Snake Learning

My daughter had an interest in snakes. I had a natural aversion to snakes. When she was nine she asked if she could have one. I said I would think about it. About four hours later my cousin Amanda shows up at door with a beautiful corn snake and all it’s accutrements. I was impressed by the narrow margin by which my nine year old had cut her timing. This snake opened up many doors in my life. I didn’t want to look at her but there she was as it turned out in my dining room due to some logistical and electrical issues with her habitat. So there she was moving around. I had to go see what she was doing. Not green, not brown, not grey she was that very weird color of those eyes of that person you know you knew that time but can’t remember. She looked wet but I knew she was dry and she was blind in one eye having been the resident snake of kindergarten class for three years she was somehow wounded in service. No matter though she was well handled in that time and although my intellect told me and my daughter agreed that reptiles do not regard their owners with anything other than interest in terms of food and shelter I sensed no menace from her. I watched for days in a fascinated way as she constantly searched her space for why I could not imagine. Putting the first mouse in her cage made me fell better about the world. Sad for the mouse? Not if you consider the filthy conditions I’d just rescued the little guy from. He’d been bred for this. The snake did what they do. I watched and was almost as satisfied. I wanted to touch her then. I could not. My daughter informed me, by popping my hand I might add, that I was not allowed to pick the snake up for at least twenty-four hours. She taught me something new, again. It is not uncommon. Later my daughter got the snake out and handed her to me and the cold chills that were all over my body rippled out several times before the finally melted away. Trying to hold a snake for the first time is like trying to hold a rope of water. It instinctively knows you are not appropriate for it’s safety and so it moves and moves and moves and as it does at first you are more and more uncomfortable. It is chaotic. As you become comfortable the snake accepts you are safe, it is safe, it will rest. It may put it’s small head on your hand, in your pocket, on your collar bone. You may feel the briefest moment when that rest happens. That moment could not be described as trust in you, not completely but it is a trust. It is much more a trust on the animal’s part to rest; that trust. Than the trust it takes to merely pick a snake up and move it around.
My daughter eventually had a collection of four corn snakes. A Ghost Snow Corn, which means really white laid a clutch of eggs. The ghost snow was named Coco, our girl got it in her mind she was going to sell snakes but it didn’t come to pass. We took our snakes to a Girl Scout event where young girls could handle a snake. The thinking was if you could concur your big fear in the fourth grade, think of what bigger things you can do? Because of those snakes I made myself hold a giant spider, yikes. I learned to throw a bottle of liquor in air and pour the contents when it came down and not care if it hit the floor. I learned to be still. I learned to be quiet. I got shot out of the space simulator at Space Camp. I tried the Gforce machine, too. Yes my daughter was there for all of these things. I could have said no. Now if I could just learn to like falling, so I could make myself like rollercoaster’s. Can you take a snake on a rollercoaster? What scares me? It is a short but silly list. What wouldn’t I do? What wouldn’t you do? I want to go to Ethiopia and feed one of the cities forty-three hyenas by mouth via a stick. If Andrew Zimmerman can do it, I can. Maybe the old time bible thumping snake handlers had it right in part, they just went too far or picked the wrong species. You can’t take a snake on a dance anymore than you take one on a roller coaster. I wouldn’t.

What is so right about the snake is this: Search Search Search Find restrestrestrestrest rest.

Getting to watch that, putting it on a scale you can observe, but in a naturalized way. Very cool. In our case the mouse often got away several times before the blind one got fed. Nature is not as fair as a nine year old with a heavy mallet.

KLS