Imagine what it’s like to be a snake. You crawl on your belly the live-long day. You have more ribs than a millipede has legs. You live in fear of being stepped on. You swallow your food whole. A stomach ache is a frightening condition because your stomach is nearly as long as your body. When you meet a snake thicker and longer than you it eyes you as its possible next meal, as do hawks, coyotes, and bobcats. When you cross a road, an oncoming driver swerves to run over you, thinking he’s ridding the world of something terrible, you. Humans have made you their symbol of evil and blame you for their lousy lot in life. For them, an evil person is “a snake in the grass.” Nearly all humans fear you, hold you in disgust, hate you and whenever they nearly step on you they want you dead, so they hurry off looking for a hoe or a hatchet. In that terrible moment, you can’t run away to save your life, because you can’t run. You have to slither.
Not exactly an attractive life, is it, being a serpent? Would you like to be one?
I like snakes. I think they are beautiful, sometimes painfully so. They are a marvel of adaptation, of evolution. Truth is, snakes need a lot more friends than they have.
Would you by chance be willing to reconsider? And join me as their fan? I’m pretty lonely for company.
“No!” you say. “No!” emphatically.
Ok, I understand
That’s what I thought. Snake hate runs deep. It’s right there with spider fright.
Snake fan that I am, I confess I have killed a few snakes, nearly all of them a long time ago when I was young, thoughtless, and heartless.
I did kill one, though, a big one, not long ago.
I’m sorry I did it. I had to. I wish I didn’t.
But I would do it again.
Here’s the story.
It’s late on a September day, about 10 pm, the 14th it was, a warm evening, quiet, no breeze, the only sound is a bullfrog gruffly grunting in the lake down the hill and north of the house, the only light is a late summer firefly winking its yellow light down against the black woods-edge to the east. That, and the wan light of the sickle of the moon that will soon set in the west.
Susie and I are sitting barelegged and barefooted on fold-up deck chairs on the concrete back porch. On the table beside us are glasses of red wine. We had come out there half an hour earlier, after our showers.
We chat about this and that. The subject turns to toads and wall lizards, both of which are common here. The wall lizards get to be nearly a foot long but sleep at night. The toads sleep during the day but come out at dark hopping along the sidewalk and lapping up insects. There are no toads on the sidewalk this evening. Usually, we could see them, as darker spots on the dark patio or back porch, hopping from time to time.
“What happened to the wall lizards and toads?” Susie asks. In recent weeks they’ve been common around the house. Some of the toads were as big as Susie’s fist. But come to think of it, we hadn’t seen any of either for maybe the last couple of weeks. What happened to them? It’s too early for them to be heading into winter quarters. Where did they go?
And so we chat on about inconsequential things and finish our glass of wine, yawn, and declare it’s time for sleeping.
We each stand up and pick up our glasses to go inside.
Just then, barely visible by my bare left foot, inches away, is a peculiar mass that shouldn’t be there. I freeze. Not alarmed so much as feeling that something isn’t right about that thing by my foot.
Standing motionless, I ask Susie calmly to turn on the porch light. She steps inside. On comes the light.
I freeze. Next to my foot, and looking up at me with its head raised slightly, is the silver-dollar-sized head of a snake. It was big, roughly triangular-shaped. A tongue flicked out of it a couple of times. Standing motionless, I saw that it had a thick body partially curved stretching back under my chair. Its tail was coiled several times around the back cross-rung of the folding chair in which I had been sitting. It must have been there the whole time Susie and I had been sitting outside.
The serpent didn’t seem to be angry or alarmed, actually seemed docile enough, so I dared step away. Well away, as you can imagine.
It was a copperhead. Poisonous. A big one.
Watching it closely, I urged Susie to run and get the shotgun.
After she disappeared into the house to get it, I realized I had asked her to do something stupid. Was I going to shoot that poor snake laying on a concrete floor with walls of stone around it? I might as well shoot myself.
When Susie reappears at the back door with the double-barreled 20-gauge, I ask her to instead grab the butterfly net.
My attempts to coach the snake into the net proved unavailing. It only made the snake angry. That was obvious because it had coiled up and begun rattling its tail while watching me closely.
I managed to coax it off the deck onto the concrete walk.
What to do? Our grandchildren come and play around the house. And Susie pokes around in the garden on many days, sometimes sticking her hand in places she couldn’t see very well. That big copperhead had been with us at Faraway Farm for a couple of weeks at least, feasting on our toads and wall lizard. It was likely to stay around, where food was plentiful.
This big snake had to go.
I cut off its head with a single shovel blow. I wish I didn’t have to do that.
It weighed several pounds and was thirty-six inches long with a thick body.
Don’t believe this story? Then come visit us at Faraway Farm. I’ll show you a lovely tanned copperhead skin hanging in my library, a reminder to examine my chair before I take a seat out on the back porch in the summer.
Then I’ll invite you out onto the back porch and allow you to sit on my chair while we enjoy a glass of wine. After dark. On a summer night.