I knew guys who wanted to be astronauts, baseball players and Marines. The only job I ever contemplated as a kid other than writing was becoming a herpetologist. I never felt revulsion for snakes and they never frightened me. Part of the attraction may have been the revulsion and fear of others, a sort of little-boy machismo. Snakes are beautiful. Like ants, they communicate using pheromones, another language we’ll never understand. They move using an elegant dance of muscles called undulant locomotion. I loved how quickly they could disappear under rocks and leaves.
Now in
Houston it’s lizard season. Green anoles sun outside on the window sills,
driving the cats crazy. I saw the season’s first snake on Friday, a pencil-thin
garter snake that slipped under the wooden fence behind the house before I
could grab it. I had an instant memory of the musky stinking secretion garter
snakes release from a gland near their tail when you hold one.
Karl
Kirchwey has a poem about these harmless creatures titled “Garter Snakes” (The
Happiness of This World, 2007). It concludes:
“Through
hazard colors
and heated
julep shade,
I cannot now
recall what was between us,
Or why I
should bruise their head.”
I’ve lost
the will to bruise the head of any animal. Like most kids I was a casual killer.
That’s gone. The only exception I make is for mosquitos.
In the mid-1960s, as a 4th-grader finishing the day at Blossom Gulch Elementary School in Coos Bay, Oregon, I could hunt for garter snakes in the blackberry brambles on the other side of the street. I could pin a snake in place with my foot and then pick it up in my jacket, and carry it home a couple or so blocks away. Mom could smell the snake before she saw it. Then I could let the snake loose in our yard. I wasn't taught to hunt the snakes; this just came naturally to me, while my sister had no interest in the same pursuit, then or ever. Coos Bay was a few dozen feet above sea level, I suppose, but in my imagination the snakes were "mountain slitherers."
ReplyDeleteDale Nelson