Spiders in the Spines : Did the Bomb Squad Really Rush Over to Keep the Big Cactus From Exploding?

THE URBAN MYTH, or fable, is like the mythical dragon that can’t be killed: Cut off its head, it grows another. (If there is no such mythical beast, I have just invented it.)

We keep hearing these fables:

--About the jealous husband who poured the contents of a concrete mixer into his wife’s lover’s convertible.

--About the helpful driver (always a woman) who is told that to push-start a stalled car equipped with an automatic transmission, she must first get it up to a speed of 35 m.p.h. So she gets the rescue car up to 35 m.p.h. and bangs into the stalled car at that speed.

--About the compacted VW Bug--with bodies enclosed--that is found days later between the front ends of two trucks that collided at high speed.

Such tales are so indestructible that it seems pointless to invent new ones, but they keep coming along.

Dennis L. Jones of Temple City writes to ask whether I believe the following:

“It seems a couple bought a large potted saguaro cactus from a nursery. They had it in their home for a few days when they noticed it was moving. They called the nursery and questioned them about it. The nurseryman told them to leave the house immediately, call 911 from their neighbor’s and explain what was happening to the police. They followed his instructions, and the police sent the bomb squad out, entered the home with full bomb gear on, covered the cactus with a large tarp and put it in the bomb container. The reason for all this was that tarantulas breed inside this type of cactus, (which has) been known to actually blow apart with tarantulas flying everywhere.”

The most improbable thing about that story is that anybody would believe it. Jones says his daughter heard the story from a friend of the principals. It is never closer than that: a friend of a friend.

The best urban fables are those that might be true; some even do have a grain of truth in them. A popular myth in recent years is that New York City’s sewers are infested with alligators--the progeny of baby alligators dropped into toilets by vacationers who brought them back from Florida as pets and tired of them.

In their book “There Are Alligators in Our Sewers” (Delacorte), Paul Dickson and Joseph G. Goulden report an interview with a former sewers commissioner who said that in 1935 his men discovered 2-foot-long alligators in the sewer and cleaned them out with rifles and poison.

In his book on urban fables “Curses! Broiled Again!” (Norton), Jan Harold Brunvand tells the apocryphal story of a wife who stopped her camper by the roadside for a moment, and then, not knowing that her husband had stepped out of the rear in his underwear, drove off, leaving him behind.

That appears often as an urban myth, Brunvand says; yet it did happen to a Red Bluff, Calif., woman, whose husband stopped their camper at a gas station and then drove off, leaving her in a restroom with 23 cents.

Evidently, it also happened to my recent acquaintance, Nardi Reeder Campion, who described the experience in Family Circle (August, 1985) under the title “Gas Station Blues.” Mrs. Campion is the author of the much-pirated list of common conveniences invented after her Wellesley class of 1938 graduated--or as she put it, things her class was before --and I think of her as imaginative but believable.

Mrs. Campion wrote that she and her husband were driving from West Palm Beach to Hobe Sound in a small rented car. She was asleep in the back seat when her husband stopped at a gas station to use the telephone. Without him seeing her leave, she got out and went to the women’s room. He finished his call, got in the car and drove away. She waited impatiently for her husband to return. He did not. Having already missed the cocktail hour at Hobe Sound, she telephoned their host. He came after her. When they reached his house, her husband was already there, having a cocktail with their hostess.

I not only believe Mrs. Campion’s story but I also believe that this same sort of thing must happen quite often--too often to be called an urban myth. I might very well have driven off from a gas station and left my wife behind, except that she sleeps in the front seat, not the back, so I would probably have missed her sooner or later. I wonder, though, whether husbands don’t sometimes drive off and leave their wives behind deliberately . Or vice versa.

However, a saguaro exploding with tarantulas is too improbable, it seems to me, even to be included in a book of fables. And that reporting such a fear to 911 would get you the bomb squad is about as likely as getting a plumber on Sunday.