I Hate Snakes

My  Mom sips her coffee and watches the sun burn the last of the dew off the grassy slope outside the dining room window.   A month has elapsed since she and our family debarked from the ocean liner in Mombasa, rode the train to Nairobi and drove overland in an open jeep to this lonely station in Kaimosi, Kenya.

Mom conducts sick call on the lawn each morning.  This is before Daddy built the brick clinic for her.

A man with blood spilling from a long gash in his calf limps slowly up the dirt path.  The woman with him flops down on the grass while the man pounds at the kitchen door shouting for the houseboy, Chege.  Chege politely speaks with the memsahib about the panga wound. 

Memsahib Eby. (my mom) rushes out to apply a tourniquet, then back in for antiseptic and sutures to do a layered closure on the wound, something she was not trained to do in nursing school.  It is a wide gaping wound, very common among Africans who work with pangas, long heavy-bladed knives.  The woman continues to lie lazily on the grass.

When they leave, Mom sees something at the spot where the woman had stretched out on the grass.  Walking closer, she draws in a breath when she sees a thick snake 4-5 ft long.  To this day, Mom believes the woman had it under her cloak and left it there as a warning or “gift” of some sort.  Africans can be very superstitious.

My Dad took this picture right after the woman left

I’ve always hated snakes and with good reason.  In East Africa, unless you have anti serum with you and few did; a session with a black mamba could mean certain death.  My Mom who is 95 now, says a mamba could easily reach up from the dirt road and strike into an open car window.

Far from home at boarding school in wild and hostile country, 400 kilometers from home, I had a continuous ache in my chest from homesickness.  No phone, no e-mail, only isolation and loneliness.  The only time I didn’t ache was when running in the grass barefoot, skinny legs scrambling, stealing the soccer ball from underneath the legs of the big boys, then running like a gazelle and pushing it into the goal. 

There were no inside toilets at the small boarding school in Tanganyika, East Africa.  Like early America, there were outhouses, with rough hewn walls surrounding a wooden seat over a deep hole filled with maggots.  I knew this because I peered down the hole with my flashlight on inky nights when I crept out of the dorm to use the facility.  I rarely used the potty under my bed, but that soon changed. 

The sun is warm on my back as I hoe my garden patch and as usual, I wait until the last minute to answer nature’s call. I pound down the path, bolt through the door, drop the latch, reaching the seat just in time.  As my eyes adjust to the slivers of light streaking though the cracks, I scream, paralyzed.  A snake is coiled in the corner between the door and me.  It looks like a puff adder, which will strike over and over again.  Puff adders often lay along a path, dozing until disturbed, then strike with amazing speed. 

My heartbeat thunders in my ears and I see the puff adder raise his head, flicking his tongue.  Like a jack-in-the-box, I jump, pulling up my pants midair, knock up the latch and I’m out the door as fast as an ostrich with a lion on its tail. I once coiled a long snake, dead of course, in the corner of the girls shower, hoping to scare the living daylights out of my classmates.

(2004) “There are no snakes in Lake Kivu,” Dr Lusi states unequivocally, “because of the methane gas.” Lake Kivu is a huge lake next to Goma, Democratic Republic of Congo.  I had just arrived with a crew of volunteers to replace the crew already there with Jim.  Jim and crews were building a new hospital to replace the hospital destroyed by the volcano…”right on top of the lava.”   

The lake is cold and deep so I didn’t have the usual fear of something biting my feet.  I swim out maybe a quarter mile and the waves are getting a little rough.  I see something long and green swimming in the waves.  I know at once…..”A METHANE-RESISTANT SNAKE.”

The adrenaline surges so powerfully that my arms and legs ache with it. My arms become skinny windmills and I believe I set a world swimming record with the long green snake snipping at my feet.  

My daughters pull me up on the pier, hands clasped over their mouths, in dismay I surmise.  They are merely stifling giggles as they fish the long crooked green stick out of the water.   You laugh, but that was one scary stick.

                                             So why am I sharing all this snake stuff?

Walking down the stairs Sunday morning to make coffee, I see something black and shiny writhing from underneath a pile of my underwear thrown on the second step to bring upstairs on one of my many daily trips up.  I have the customary adrenaline rush and stand perfectly still lest I scare whatever is there.  My eyes might be fooling me.  Sure enough, a coil is moving veddy, veddy slowly from under the unmentionables.  My stomach squirms and does some very professional somersaults.

Driven by uncontrollable panic, I leap past the step up to our bedroom to tell Jim about the horror right here in our very own home.  He just snorts and turns over.  It’s obvious he isn’t going to come save me. I tiptoe down silently and jump past the last few steps, with my heart hammering like pistons in race car, flip-flopping all over my chest.  I can imagine the snake throwing his long scaly body around my leg in a wild embrace, sinking in his teeth for a venom extravaganza.

I race to the garage and grab a heavy, long-handled shovel, flick the underwear off the snake, with the handle, throw the snake what I hope is a scalding look and start slicing and stabbing with the shovel.  The head is still on, but I do enough damage to kill him, plus several wide gashes in the bottom step.  I stab at him  several more times just to be sure he is dead. 

Disheveled and breathless, I lean on the handle.  I finally rouse Jim.   Can you believe he laughs and says it is just a worm?  Later emptying some coffee grounds, I find that big snake in the kitchen trash.  It gives me the shivers just thinking about it.  That was not what I meant by getting rid of the snake.