Snake

Erica Wright

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781501348716
• eBook ISBN: 9781501348723
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Feared and worshiped in equal measure, snakes have captured the imagination of poets, painters, and philosophers for centuries. From Ice Age cave drawings to Snakes on a Plane, this creature continues to enthrall the public. But what harm has been caused by our mythologizing? While considering the dangers of stigma, Erica Wright moves from art and pop culture to religion, fetish, and ecologic disaster. This book considers how the snake has become more symbol than animal, a metaphor for how we treat whatever scares us the most, whether or not our panic is justified. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in the The Atlantic.

1 Kingsnakes and Beauty Queens

Thirteen-year-old Boyd Fortin holds up a rattlesnake’s partially disemboweled carcass, the creature’s organs spread like a clothesline across a once-white apron. Richard Avedon photographed the teenager in 1979 at the annual rattlesnake roundup in Sweetwater, Texas, an event that celebrated its sixty-second year in March. At these roundups, wranglers capture thousands of rattlers and bring them to an arena where they are brandished, mutilated, milked, sold, slaughtered, and skinned. Shortly after I moved to Atlanta, someone informed me that Georgia still hosts a yearly roundup, too. “They even crown a beauty pageant queen,” I was told. “She kills the first snake.”

I started an electronic file called “Roundup Research,” but it contains only one document: a link to a CNN video about Sweetwater, which does indeed show pageant contestants.¹ The 2011 winner of the Miss Snakecharmer contest, Laney Wallace, remarks, “Tomorrow I get to skin snakes and chop their heads off, and I’m super excited about it.” In another scene, a man squeezes a decapitated snake until its blood drips into a young lady’s upturned palms. She turns to a white wall to leave her handprints. That macabre ritual did it for me; a roundup was not in my future. Something about the events still preoccupied me, though, perhaps because I had assumed Avedon’s photograph belonged to a time long past, a historical document of a bleaker era. I’m still not sure what I hoped to find at the 2013 Rattlesnake and Wildlife Festival, but it was only a three-hour drive away in Claxton, Georgia, and I talked a friend, high school teacher Kristen Linton, into going with me.

Until 2011, this festival was also a roundup, but the Claxton Chamber of Commerce—responding to concerns from groups such as One More Generation and the Georgia Department of Natural Resources—turned it into an appreciation weekend. At the version Kristen and I attended, few remnants of the festival’s gory past remained, but one booth displayed an array of animal pelts for children to stroke, and I nearly bumped into a carton of cottonmouths while trying to snap a photo of tiara-wearing girls posing with a diamondback. Mostly, though, the event was an excuse for families to enjoy a warm spring day and eat fair food. Kristen and I snacked on fried pickles and looked for the conservation booths.

The best of these was The Orianne Society, a non-profit founded to save threatened reptiles and amphibians. I chatted with a herpetologist as he gently maneuvered a Central American indigo for a small crowd. Another scientist approached to show me a scarlet kingsnake, a slim species that grows to only a foot or two in length. “She just shed her skin,” the handler said. “That’s why she’s so glossy.” And she was. Her black stripes were iridescent, and I almost wanted to touch them. I surprised myself by admiring what had most scared me as a child. Was this what I had hoped to find? Watching the kingsnake glint in the afternoon light, my only sensation was wonder.

The highlight of the second annual Rattlesnake and Wildlife Festival—for me at least—had nothing to do with snakes. It was a raptor demonstration led by Steven Hein of the Center for Wildlife Education at Georgia Southern University. The hawks, falcons, and owls ate out of Hein’s hand and swooped over the crowd of attentive listeners. The message was simple: with contact comes understanding. Hein wants people, particularly children, to have first-hand experiences with wildlife. Nearly every wildlife educator I’ve met mentions the curiosity of children outweighing apprehension. Recently I spoke with Mike Clifford who leads the education committee for the Virginia Herpetological Society. His own history with reptiles goes back to his childhood, and he gave his first live-animal presentation in high school as part of a science fair (where he reportedly lost and never found his rat snake). A few years later, while taking a public speaking course at Virginia Tech, he brought in a northern water snake, and his instructor climbed onto a desk at the back of the classroom. I’ve found similar patterns with other reptile enthusiasts—not the scaring-professors part, but the early interest part.

Clifford and I talked about an issue that remains nebulous to me. Is fear of snakes innate or learned? There’s data to support both sides of this debate. When shown photographs of snakes, infants’ pupils will dilate, implying fear.² On the other hand, I’ve attended plenty of live-animal presentations, and kids tend to be either excited or inquisitive. It’s their parents who are more likely to hang at the back. Clifford often presents to younger audiences and confirmed my observations. He also recalled his own early years during which older children would tell him that snakes couldn’t be killed, that if cut in two, they would simply grow back together. Even at a young age, his neighbors had been taught superstitions rather than facts.

In a documentary about Avedon from PBS’s American Masters series, Avedon states, “I think I have photographed what I was afraid of.”³ And a few minutes later: “By photographing what I was afraid of, I explored and learned and laid the ghost.” When I flip through my own snapshots of the Wildlife and Rattlesnake Festival, I’m amazed anew by how beautiful that kingsnake is, how docile the eastern indigo, and even how bold the diamondback. The festival may have been partly an excuse to sell crafts and fried foods, but I did gain a new appreciation for both rattlesnakes and wildlife. Which is to say, the event is appropriately advertised.

In the small town of Cocullo, Italy, every May 1st marks a special occasion: Festa dei Serpari. The Serpent Festival. In the weeks leading up to this day, handlers begin catching nonvenomous specimens to drape on the statue of San Domenico di Sora. The ritual is intended to protect residents from dental problems and—appropriately enough—snakebites. While experts may be in charge of the animals, photos from the event show happy children and adult attendees holding them as well. It feels like a magic trick: A sleight of hand and suddenly the evil snake is replaced by the good one. The contrast between a roundup and this festival couldn’t be more striking. It’s all about spin, albeit in the case of Festa dei Serpari, spin that goes back centuries.⁴

While now a Catholic celebration, it’s thought to pre-date Christianity when ancient people of the area worshipped Angitia. (You may not have heard of her, but perhaps you are familiar with her sisters Circe and Medea.) Angitia was above all a goddess of healing, and snakes in general have a long history of being associated with medicine. Consider the rod of Asclepius, which graces hospitals and doctors’ offices throughout the world. Of course, there are plenty of positive superstitions about snakes. I was told as a child that dreaming about them means you’re coming into money. There’s also the omen that one crossing your path means your luck is about to change (you are soon to become renewed in some way). If you’re bitten and survive, you’ll supposedly live until a ripe old age as a reward.

While several species are used in Cocullo, the most common type seems to be a striped beauty with golden undertones, the four-lined rat snake. Who knows what the animals think about this affair, but they are treated well, fattened up beforehand with a diet of eggs and mice, then retrieved by their handlers after the festival to be released into the wild.

Another exuberant serpentine celebration happens annually in Manitoba, Canada. Each spring some 70,000 red-sided garters emerge to mate, and intrepid tourists come to watch the spectacle. The otherwise sleepy town of Narcisse bustles with human and serpent activity for a few days.⁵ There’s also Nag Panchami, a Hindu celebration of the serpent god where worshippers offer milk to cobras but also kill them, not so far removed from our roundups here in the States.

On the drive back from the Rattlesnake and Wildlife Festival to Atlanta, Kristen and I passed the time with the Proust Questionnaire on the back page of Vanity Fair and then wrote twenty questions of our own. “How would you least like to die” was at the top of our list. “Being impaled,” Kristen answered without hesitation, describing semi-trucks carrying steel beams, the way they could crash through a windshield into her torso. I took a minute to consider. In the past, my answer would have been snake-related, perhaps circumstances akin to the scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark when Indiana Jones drops into the pit. As a kid, I never made it past that point in the movie.

I still don’t wish to be lowered into the middle of a rattlesnake roundup arena, but when I think of those pens—thousands of creatures with no hope of escape—I feel more sadness than terror. At the end of the day, humans are the most dangerous animal, and we should take responsibility for our outsized fears. The first step might be finding a way to admire what frightens us in nature. “Rotting,” I finally answered. Is there a festival for that?

2 The Problem of the Serpent

Debbie Richards had a new Shi Tzu puppy that snuck out of the house and bounded, as puppies are wont to do, into trouble. The dog’s barking caught her owner’s attention, and Debbie quickly found her along with a four-foot eastern diamondback. Rattlesnakes are common in Lamesa, Texas, so she didn’t panic but instead scooped up her pet and told her husband Milton who said he’d take care of the problem. He found a shovel, then watched the distinctive, alarming tail of the visitor disappearing underneath their deck. He reached out with the shovel, planning to pull the snake toward him and kill it. That’s where things went wrong.

Rattlesnakes are venomous pit vipers with a wide range in the United States, though they are especially common in dry, warm locations of the Southwest. Like most snakes, they don’t go looking for trouble with humans, but they will defend themselves. As the Department of Wildlife Ecology & Conservation at the University of Florida assures us, you’re much more likely to be struck by lightning. In fact, you’re more likely to die from a spider bite.¹ (In case you were thinking of sleeping ever again.) Our fear of snakes is out of proportion to the actual damage they can cause, especially considering that there are more nonvenomous than venomous varieties, and they all play an important role in our ecosystems—most notably keeping down rodent populations, preventing the spread of disease. However, second-guess their deadly potential at your own risk.

I grew up in rural Tennessee where from an early age I knew the dangerous types native to my area. Although I spotted a few cottonmouths—what we called water moccasins—at the nearby creek, I never had any run-ins with the others. I was lucky. Left to my own devices, there was little I enjoyed more than exploring my neighbor’s big barn where he stored hay for his cows. Despite my luck, I would scream in terror when I inevitably ran across a rat snake. I don’t remember a time when I was ever not afraid of snakes—it almost seemed bred into me.

Fear of reptiles actually ranks higher than fear of public speaking, even though a fair number of people have never seen a snake in real life.² And while the designation “reptile” covers a range of animals, I don’t think anyone’s getting worked up over a box turtle. Perhaps more surprisingly, ophiophobia might be evolutionary. A recent study found that infants’ pupils dilate when shown images of snakes, an indication of stress.³

This study surprised me, but upon reflection, it makes sense: For starters, it matched my own childhood experiences. And while we now have access to life-saving medicines, a bite a million years ago—or even a couple hundred—would have left someone dead. Perhaps this is why they are so often depicted as evil in folklore and religious texts. A natural enemy—or, in a different light, an easy target.

When Milton Richards—who is my first cousin once removed—tried to pull the diamondback from underneath his deck, he quickly realized his mistake. The snake was not in fact moving underneath the wooden planks but up the nearby latticework, disappearing into some ivy. It turned and struck Milton in the hand, puncturing his palm and index finger; he had time to tell his wife before he lost consciousness. Debbie and her son who lives nearby got Milton to the hospital where he was pumped full of antivenin, but still his organs began to shut down, not one by one but several at once. And so began the mystery of what had actually bitten Milton. While certainly dangerous, the eastern diamondback’s bite is treatable, and effects are typically not as severe—or as fast—as Milton experienced. Could he have been attacked by the more lethal Mojave rattlesnake? Mojaves aren’t native to Lamesa but are typically found farther west in Texas. Could they have migrated or been accidentally transported into the area?

After receiving around forty-eight vials of antivenin, Milton stabilized though doctors remained concerned. Friends and family members began to fill the waiting room, worried that they might need to pay their last respects. Milton himself doesn’t remember anything from the first five or six days, but would be released after eight. His relief was short-lived: His second hospitalization quickly followed and lasted more than a month.

Snake identification is an intense hobby, one taken quite seriously by its practitioners. I joined one group on Facebook with more than 100,000 members and strict rules. After someone posts a photo, enthusiasts weigh in, but I use the term “weigh in” loosely. Guesses are absolutely verboten; the latest set of rules warns that violators can be expelled. “There are plenty of experts here,” they state. “[W]e will not miss a few.” Only species identification is allowed (English and Latin), and conversations are directed toward a sister educational group that has its own rules about jokes and controversial topics (such as cats). The advice for all snakes is to leave them be and, if you suspect the animal might be venomous, a spray of water is recommended. I’ve lost hours scrolling through the photographs, reading the impressively fast and accurate identifications. Photos that would have once give me nightmares became fascinating, and it’s remarkable how our bodies—our reactions—can change through conditioning. Several fellow members report the same phenomenon; after only a few days, they’re less scared (or not scared at all). Last year, a seventy-two-year-old woman went viral for killing eleven copperheads who had nested under her Oklahoma home.⁴ In the widely circulated photo, she’s waving cheerfully at someone off-camera, cup of coffee in the other hand. The very embodiment of sangfroid.

Besides a few lingering effects, Milton feels healthy now and is disinclined to move out of the country as his wife initially wanted. Since being bitten, he’s killed thirty rattlesnakes on his property, and he mentions this casually, unimpressed with himself. It’s “just a way of life.” He remembers being out with his brother when they were kids, playing on a hay bale. They spotted a rattlesnake and trapped it in a thermos to bring home and keep as a pet in their empty fish tank. They tended to the animal until it mysteriously “died” while they were at camp. (Their mother—one of my favorite relatives with a vibrant, confident personality to match her vibrant, confident wardrobe—wasn’t as fond of their guest as her boys.) When we talk, Milton seems delighted by this childhood memory, unbothered by his later experience.

The myst...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series
• Title
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Kingsnakes and Beauty Queens
• 2 The Problem of the Serpent
• 3 From Mademoiselle Dorita to Britney Spears: The Snake Charmer Girls
• 4 A Mouse in Your Teeth
• 5 Say Amen and Pass the Cottonmouth
• 6 Python Pocketbooks
• 7 Who’s a Good Boy?
• 8 Snakes Are Not Cheap: Titanoboa and Other Monsters in the Lake
• 9 The Hobbyist
• 10 Sharper Than a Serpent’s Tooth
• 11 Magnanimity and True Courage
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index
• Copyright