room.

Cough and his family were still gone when we got back. Since the house was empty, I took a bath with a bath bomb I’d bought made with real birch tree oil while Daniel looked for the spider again. We shared a bottle of Alaskan wine made from rhubarb and fell asleep eventually. No one brought up the spider.

I dreamed I was a rat. On a farm. I’d eaten too many moose burgers and a wise sheep was urging me to drink more rhubarb wine, but I didn’t trust him. When I woke up, there were voices.

“You need to get a news crew out here,” Cough’s brother was saying. “It’s an effing miracle.”

The web spelled out, “J-E-S-U-S-*-J-E-S-S.”

Now it was personal.

The news crew did come. They wanted to interview me, of course, being the Jess from the web, but I declined. Cough was quick to cash in on the whole thing, not surprisingly. They interviewed him wearing a t-shirt that he’d drawn on with a Sharpie. A picture of a spider on a web. He created a Friends of Spiders Facebook Group and started taking donations to save the old barn.

If it was difficult going to sleep with a spider in the barn, it was nearly impossible with half of Eagle River camped outside. Some local band wrote a song called “Jesus Jess” that went viral on TikTok and protesters from PETA came around to argue that veganism is the only humane way to live. No one who came knew where I could get a room.

Daniel and I were barely talking. After doing shots with Cough and the band members, he came to be of the opinion that anyone who didn’t love the book had to be some kind of Nazi. I replied that all spiders should be stepped on and squished, which got me a loud round of boos from a classroom of third graders who’d been part of the field trip from one of the Anchorage elementary schools.

Tuesday night it rained. That sent most of the onlookers to their tents and cars, but a hardy few still stood watch. Nevertheless, on Wednesday morning – without a single soul having seen how – there was another message.

“S-O-M-E-*-P-I-G.”

There were two camps: the one I was partial to, which I’ll admit was probably the minority, believed this was a reference to the book. That well-loved farm fable, the one that started it all. The second camp believed, as the CNN reporter so aptly put it, that the spider’s opinion of me was that of most of America, that I was not a person of high moral standing.

Daniel ended up moving in with Cough and one of the PETA protesters. I think you can still buy their t-shirts on Etsy.

Me, I’ve moved on. I’m living in New York now, and the business is doing great. Jess’ Pest Control!!! (with exclamation points) was ranked #1 by residents in the Upper Manhattan area last year. We have a contract with Hilton Hotels that gets me a free suite in just about any town nationwide.

We specialize in spiders.