Snakes have a bad reputation. Starting with the Garden of Eden, they’ve been universally scorned and feared, but they are, nevertheless, fascinating. We can swim, walk, run, jump. But we can’t glide along on our bellies, nor can we move with complete silence. We have nothing in common with these cold-blooded creatures. It’s not easy to relate, but aren’t they amazing?
There are people who really like snakes and those who truly fear them. Next door to my grandmother lived a boy named Skipper. He was about five years older than I, and he was fascinated by all animals, but especially snakes. His backyard was like a jungle, filled with birds, garter snakes, newts, and all sorts of insects. There was a scummy pond full of goldfish and tadpoles who were always on their way to becoming frogs. To an eight-year-old, visiting Skipper’s back yard was like going on safari.
Skipper’s bedroom was home to snakes and lizards that lived in a variety of cages. One day he invited me to watch him feed his captives. I was curious but cautious and when he dropped a mouse into the first cage, I decided it was time to leave. I ran back through the garden gate to the safety of my grandmother’s kitchen and was never able to view Skipper in quite the same friendly way again. Not surprisingly, Skipper grew up to be a rather famous herpetologist.
Then there’s my friend who is phobic about snakes, something I didn’t quite understand until one day she reluctantly joined me for a walk in the woods near my house in Washington. (There are no harmful snakes in western Washington and that’s part of the reason she lived there.) Five minutes into our walk, a garter snake crossed the dirt road about ten feet ahead of us. In a second she had grabbed my arm with the strength of a sumo wrestler, turned me around and dragged me back to the driveway where she released her iron grip. “How can you live out here?” she asked as she got in her car and headed back to the safety of streets and sidewalks.
During the ’80s, when we lived in the Caribbean, the island snakes were constrictors. The big ones controlled the rodent population. The smaller ones dined on lizards and bugs. I would sometimes see them coiled in the trees or sliding away into the grass. I liked having them around.
Because the island was so benign, we slept on the porch of our house under a canopy of bougainvillea and jasmine. One night, before turning out the light, we saw a slender snake dangling from the vines and realized that it was in the early stages of swallowing a gecko. We watched the slow, inevitable progress of a creature being eaten alive, moved by powerful contracting muscles into the large, hinged mouth and then the midsection of the constrictor. There were moments when the snake almost lost its grip on the vine, but it held on, and we watched it get fatter and fatter until finally the gecko’s tail disappeared.
I couldn’t watch Skipper’s snake eat the mouse, but I watched the snake swallow that gecko. This was not an edited film or feeding time at the zoo; it was completely live and real and unforgettable. It left me with an acceptance of how nature keeps itself in balance. The bugs ate one another, the gecko ate the bugs, the snake ate the gecko and something would soon swoop down and grab the snake, or our gardener would chop off its head when I wasn’t looking because the natives there thought snakes brought very bad luck.
Bad luck, sinister, dangerous, slimy, phallic, predatory, we have so many descriptors and associations with snakes, most of which are negative, but over the years, I’ve come to respect and even feel some liking for these maligned creatures. I sympathized a little with the rattlesnake that bit and nearly killed my dog, Lucy. She was getting too close. The snake was defending itself. Maybe next time Lucy will steer clear, or maybe she will never understand. Probably none of us really understands the human relationship to snakes, but I think it helps to remember that they live here too and the more we mess with them, the more we upset the natural order of things.