The Truth About Snakes

 Fear of Snakes is one of the most common phobias. From mild repulsion to screaming to fainting, most people react negatively to Snakes. Many kill them, just in case.

 Is it because they are so different from the rest of us vertebrates, gliding effortlessly despite the absence of limbs or fins? Is it bad press and superstition since Genesis 3:1? Actually, of some 3000 species of Snakes worldwide fewer than 15% are venomous. 

 

Facts don’t matter to people like me whose fear of Serpents oscillated between screaming and turning to stone. Once I was returning to my car and the only way over the tangled sand-dune vegetation was a narrow trail I had successfully walked over a few hours earlier. But now, to my left I spotted a coiled Coral Snake. She was venomous, I knew, but that didn’t matter; had she been a Gartersnake I would have done the same: run back to the beach and look around for some man to carry me over that only viable exit.

 

My aversion didn’t improve until 4 May 1975, a fateful Sunday morning that would nearly become my last. On the kitchen floor there was a small snake, courtesy of one of my Cats who dragged her up from the basement. This time I screamed.

 

Bob, my then husband, still asleep at that early hour, came to the rescue and was amused at the sight of the harmless Gartersnake. Putting her out in the backyard was too close for my comfort; pets on the loose, neighbors, and pesticides didn’t bode well for the reptile. He offered to put the Snake in a coffee jar so I could release her in a field out of town on my way to work.

It took courage I didn’t know I had to agree to the insane plan, but my respect for life won and I allowed him to put the jar – breathing holes previously poked in the lid -- on the passenger seat. At 5 am on a weekend an unconfined glass container by the driver didn’t raise any alarms in our sleepy minds. We had not even heard of the “elephant effect” of loose objects in a vehicle.

 

I set off in the quiet dawn and just two blocks away from home I fearfully glanced over at the jar. The lid had come off and I saw the Snake as she was falling onto the floor. I hit the brake with force … only that in a state of absolute terror I hit the gas instead. My Toyota Corolla wrapped around a utility pole, and I was critically injured. Shattered glass from the coffee jar had severed my carotid artery. Still conscious and my eyes spared, I watched my blood spurting like a geyser from my neck.  

 

I would not have lasted 10 minutes in sleeping Tulsa, OK, had a man sipping his first cup of coffee not heard the crash through his kitchen window overlooking Lewis Avenue. He called an ambulance which dispatched from St. John’s Hospital just one block away. I received a transfusion just in time.

 

When the ambulance medic dropped by my hospital room two days later –those were the days of chivalry— I asked him whether he or anyone else had found “the Snake.” As if the medic knew the genesis of the crash! As if anyone could see a small Snake in the site of a wreckage! Of course, nobody had seen a Snake. And I found myself hoping that she survived and somehow made it safely away from the street.

 

Was that an epiphany?

 

Two weeks in the hospital with multiple broken bones, vocal cords severed, and permanent impairment of some of my abilities beg the question: Could any Snake have caused more damage than my fear of them? Not a Gartersnake to be sure, but very few others and none native to Oklahoma. 

 

I didn’t dwell on the errors of judgement Bob and I made leading to the accident. Nor did I run into any snakes until one sunny morning. I was reading in my backyard and not far from my feet, on the grass, I saw two Gartersnakes entwined with each other. I had never seen such a thing, but I knew what it was, and I was filled with wonderment and compassion that those two individuals were furthering their kind and, yes, loving each other. It was so clear to me, so beautiful, and I was free of fear.

 

I would urge anyone who is still in the grip of herpetophobia to visit Advocates for Snake Preservation https://www.snakes.ngo to learn truths that will help.