Thinking about snakes

I’m not sure what got me going—oh, right, a friend used a Greek word that means some people are like snakes. But I’m not referring to people, however true. Not directly, anyway.

Like the time I’ll never forget in Oklahoma. A rig hand at a well location collected rattlers between shifts and kept them in a steel barrel “for fun.” Which he occasionally hit with a wrench, hard, just to hear the angry hissing and wild strikes inside. This I found unsettling.

Bad enough until I exited a trailer in the dark one morning, to be assaulted by the distinct bang and ungodly commotion next to me. I surely jumped 10 feet, only to see the same silly grin as I picked myself up and dusted of. Rig hands were known to have side arms and liked to shoot things between shifts, for fun— I knew to bite my tongue.

Next day a blowout below 16,000 feet made a mess that knocked the barrel over. Needless to say I slept in a car for weeks. The company thought we hit a mother lode—it turned out to be an over pressurized gas pocket that drained quickly, taking a good chunk of budget and several wells with it.

Then there was the time in Texas. I was hoisting up onto an outcrop seen from a distance, to get a better look. There it was, sunning at eye level feet away, coiled. I dropped down, somehow without twisting an ankle. My team knew why by the rattle. We went elsewhere. My colleagues were from the south so knew better— and encouraged me to lead without the warning. Later admitting it was “just because I was a Yankee thing.” It put the Oklahoma incident in perspective.

My frst experience was during feld camp in upstate NY. My team was traipsing through a feld of tall dry summer grass on the way to an outcrop hundreds of millions of years old, which made me that old, in a way—I liked delving into the earth’s environments, and reconstructing ancient realms from the barest evidence. It’s what geologists love.

Someone yelled having seen a large snake and “copper head!” I saw it too. But we were spread out which boxed it in, the grass streamed back and forth between us several times. We began running in the same direction which didn’t help. The last time I saw the fow coming at me the snake was gone. We were running from a cornered rabbit. It froze and looked at me, cringing in fright with those beautiful stone eyes, wishing me gone, not knowing what to do next. Seeing us as harbingers of death in a beautiful dun colored feld under the sun.

Back at camp people scofed and said we ran from a rabbit all along. I faced the charges head on with, “No, it wasn’t the Monte Python killer rabbit. It was a snake. I saw it, too. Really.” The laughing was hearty around the campfre that night. We were advised to study bird watching, which was lost on me because I already did.

Thinking back there was no sound. Only the rush of energy through the body. That built up and drained away.

As you notice one thing you begin to notice more and more, what was hardly noticeable. We think we know everything here to the horizon—ah, yes, the easy familiar, for example.

The world is like that, full of countless fragile and improbably things. Full of energy moving in and out of the shadows without a sound. Burning so brightly in a land of alarm and honey.

Rilke said that all beauty is terrifying. He also asked this:

“Who, if he cried out, would hear him among the orders of angels?”

Finally, whatever my place that was my frst visit. Though I wish to tread more softly.

Stephen Cipot Garden City Park