My fear of snakes, what I suppose a clinician would call my “ophidiophobia,” began in the spring of 1991. I had had no thoughts about them one way or another, and living in a small town in New England, I seldom if ever encountered them. But I stepped off the school bus on a sunny April day and began the short walk home and realized, just as it was too late to avoid it, that I was about to step on a small garter snake, probably less than a foot long, that had already been squashed flat by a car tire.
The tread was still visible. The guts were caked into the pavement. It was fresh. I knew it hadn’t been there when I walked to the bus stop that morning. I always followed the same path. I would have seen it. At some point during my school day, when I was struggling through long division or fucking up my locker combination or painstakingly counting the syllables of every sentence the teacher said and tapping them out on my fingers to keep worrisome thoughts at bay or otherwise negotiating the torments of fourth grade, the harmless scaly thing was crushed.
I shrieked and jumped to the side, preposterously, as though this creature, dead as dead can be, could have suddenly reared up and attacked.
This happened 34 years ago. I am terrified of snakes today. I will not go near one.
When I was in my early 30s, I went jogging on a forest trail in Vermont and a tiny one slithered across the path and I shrieked again and jumped again, anything to avoid being anywhere near it, though I don’t know whether I was afraid of the snake itself – surely it was harmless – or the prospect of crushing it, of mashing it into the dirt with the tread of my Asics size 12 running shoe, which would have killed it just as surely as the front tire of any sedan or SUV.
When I go running in Arizona or Texas, where the snakes are much larger and mean business and have the venom to back up the swagger, I keep maniacally alert for the sight of a coil or the sound of a rattle.
When I was 20, I sat down in the lecture hall of my sociology class and a pretty girl next to me, one I’d never noticed before in a class of over 500 students, beckoned me to “have a look” at something and gestured toward her gauzy, low-cut blouse. She had the slightest hint of a goth aesthetic. She wasn’t wearing a corset or fishnet stockings, but it was easy to imagine she owned such things. Thinking it was my lucky day, I obligingly peered toward her cleavage, only to see a baby boa constrictor nestled in the gap between her right breast and lacy bra cup. Again, I shrieked. She laughed. Being 20, I still thought I might have a chance of sleeping with her. She’d chosen me to pull that prank on, right? I still got to see down her shirt, right? But for the next 75 minutes, the thought that I was within inches of a snake, even a tiny one, overwhelmed even the wishful thinking that I’d somehow be able to parlay this into getting laid.
But on that day in fourth grade, I just collected myself and kept walking. I looked back, absurdly, to be sure the snake wasn’t following me. I let myself into the house with the garage door code, fed and walked the family dog in the opposite direction from the dead snake, sat down at the kitchen table to do my spelling homework.
“The dead snake is on the ground in front of the Blakes’ house.” 13 syllables.
It seems odd to develop a phobia because of a dead version of the object of that phobia. Like developing a fear of heights in a moment that you’re standing safely on solid ground at sea level. Or suddenly acquiring a fear of tight spaces while lying in an open field, gazing at the open infinity of sky. The snake in the road was a mass of dead organic matter. Nothing more or less. It terrified me anyway.
It was still there the next day, of course. I gave it a wide berth this time, an exaggerated arc almost to the other side of the street. Not the side I was accustomed to walking on.
I think that I assumed it would be gone sooner or later. That there must be people who take care of such things. That some poor municipal worker would have to come out with a sharp-tipped shovel and scrape the thing off the street. But of course, that’s not how things happen. Maybe with larger, furrier, cuter roadkill. It’s hard to imagine a possum or even a squirrel getting crushed by a vehicle, bones and organs split and exposed like a sloppy dissection project, and just being left to rot in a quiet neighborhood.
But an unassuming and very small snake, on the side of the road, courteous enough not to draw much attention to itself? It just stayed there, decaying more as the days got hotter. And each day, I got a little bolder, walking a little closer to it, monitoring its inevitable rot, feeling the rise of bile in my throat as disgust and irrational fear coursed through my nervous system. Yet it wasn’t entirely disagreeable. It was like my habit of opening the mayonnaise or Dijon mustard jars that my parents kept on the refrigerator door and inhaling deeply. Disgusting, overwhelming, yet pleasurable in a way that felt transgressive and insane.
“The dead snake is on the ground in front of the Blakes’ house.” Still 13 syllables. It was comforting to know that that, at least, would never change.
It remained there far longer than you would have thought. I checked every day, monitoring its gradual fading from carcass to abstraction. Eventually, it was like a fossil on a desert rock, a two-dimensional stain on the road as smooth and unobtrusive as the pavement itself; months after first finding it, I boldly ran my sneaker along it to confirm this. It was gone.
That fall, I got a pet hamster. It died two years later, when I was a gawky sixth-grader, on the precipice of adolescence, still very much a kid. I cried when it died, but in a way that felt disingenuous. I didn’t want to touch its cold stiff body, understood intuitively that to do so would be unsanitary and unseemly, but I wasn’t afraid of it either. I grieved in a way that was partly real, but more than anything, I felt detached and accepting. This was right and okay, I thought.
My father buried it in the backyard. I made a ridiculous cross-shaped tombstone out of chopsticks and glue to mark the spot. I was not a religious child, but I knew that that was one thing crosses were for.
I spent the rest of that afternoon building a gallows out of Construx, a building block toy set that, I assume, went out of business when LEGO became a cultural juggernaut. I had seen the spaghetti western Hang Em High on TNT a few weeks before, an old Clint Eastwood flick that, as its title suggests, features several hangings. I was fascinated and terrified by that too. If I could have jumped aside with a shriek to avoid those scenes in the movie, I might have. But I just sat on the couch, mouth agape, watching the drawn-out build-up to the hangman pulling the levers.
I was pleased by how closely my homemade gallows resembled the one in the movie, complete with a trapdoor. I somehow figured out how to tie a hangman’s noose into a piece of string. I gathered up all my GI Joe action figures and emotionlessly hanged them, one after another.
In the middle of this worrisome exercise, the sort of thing you could imagine being the behavior of a future psychopath or at least a child in need of psychiatric intervention, my father walked in the room and carefully observed my creation. What is a parent even supposed to say when they see their 11-year-old doing something so unabashedly ghoulish?
I overheard my parents discussing it later that night.
“Well, it’s his first real experience with death.”
“I know it’s just a hamster, but it still has to be hard for him.”
“That was probably just his way of dealing with it.”
They didn’t know about the snake in front of the Blakes’ house over two years before. Death had been on my mind for far longer than since the hamster died. But no one wants to alarm their parents with such a stark and weird and obsessively abject plaything. So I disassembled the gallows. Told myself the GI Joes were alive again. Imagination is allowed to work this way.
It’s not a fear of snakes or heights or tight places. It’s a fear that the unconscious will win out, the will to self-destruct will take over, that I’ll choose to let the snake bite or choose to jump off the building or choose to crawl into the cave with no exit. Phobias name the things that are inevitably terrifying but alluring. We long to scrape our sneaker on the ground, to confirm death’s finality, to take in its seductive scent.
Six years later, my dog died. I drove to the beach, now a moody young adult with romantic inclinations and some modest experience of the world. The same beach where I had parked after sundown once or twice for a fumbling and sweaty and guilt-laden interlude with a girl who thought I might be worth making out with.
I gazed out at the ocean, thought about my dog snatching tennis balls out of the air and panting after a long walk and snuggling up to me while I did my trigonometry homework, about his final days when he couldn’t eat, could barely even move.
I grieved for real this time. And, I told myself, I grieved the way one is supposed to.