Chronicles for September 9, 2006.

A DREAM OF SNAKES. I bought my first copy of People Magazine in, like, ten years yesterday because of the cover photo of Steve Irwin cuddling a baby crocodile.  I'm not exactly a herpetophile, but I do like reptiles, and the young of any animal species are usually pretty cute once they get past what I call (regardless of species) the "larval" stage.

And of course Steve Irwin was a very cute man.  He never showed any perceptible signs of aging and I always picture him smiling when I think of him.  I wanted that photo to put in the trunk where I keep things that my great-grandmother would have called "Keepsakes" but which I refer to as my "time capsule."  Steve Irwin's is one of the faces I don't want to forget.

Subsequently, on Real Time with Bill Maher, the New Rules included a rule that "you"---the press, I guess---can't call someone's death a freak accident if he dies from a stingray attack while swimming in stingray-infested waters.  A fair point, I guess.  Apparently---this is according to the People Magazine article---the ray that got Steve Irwin was almost seven feet across and the barb went directly into his heart.  He pulled it out himself and apparently bled to death, which I didn't know. 

I think that Steve Irwin would actually agree with this.  He consciously spent his life balancing on the rickety rim of peril. 

I wonder if he just got too comfortable there. 

To point up this lesson, I had a dream that was absolutely infested with snakes.  I rather like snakes, as long as they are nonpoisonous and too small to swallow a cat; my first husband once brought home one he found in the woods that was rather sweet.  It was a black snake; she liked to lie in my lap when we were watching TV.  I realize it was because she liked the warmth, not because she had noticed me as a fellow being, but it was still sweet.   I liked her----my husband said it was a she----but I couldn't get too attached, because of her need for live food.  I like rodents as much as reptiles, is the thing. More, actually.  I definitely couldn't deal with feeding time; and I was relieved when he gave the snake to his younger brother.

My mother, on the other hand, has a phobia about snakes.  She's had it since she was a little girl.  She can't look at a picture of a snake.  She can't even talk about snakes.  I never told her about our (temporary) snake because I was afraid that she would never have come to visit us again, even after the snake was gone.  Though she enjoys my digital artwork, I've never shown her the image above.  If you look closely, you'll see five golden snakes (their heads) with their chins restfully propped up on a [non-reversed, non-satanic] pentagram.  It emerged from paintshop one day, and I was quite taken with it.

So it was odd that I had this dream:  in it, there were giant 20 foot long snakes hanging from all the trees around my house.  I was terrified because I was afraid they'd get my cats.  I woke up with a scream---which startled hell out of Nick, who was sitting up in bed with a book---because I dreamed that I opened the toilet and there was a water moccasin in it. 

"Very phallic," said Nick.  Excuse me, no.  Phallic symbols are necessary if you are so repressed that you can't consciously or unconsciously allow yourself to think of a penis, but they're everywhere these days.  No, the snakes in that dream were snakes and the dream was no doubt brought on by my own sorrow and anger over the death of Steve Irwin.  To reframe the great man's most famous phrase, sometimes a snake IS just a snake.

When I was a child growing up in South Carolina, we lived for a number of years on the Catawba River, a river which separates Lancaster and Chester counties.  The Catawba river was quite polluted in those days----it looks as if they are doing much better now----and a couple of times a year we'd get what were known as fish kills: hundreds of dead catfish would wash up from wherever and my dad and the other owners would have to gather them up and dispose of them.  We went swimming in it anyway, of course; the Seventies was the Anti-information age, where nobody believed anything they read (in contrast to now, where everyone believes everything).

Sometimes, huge pieces of some sort of light, porous industrial waste product would wash up on the "beach."  It was light enough to float on the water.  It was black and if rubbed or broken, produced a silky, shiny black dust that smelled like methane.  Naturally we called them "fart rocks."  I have no idea what they were made of or where they came from.  At this juncture, with 30 years between then and now, I don't want to know. 

We also had terrific storms.  Another thing (besides the effects of pollution on swimmers) my otherwise quite intelligent father---a professional man, be it said----didn't believe in lightning rods.  He simply did not believe they worked.  We therefore lived in a large house on the edge of a cliff overlooking the water with no lightning rods. During storms, you dared not touch, or even sit near the telephone on the top floor (the main floor) of the house.  If you got too near it, your hair would stand on end.

One night, during a particularly vicious storm, I heard a sound overhead (main part of the house; where the living room, kitchen, and master bedroom were) like a bomb going off.  I was so inured to intense thunder, I didn't even get up.  But the next morning when I went upstairs, the towel racks had blown off the walls of the master bathroom, leaving only burn marks behind and the television and stove had exploded.  My parents never even woke up, but it wasn't too long after that we moved back into town. 

In addition to everything else, the woods and water were infested with snakes.  Water moccasins and copperheads----two poisonous varieties of pit viper---were the most common.  I remember the shudders afforded by the sight of the yellow rubber SNAKE BITE KIT my father kept in the laundry (which was separate from the house).  It was something he bought somewhere.  It looked like something you'd get at Hell's Five and Dime.

It had in it a sort of ski rope looking thing in it that was supposed to be used as a tourniquet "to keep the poison from rushing to your heart," my brother said; a suction cup for suctioning out the poison (though first aid lessons in those days wrongly said that the better approach was to have another person suck out the poisoned blood), and a sort of scalpel looking thingie for cutting an X across the bitten place to let the blood out.  I mean:  Jesus.  Kids today, with their video games and indoor lives; they don't know the meaning of fear.

I didn't actually see many snakes in my time there, but I didn't go looking for them either.  We were forbidden to walk in the woods or enter the intriguing ancient shack (made of LOGS with WOODEN PEGS in them) that someone had (a long time before) built on part of our property.  "Snakes," said my mother.  Characteristically, she didn't worry about them till she saw them, at which point she went apeshit. One got into the bottom story once, called the "basement," poor thing.

It was the ones in the water that scared me.  We had a very long boat dock; snakes would sometimes climb up under the boards, and you'd be merrily swimming around and suddenly catch sight of them. They never did anything and were completely unaggressive.  And once when I was running along the beach, I took a flying leap and---looking down---saw a snake wriggling hastily out of the water from under where my feet almost landed.  A water moccasin.  Which would certainly, and quite justifiably, have sunk his fangs in me if I'd come down within striking distance.  He didn't want to fight, quite obviously, but I'm sure he'd have felt I hadn't given him a choice if I'd come as close as I nearly did.

The thing is, I have always thought snakes were sort of cute.  I like their little faces---at least when their mouths aren't open to show giant, poisonous hypodermics, I think so.  I felt terribly sorry for the snakes that various friends and family members killed; after all, it was their world, not ours.  It was sort of how I felt reading Kipling's Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, whom I sincerely hated for killing the lady snake, Nagaina and her babies. 

Even J.K. Rowling makes them the symbol of consummate evil in the Harry Potter novels.

And in my dream last night, I was in the grip of some sort of atavistic fear I couldn't control.  I also felt a primitive disgust (though even in my dream, the worst part for me was having to kill the snake in the toilet). 

I'm sure these feelings are built into the species and inhabit our collective unconscious; throughout most of human history, it's behooved us to feel fear and disgust in the presence of these really beautiful and elegant creatures.   

I honor Steve Irwin for pushing past these primitive responses and teaching people that it IS possible to love a reptile.  Unfortunately, it's possible to forget----and have to relearn, as many of my fellow Floridians did this summer----that the world is filled with creatures inimical to humans and not capable of understanding that we've changed our minds (mostly) about them. 

So I'm afraid that Steve Irwin, who certainly taught that people should respect their fear of dangerous wild animals, just didn't remember that the stingrays hadn't got the word about him. 

It wasn't a "freak" accident because the potential was right there in front of him the whole time, as he knew.  It was just very, very sad----tragic for his family and for a whole world of people who loved him.

MY CONVERSION TO FLICKR. I wonder if anyone would ever blog if when they started off they knew how much there is to do if you take your blogging seriously.

My latest blogging endeavor:  to upload all my thousands of images to a Flickr Pro Account---which, I have to say, is a BARGAIN for what it is----so that I don't fill up my allotted typepad space with my image files.  When I checked my file manager for the last month, I found out that by uploading my files to typepad, I'd used up a whopping TEN PERCENT.  If I hadn't heard of "image hosting" I'd have been entirely flummoxed instead of wearily resigned to 6 hours of uploading files. [Hint to anyone considering Flickr:  DOWNLOAD THE FLICKR UPLOADER.]

Anyway, it's all done now.  The image on this page, unlike any other images on this page, is brought to you by Flickr, which---so far---I highly recommend (though without trying any rival services).  And if I'd bothered to investigate it a bit more before diving right in to the uploading, I could have saved myself two or three hours.