Chasing The Tail of My Own Fear of Snakes
I realize that having issues with snakes is quite commonplace, however my issues are complicated by my memories of how people reacted to those snakes after having let us play happily so near to them.
While living in the deep south we kids, apparently, were encouraged to swim in and play around some beautiful, yet swampy and entirely snake-infested waters. Why that is, is still a mystery to me now that I am a parent, myself. However at the time we were thrilled to be allowed to play in the wild and all did so, happily, without any harm that I can remember.
Occasionally, though, the inappropriateness of choosing a swamp as a playground would strike to our caretakers as problematic, who would then suddenly rectify the situation by becoming quite hysterical and slaughtering the snakes using any manner of tools handy. They would cut the heads off of snakes with shovels and hoes, even guns. The violence of these sudden slaughters were shocking, confusing and quite terrifying.
One of my earliest memories is a vivid image of my grandfather standing in his maroon silk robe at the end of his fishing pier shooting at close range at the same peaceful Cotton Mouths we'd been told to swim next to the day before in Slidel, La. The lack of sense of it all bewildered me.
Once, in New Orleans, our neighbor leaped over our back fence and began to chop off the heads of tiny "ground rattlers" with a hoe, too. He was Latino and I didn't understand what he was saying, but my mother told me I had been picking up the babies with my hands and were playing with them.
I suppose these images have left me with some frightening images of snakes as both killers and victims.
That having been said, it's the people in this clip below that creep me out the most.
While living in the deep south we kids, apparently, were encouraged to swim in and play around some beautiful, yet swampy and entirely snake-infested waters. Why that is, is still a mystery to me now that I am a parent, myself. However at the time we were thrilled to be allowed to play in the wild and all did so, happily, without any harm that I can remember.
Occasionally, though, the inappropriateness of choosing a swamp as a playground would strike to our caretakers as problematic, who would then suddenly rectify the situation by becoming quite hysterical and slaughtering the snakes using any manner of tools handy. They would cut the heads off of snakes with shovels and hoes, even guns. The violence of these sudden slaughters were shocking, confusing and quite terrifying.
One of my earliest memories is a vivid image of my grandfather standing in his maroon silk robe at the end of his fishing pier shooting at close range at the same peaceful Cotton Mouths we'd been told to swim next to the day before in Slidel, La. The lack of sense of it all bewildered me.
Once, in New Orleans, our neighbor leaped over our back fence and began to chop off the heads of tiny "ground rattlers" with a hoe, too. He was Latino and I didn't understand what he was saying, but my mother told me I had been picking up the babies with my hands and were playing with them.
I suppose these images have left me with some frightening images of snakes as both killers and victims.
That having been said, it's the people in this clip below that creep me out the most.
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