There are certain animals that we are taught to fear. We watch Jaws for the first time, and then our mind fills with terrifying thoughts when we wade into the ocean, watching for that ominous fin cutting like a blade through the water. We see pictures of lions, and tigers, and bears (oh my!), their mouths filled with murderous teeth as the throw their heads back in a fearsome roar and hear stories of alligators with steel jaws. We look out for spiders with a red hourglass on their back, even if the black widow is not endemic to our neighborhood, and jump away from the common garter snake because it makes us think of a much more dangerous species, venom dripping from its fangs.
From a young age my parents were worried that I refused to learn these lessons. I remember my very first trip to the beach – I was six years old, and we visited Jekyll Island, Georgia, a spot we would come back to for many years. My most cherished stuffed animal at this time was a blue-gray shark, a puppet with two black beads as eyes with a mouth I could move, filled with felt teeth that could never hurt me. I brough “Sharkey” to the beach and held him tightly as my dad told me to watch out for sharks. To this day he brings up the line I responded with – “Sharks are kind of nice, Dad!” I applied the same ideology to snakes – the animal he detested the most.
A year or two before this vacation my family had gone to a local wildlife sanctuary, when my brother was still in a stroller. There is a photo of me, my face lit up with delight, as a volunteer to one of the rangers – a python is laying peacefully in my lap as I look at it with fascination.
For my entire elementary and middle school experience at a Catholic school, we were taught to fear the snake – the root of all temptation, of all evil, a form the devil had taken that led to the fall of Adam and Eve. We were taught not to listen to the snake. To my teachers, snakes were sin, to my classmates, they were ‘icky’. Years later I found a snake outside in my backyard garden, and managed to grasp it before it slithered out of my fist. I expected it to feel wet and slimy, but the scales were dry and smooth like leather boots. I told my dad – he ordered me to wash my hands.
In fifth grade my friend had our entire class over for her birthday party – we played volleyball in her yard and ate snacks from her patio table. From the other side of the net, a girl served the ball and it landed out of bounds. I went to retrieve it, and in the grass was a thin brown snake. I dropped the ball and picked the creature up, delicately. The snake writhed for a minute before reaching a sort of calm and wrapping itself around my wrist. I heard a scream as another girl saw it, and a boy near me screamed “Step on it!” I chased him around the house with the snake in my anger, and it became clear to me that he hated it so much because he was terrified. When I was satisfied his punishment was enough, I brought the snake to a deep part of the woods, let it slither into the underbrush avenged, and returned to the party.
Snakes became form of a little rebellion for me as I entered middle school – by aligning myself with the thing that my friends and family thought was fearsome and the symbol my suffocating school condemned as sinful, I possessed power. Genesis warned us not to listen to the Serpent’s hissing, but I had grown tired of listening to my teachers and their preaching. When I heard their insistent scolding about how we would go to hell for any number of things, I let my class know I wanted a pet snake. I really did – at a park I saw a girl taking pictures with her albino ball python, smiling with the white and yellow snake draped contentedly over her shoulders. My mom told me no, my dad wrinkled his face in disgust.
These past few weeks, I’ve been seeing snakes all around me – I imagine myself as Medusa, turning those who dare to look at me stony with fear. The first encounter was a quick brown flash through tall grasses on a hike, too quick to identify a species. I saw several more in this matter, darting away as my foot fell on the trail next to it. I vowed to pay more attention next time, to creep up a little more carefully and get a good look. The opportunity came not from a hike in the woods but in the trimmed shrubbery of my front lawn, as I was tying my dog up in the yard. A common garter snake was curled up lazily in a bush, its scales a yellow and brown mosaic. I was able to snap a picture to confirm it was indeed a garter snake, and it stayed there until my dog began sniffing around the bushes. The snake departed fast as a whip, and I thought it was gone. But the very next day, when I was sitting out on our patio, I spotted it again – it must have been the same snake from the bush. It was splayed out like the loose end of a ball of yarn in the black mulch beneath the shade of a dogwood sapling. I crouched down to see it, met its eyes. It flicked a bright red tongue out of its mouth repeatedly. I wiggled my tongue back. The snake responded. For a moment, we were communicating – then, my dad, home from a long day at work, shouted out in repulsion and it darted away.
I haven’t seen the snake since, but I hope it is still in my yard, lying in wait for another surprise encounter. Like my dad, many people see the snake as something to chase away or run away from – even one as common as the garter. They see snakes as cold, inhuman, and dangerous.
A recent study published in Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology studied a group of 40 garter snakes and placed them in an enclosure. What the researchers found was that the snakes formed groups – not only that, but they returned to these groups once again after being moved around. Garter snakes form social bonds – they make friends. They are social creatures, like many other animals, including us. Perhaps the snake in my yard found its group again. I hope it has. Its easy to listen to what we are told about these animals, but the snakes we can find in our backyards are not a threat if we do not perceive them as such – they are more similar to us than we think.
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