As Snake Season Closes

By Tom Poland

Serpents Are Grateful

If you were in the bathroom at a most private moment and a snake drops in how long would it take you to get out of there? A second? Well a snake in the bathroom’s not possible you say. Wrong, my friend. I worked with a woman who was at a restaurant, long closed, the Key West Bar & Grill. She went to the ladies room and as she sat, the water beneath splashed her derrière. She jumped up and a coiled snake stared back from the bowl. She never went back. Snakes in the toilet = bad for business.

There’s a video on the Internet that’ll make you laugh hard. People are using a public restroom in a South American country. As they do what people must do, a vulnerable moment if ever, a prankster eases an anaconda over the stall. You can guess what happens next. No matter what they are doing the terrified victims explode out the stall door. They can’t open it fast enough. One fellow is perched on the throne when the prankster eases the snake under the wall across the floor. Fast as a squirrel he scrambles to the top of the stall screaming and shouting. A show similar to Candid Camera catches the action. (See it at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTgyCL4NXO0) Yes, it’s mean, but it’s funny, this exploitation of our fear of snakes.

I had a snake encounter last week. As I watered my schefflera Thursday, one emerald green limb seemed a wee bit out of position. I touched it and it moved. It was the green snake you see pictured here. I jumped back, but the snake stood his ground. It coiled around a stem and lay across the plant’s foliage rendering it near invisible. Then it appeared to stare me down. I considered picking the snake up but didn’t. Scared I suppose. Shouldn’t have been. Green snakes, known also as grass snakes, won’t hurt you. They’re non-venomous and do good things like eat spiders and insects. They’re not constrictors. They just swallow their prey.

I did get my camera and take a close photo of it. I left the snake alone and worked a while. Later, I went back out and the snake was still there. My front stoop is a good place to hunt. Plants and a fountain attract prey. If you look at the photo closely you’ll see an insect just to the right of the snake. What became of it I wonder?

Down herein Dixie we have what is known as the rough green snake. Smooth green snakes live in other parts of the country, and this smooth or rough business refers to the snakes’ scales. Rough green snakes’ scales appear to have a slight ridge or keel. Unlike many snakes, the rough green snake is diurnal. He likes to get around during daylight.

I find all snakes to be handsome creatures but that doesn’t stop people from running over them, grabbing a hoe or shovel and killing them. My friend, Kym, says the only good snake is a dead snake and she backs it up. So far this summer, she’s killed three snakes around her pool. Last summer she must have killed at least eight snakes. Summer is open season on snakes, the killing time for all things that slither, hiss, coil, and rattle. Kym doesn’t even like green snakes, one of our more beautiful snakes in my opinion. To her a snake is a snake is a snake.

She’s not alone. I travel country roads and see many a mangled snake roasting atop gravel and tar and asphalt too. I have yet to see the corpse of Opheodrys aestivus, the rough green snake. In full disclosure I confess that I accidentally ran over one last summer. On my way to Home Depot a green snake shot from the left shoulder into my left front wheel. I tried to miss it. A newly killed green snake turns blue by the way. So, if you see a slender dead blue snake on the road, it is, well, was a green snake.

Yes, summer time is snake season, but summer is winding down and that means snake’s encounters with man will dwindle. Fall’s cooler air isn’t far off. You can see it in the softness of daylight as Earth tilts away from the sun. You can see it in the birch leaves that fall, the muscadines that fall all navy-gold speckled, and you can see it in withering tomato plants and precocious leaves eager to turn red. As sure as summer follows spring, winter follows fall. Snake season will be closing in due time, and for that I imagine snakes are grateful.

My green snake has nothing to fear from me. I pose no threat but those who suffer ophidiophobia, an abnormal fear of snakes, can’t say the same. Besides irrational people, birds and other snakes such as the eastern racer and king snake prey upon green snakes. I think it makes some people feel good to kill a snake. It’s as if they rid the land of evil or protected their dog or cat or kid from untimely death.

Ever since Adam and Eve bit that apple snakes have gotten a bad rap. It’s trendy to knock snakes and all the serpentine negativity has spilled into our language. We call someone pretending to be our friend a snake in the grass. Someone who sells a useless product sells snake oil. When we can’t find something that’s in plain sight, we say, “If it was a snake it would have bitten me.”

Yeah snakes get a bad deal and literature’s no exception. Snakes get the bad guy role every time. In his essay, “The Starry Place Between The Antlers,” Georgia’s James Dickey, wrote, “Whenever I can, I pursue snakes with a long, dusty aluminum pipe and darts made of coat-hangers and typing paper, and whatever weapon my breath is, as I have dreamed all my life that they are pursuing me with only their sunny venom and subtler poisons drawn from the roots of mossy trees.”

Another Georgian, Harry Crews, wrote a southern gothic novel, A Feast of Snakes. His book about down-in-their-luck southerners gave snakes a prominent role. James C. Cobb described Crews’s book in his own book, Away Down South: A History of Southern Identity (2005): “In his fiction Crews presented a southern poor-white netherworld inhabited by characters whose desperation, depravity, and grotesqueness went well beyond anything Erkine Caldwell had dared to offer. A Feast of Snakes emphasized the widening chasm between upwardly mobile white southerners and the grim realities of life facing those for whom upward mobility did not exist.”

Crews’s novel is set in “Mystic,” a small South Georgia town whose traditional rattlesnake roundup becomes a big-time tourist attraction. Main character Joe Lon Mackey, once a high school football star, lives a miserable life, drinking all the time and living in a trailer. He has two bratty kids and a wife with rotten teeth who’s resigned to her wretched existence. When Joe Lon carries out a murderous shooting spree a mob throws him into a pit of thrashing rattlesnakes. Joe Lon rises from the pit for the final time with snakes hanging from his face. Well, at least the snakes did away with a bad guy, but trust me when I tell you snakes are not bad guys. Cut ’em a break.

To be a snake in the summer is to be a target but snake season will close soon. The official start to fall comes September 22 at 10:29 p.m. EDT. Soon the days will chill and snakes will brumate, a term referring to something akin to hibernation, but they won’t do it all winter long. They’ll brumate only when temperatures get too cold for them. When they do, all holed up underground or sequestered in a rock crevice or that stack of firewood out back, they’re safe. Not so when spring brings its earth-warming ways. And especially not so when summer arrives and we garden and mow the lawn and drive down country roads when lo and behold a snake crosses our path. “Snake! Somebody get a hoe!”

What if the tables turned? A telling passage comes from a writer with the odd name Lemony Snicket that describes what might happen, which I’ll paraphrase here. “A pair of snakes learned to drive a car so recklessly that they would run you over in the street and never stop to apologize.”

Sounds familiar does it not.

Visit Tom Poland’s website at www.tompoland.net
Email Tom about most anything. [email protected]

Tom Poland is the author of eight books and more than 700 magazine features. A Southern writer, his work has appeared in magazines throughout the South. The University of South Carolina Press has released his and Robert Clark’s book, Reflections Of South Carolina, Vol. II. The History Press of Charleston just released his book, Classic Carolina Road Trips From Columbia. He writes a weekly column for newspapers in Georgia and South Carolina about the South, its people, traditions, lifestyle, and changing culture.

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