Of Snakes Sex Playing in the Rain, Random Thou Read online

  From top to bottom, the game remains consistent, constant. It slows down action to an observable but unpredictable pace; it demonstrates that even in a world where collective might is often perceived as the only answer to adversity, there is still some place where individual effort, singular ability, and lonely bravery count; where errors are only temporary indiscretions, for heroism can be restored. It’s the only endeavor I know of where the strongest is routinely asked to sacrifice himself for the sake of the weaker for the benefit of the whole. And throughout the play, the strategy centers on one goal: to get home. Perhaps most significantly, it underscores the notion that nothing is ever sure or secure without vigilance and focus and that anything can change the outcome right up to the very end. In a word, baseball offers hope; what other sport can make a claim that is more important?

  When a pitcher takes the mound and batter takes his box, when the infield goes into its crouch, and the umpire bends over to study the zone, when the aroma of a summer night is augmented by the fragrance of grass and the bouquet of cold beer and hot peanuts, when the tartness of mustard-soaked hotdogs and dill pickles is complemented by the chorus of fans heckling and rooting, and when the unique sound of ash on horsehide cracks out and ignites a conflagration of vocal approval, something magical is happening: Baseball.

  It’s a fantasy, perhaps, a myth, but it says something about the way America was, the way America is. And so long as the grass grows and the wind blows and fly balls get lost in the sun, it will continue to say something about the way America can be.

  OF SNAKES AND SEX AND PLAYING IN THE RAIN

  “When the legend becomes the fact, print the legend.”

  —The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

  Not long ago, around a table at a hotel restaurant during a writer’s conference, a fellow conferee began talking about how much she liked Larry McMurtry’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Lonesome Dove. She said her favorite scene was the one where the young cowboy falls off his horse into a nest of water moccasins while he’s crossing the Canadian River. She declared that the scene moved her so much because her husband, a rural-reared lad from Oklahoma, had an uncle who died in precisely the same way.

  “Oh?” I responded. I should have kept my mouth shut.

  “Yes,” she said. “He was swimming in the Arkansas River, and he swam into a nest of water moccasins and was bitten to death.” She sat back, warming to the telling. “He went into the water, then he started screaming. But no one could tell what was wrong.” Her eyes widened, her tone became lower, more sinister. “Then he climbed out onto the bank, and they could see the snakes.” She paused for dramatic effect, then nearly whispered, “They were hanging off of his whole body like living ropes.” She sat back and folded her arms, immensely satisfied with the horrified expressions on her fellow diners’ faces.

  I, though, only smiled. “I don’t think so,” I said.

  She fixed me with a glare. “He saw it happen,” she insisted. “My husband saw it, too. They were working cattle.” She looked around the table and explained sadly, “He was only a boy.”

  “It didn’t happen,” I said, laughing. “It couldn’t.”

  She was angry now: defensive. “Are you calling my husband a liar?”

  “No,” I said, wondering how big her husband was and if he had a temper. “I don’t doubt that he believes that it happened, even believes he saw it happen. But I can assure you, it didn’t happen.”

  “And just how would you know?”

  “Because,” I said, looking around for support among the urbanite crowd surrounding us; most were giving me annoyed looks. “For one thing,” I continued, undaunted, “water moccasins don’t bite and hang on. They strike. ‘Sting’ is the proper term. Technically, they’re vipers.” She stared at me. “And for another, they can’t strike under water.”

  “Well, it happened,” she sniffed indignantly. “My husband was there, and he said so.” She didn’t speak to me for the rest of the conference.

  The point, of course, is that the story is part of the fabric of American folklore. When I was about twelve, Ken Kirkendall, our Sunday School teacher from the First Baptist Church, bravely agreed to take five of us boys out to a nearby creek for our first overnight camp-out—sans peres. Typically, we had no sooner built our campfire and wolfed down lukewarm bowls of canned chili than we began sniggering over mildly pornographic jokes, scatological anecdotes, and tales of quasi-erotica, most of which we had learned from the older boys during Sunday night’s Training Union classes.

  Horrified by our puerile declamations, Mr. Kirkendall tried to divert us with ghost stories, but we had heard most of those already, so he shifted to a “true story” guaranteed to scare us. He told us the tale of a friend of his who had gone swimming in the Brazos River back when he was a boy and who had swum into a submerged “nest of water moccasins” and had been bitten to death. The details were more specific and more graphic than those of my writer acquaintance’s husband’s story, better designed to shock and terrify small boys; but the particulars were the same: No one could tell what was wrong with the victim, who was a good swimmer, until he began thrashing about in the water and screaming. Then he climbed out onto the bank, revealing a body alive with clinging, poisonous snakes; he was dead before anyone could help him, and so forth.

  I utterly believed the story at the time; I believe to this day that Ken Kirkendall believed it, as well.

  The next time I heard the story was only a few years later, at Glorieta, New Mexico, on another church-related outing: the Baptist Youth Camp held there every summer. This time, the taleteller was from Colorado, and the river was the North Platte, or a slough near the bank thereof, and the poisonous serpents weren’t water moccasins but rattlesnakes. The rest of the story was about the same, only it wasn’t a friend, but a hunting companion of a cousin who stepped into a “pit of snakes.” Death of the unfortunate soul was the end of the story, though, and I remember thinking how remarkable it was that two such incidents could occur in such similar ways. It never occurred to me that a fellow Baptist might not be utterly truthful.

  Doubt was born, even so, as I heard the story at least twice more before I left high school. Once, while visiting distant cousins in Bowling Green, Kentucky, it was the explanation for the cause of death of a great-uncle of mine who fell out of a fishing boat while trolling on the Green River. This time, the snakes were “water adders,” whatever they might be; I heard it also from another cousin from California who was visiting Texas and typically bragging about the superlative nature of the Sunshine State’s waterways in comparisons to Texas’s murky streams. In a challenge to establish which state had the “deadliest” river, his version of the story served as evidence of his home state’s unquestionable claim to the distinction. The details, though, were more or less the same. Water moccasins were again the poisonous serpents, death was the result of the misadventure, and it happened to someone he knew very well.

  The tale next came to my attention when I was in college as part of the folklore of Vietnam. I read or heard it related no fewer than five times as an incident that took place in a Southeast Asian jungle stream, always involving some exotic poisonous reptile or other, and always containing the same particulars. In doing some subsequent research as well as idle reading for a course in American military history, I ran across the same incident as a feature of several armed conflicts. Supposedly, the events took place in the swamps of the Carolinas (American Revolution), the everglades of Florida (Creek-Indian Wars), the flooded mountain streams surrounding Mexico City (Mexican War), the bayous of Louisiana (Civil War), the resacas of Cuba and the rainforest rills of the Philippines (Spanish-American War), the Nile River (World War I), and on no fewer than three islands of the South Pacific in World War II. During this last conflict, at least one incident took place in a salt-water lagoon; instead of snakes, the deadly submarine menace was an eel of some sort.

  Curiously, I’ve found no mention of such an event during th
e Korean Conflict; perhaps there are no poisonous reptiles in Korea. Thus far, it hasn’t arisen in the Gulf War, and tragically, the book isn’t yet complete on the War in Iraq, both conflicts occurring in regions where water if not amphibious reptiles are more scarce. It seems, though, that wherever Americans are tempted to venture into a flowing stream, they run the danger of emerging festooned with poisonous serpents. Almost always, the story is presented as a verifiable fact, and in every case there is a more or less unimpeachable witness to attest to the veracity of the account.

  ###

  Not long after I began teaching in a university, a colleague presented me with a short story written by a friend of his who resides in New England. The story had been published in a fairly well-known literary magazine, and it concerned some boys off on a summer swimming lark in some remote lake in Maine. One of the boys, anxious to claim the right to be the first in the water, throws off his clothes, seizes a rope someone had thoughtfully left dangling from a high tree branch, and swings enthusiastically out over the lake and into the water.

  “Don’t come in!” he screams to his companions as he founders and thrashes in the water. He makes his way toward the bank, and, as in all previous versions, comes out draped with snakes—in this case, something called “tree asps.” Frustrating as would be any search for the identity of any snake such as the “tree asp,” of which none are specified in biology texts as being peculiar to North America or anywhere else in the world, nothing about this version was more curious to me than a brief dedication at the opening of the story: “For Dave, who really died this way.”

  Well, not to be mean about it, “Dave” didn’t die that way. He might have died as the result of a swimming accident in a lake. He might even have been stung or struck by some semi-venomous creature indigenous to New England. But he didn’t die because of hundreds or even dozens of bites inflicted by submerged reptiles any more than did McMurtry’s hapless (and utterly fictional) cowboy.

  I am not and do not pretend to be a herpetologist or even an armchair expert on snakes. Indeed, I have a West Texans’ natural aversion to reptiles of any sort. And I’ll confess that it’s entirely possible that something called a “tree asp” can and did bite some boy in a lake in Maine, or wherever. But by this point, I had heard or read about the story in so many different versions that I was convinced that none of them ever happened. This was nothing more than a tall tale, something not far removed from stories of Paul Bunyan or Pecos Bill, accounts of mysterious ghost lights and UFOs, the sorts of things that have often been collected in a variety of volumes dedicated to cataloguing “urban legends,” even though all of the versions of this particular tale have distinctively rural settings.

  But when I informed my Yankee friend of my doubts as to the accuracy of the reported details of “Dave’s” demise and listed a few supporting facts from my reading on snaky biology as well as the story’s frequent appearance, I discovered that the subject was a sore one. He hotly claimed that certainly snakes could strike (or sting) under water, and he was offended that I doubted his friend’s veracity. He averred that I was merely jealous of a prestigiously published piece of fiction and upset that I hadn’t thought of it first. (Actually, I had “thought” of it first, or at least beforehand; it had been brought to my attention often enough, that I had come to regard it as far too hackneyed to work as a fictional element—McMurtry proved me wrong, of course.) But then, in his fulminating resentment of my response, my down-easter friend took matters a step further.

  “I know it happened, because I was there,” he declared. “I was one of the boys in the story. I saw it happen!” Then he snatched the story from my hand and stalked away. Later, he left academics and became an attorney, and I wondered what role I might have played in that decision.

  ###

  When McMurtry’s book came out, I thought that the fictionalized treatment of the tale in a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, combined with its graphic depiction in a television miniseries, would finally dampen the story’s veracity—as a tale. After all, McMurtry made no claim as to any historical foundation for the story; he presents it as a set piece of a larger fiction. But as my more recent experience at the writer’s conference demonstrated, the publication and broadcast of the story’s particulars seemed to have fueled a new blaze of enthusiasm for telling it; as before, each version is grounded in the virtually sworn testimony of an eye-witness account.

  I thought about trying to trace the story to its source, but a bit of library work quickly convinced me that this was a fool’s errand. Those published accounts involving warfare episodes left me at dead ends. None made it into any official reports I could locate. Other versions were rendered in either a fictional or reportorial setting, even though many of them relied on specific witnesses to support the truth of the revealed facts. None led me to an earlier version. It was almost as if the tale slithered full-grown and in full-scale, as it were, from the gnarly forehead of American culture. And each of its proponents was implicitly prepared to do battle to defend it as being both original and unquestionably true.

  The facts of the matter—if facts they are—are no easier to establish than the source of the story itself. After reading as extensively as I could stand about snakes and their habits, I consulted two zoologists who specifically disagreed on the point of whether venomous reptiles such as water moccasins could strike under water. The first, an assistant director of a major metropolitan zoo, claimed in a distinctively British accent that they could, but he was quick to point out that they never clustered or nested under water. “They hang about in trees,” he said, “near ponds or lakes or sluggish, nearly stagnant streams. They can swim, but they’re not good at it, and even a moderate current would be decidedly unpleasant for them.”

  My second expert, a professor of biology with no accent at all, said that if a snake or any semi-amphibious reptile opened its mouth wide enough to strike and inject venom under water, it would drown. “All poisonous snakes in North America are vipers. Pit vipers, for the most part,” he said. “Some swim, but they’re not true amphibians, and they don’t belong to the same class as amphibious reptiles such as alligators, turtles, and frogs. You can drown any of those, too, he noted, if you force their mouths open under water. For that matter, you can drown a fish.”

  I asked him specifically about water moccasins. He defined them properly: acinstrodon piscivorous, phylum chroradata, class reptilia, sub-phylum vertebrata, order squamata, family crotalidae. “They’re quite common throughout the South and Southwest, with varieties in Central and South America, and they’ve been observed as far north as Canada,” he said, adding, “They’re poisonous, but truly not that deadly. Not like a rattler or a coral snake.” He wasn’t prepared to go on record and say that it was impossible for someone to swim into a “nest” of water moccasins and be struck, but he was certain that the strikes and bites would have to be administered above the surface of the water.

  “Can they feed under water?” I asked.

  “No,” he said. “They really don’t go into the water much. Their young are born live, and they don’t cluster or nest except during hibernation.”

  I told him of a childhood experience I had. I was bass fishing out of a rowboat on a small, man-made lake when I noticed that my stringer, on which I had four or five catches, was moving. I pulled it up only to find a snake clinging to it, with almost half a fish in its wide jaws.

  “Was it a water moccasin?” he asked.

  “I really didn’t look that carefully,” I said. Actually, I was so terrified, I threw the whole thing as far away from me as I could.

  “It was probably a harmless water snake of some kind,” he said.

  “So water snakes can bite under water?”

  “Right.”

  “But water moccasins aren’t ‘water snakes’?”

  He wasn’t sure about that. Suddenly, he wasn’t sure about any of it. “We don’t know much about snakes,” he said. “That’s the saddest thing ab
out it.”

  The point, of course, is that biological facts don’t mitigate. Regardless of whether or not a water moccasin or any other type of snake could perform such an action under water begs the question of whether or not such actual incidents that have provided the foundation for this story over and over for years and years ever took place. The answer, alas, is that there’s simply no way to know.

  The only thing I’m sure of is that the tellers of the tales purely believe it. Again, psychology is outside my field, but it’s a fairly ordinary human trait to come to believe a story that one knows is false merely because years of repetition have made it a part of the fabric of actual experience. I suspect that if these taletellers were strapped down and subjected to a lie detector’s probes, they would be certified as truthful, even though they may have made the whole thing up or stolen it from someone and adapted it for personal use. In almost every case, the teller becomes defensive, even angry when he or she is challenged about it; often, the victim or at least the eyewitness to the horror is made into a relative or close friend, a protective shield that deflects penetrating questions about their own credibility.

  ###

  This is not so odd a phenomenon. Many folk tales are based on the same sort of self-delusion. I know a long-haul trucker who swears that he picked up a hitchhiker one night, took him through a town, let him out on the highway. He noted that the young man had a peculiar birthmark on his cheek and that he walked with a pronounced limp. Then, later, on down the road, when the trucker stopped for coffee, he mentioned the incident and was informed that the young man he had given a ride to had been run over and killed the night before. Of course, the victim had a peculiar birthmark on his cheek and walked with a limp. And now, of course, he’s a doomed soul, destined to spend eternity hitching a ride on a lonely stretch of rural highway.