Snakes in the Garden

It seems that I have always been aware of snakes from the beginning of my memory. When I was three, my parents went out to a swimming hole in Mississippi for a picnic with their friends. They took my sister and me to wade in the shallow water. I remember two events from that day--my father and some of his male buddies picked up my mother in her halter top and shorts and threw her into the water. She was screaming--good-naturedly though--that she didn't intend to go for a swim. The second memory revolves around seeing a rather large snake beside the water; I learned later it was a water moccasin so common in Mississippi lakes. My parents grabbed me up and begin asking me frantically if "the big bug" as I called it had bitten me. Of course, I liked the attention I seemed to be getting from everyone and kept pointing to numerous places on my body where the snake had bitten me.

As I grew a bit older and began to attend Sunday School at the Second Baptist Church of Greenville, Mississippi, I learned about another snake, this time in the Garden of Eden. It seems that this one was beautiful and even talked to the first woman, Eve, convincing her to sin against God by tasting the forbidden fruit. As a five-year-old, I had more trouble believing that a snake could be beautiful than believing one could actually speak.

As a teenager, I often went on fall walks with my friend Linda and her family around Lake Enid or Lake Sardis in the delta. On one occasion, the two of us noticed a snake hanging from a branch above our heads. We backed slowly away and told her dad who was back at his truck. He immediately took his shotgun--which all good Mississippians still carry--and shot the snake, bringing it out on a stick for us to see.

When I became a mother, my husband and I often took our fold-out Apache camper to our favorite state park in Arkansas, Devil's Den. We, along with our young children, enjoyed watching the naturalists present various programs during the day and occasionally at night. One of the most memorable for us all occurred around a large campfire. The naturalist was speaking on some topic when at least three small copperheads came crawling up into the audience's sight. The naturalist simply took the long stick already in his hand, picked each one up without missing a syllable in his presentation, and tossed it back into the dark night.

My position these days regarding snakes in that they are typically just trying to survive in an ever-more-difficult environment where humans continue to encroach upon their land. My grandson and granddaughter are city children and don't care to be out in nature as much as my children did. Charlie, our seven-year-old, however, recently was brave enough to attend a week's "snake camp" in which he learned about the habits of snakes, made models of snakes with clay, drew snakes, and even held one. It gave me hope that we could all get along.