Zero at the Bone

Adam was well named, for we thought he was a rascal and a sinner. My first memory of him was the sight of Adam clambering back over the fence after he had been caught trespassing in the garden. He was as wild as the little rabbit kitten he had been raising, which also once escaped into our garden, perhaps to cavort with Benji, my own, rather larger rabbit. I took one look at Adam’s rabbit, which was an identical colour to my own, and rushed inside, shouting, “Mummy, Benji’s shrunk!”, until Benji himself lolloped out of the undergrowth and stood beside Adam’s little runaway.
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As Adam grew older, his misdemeanours grew proportionally in magnitude. I was, by comparison, very naive, and I was very surprised and bemused some years later when he tried to sell me a foil sausage full of weed. I asked him how much he wanted for it, and he said, “twenty bucks”. Twenty dollars was, at that time, more money than I had ever dreamed of. Not that I would have dared to smoke his grass anyway - or even known that smoking was what you do with it.

Adam and I did, however, have one thing in common. We both liked, in that era before wild things became so rare that it became so criminal to disturb them, to turn over stones. We’d been watching far too much of Harry Butler. Across the road from our houses in suburban Canberra, there was an area of “waste-land”, a veritable “brown-field” site covered with tussocky grass, and stones - oh, so many stones. Some of the stones were small, and I could manage these myself, but others were massive, and the two of us would labour at them, levering them with sticks of ancient, ringbarked gumtrees. Mostly, the things we found underneath them were cockroaches, or the larvae of Christmas beetles, which we thought were the real witchetty grubs. Sometimes - quite often, in fact - there were lizards: slippery brown and gold skinks which surrendered their tails if you grabbed them in the wrong place (we never grabbed them in the wrong place), and bluetongues which liked to be fed on snails and bananas. Once - I would have been about ten years old at the time - as Adam squatted and strained to roll over a stone, I felt a strange electricity running through my skeleton, and when the stone lay overturned, there was a snake.

It was, admittedly, a very little snake, but I wasn’t going to risk anything by touching it. Everything in my being was tingling. I knew that pythons were non-venomous, but this wasn’t a python, and just about every other Australian snake I knew was venomous to some degree. But Adam plunged straight at it, and grabbed it expertly behind the jaw. To this day, I don’t know how I let him persuade me to take it home and keep it for a “pet”. Perhaps it was because I knew that the “waste land” was due to be annexed to the local horticultural centre, and turned into lawn: no place for snakes. But whatever the reason, the two of us marched off to my place: Adam ahead of me, the snake with its centimetre width of mouth wide open, its whiplash body coiled around his fingers; me trailing behind, trying to think of more excuses for not taking the snake home. Not that I was a coward. Secretly, half of me did want to after all, because I wanted to identify it.

Believe it or not, my parents were used to this sort of thing, so when we got to my place, my father dug out an old fish-tank which we could use as a terrarium, and the snake was soon installed inside it. For a while it seemed sleepy, and sat basking under the fish-tank light, but gradually it began to wake up.

We first knew for sure that we were in for trouble when my father walked past the tank later the day, and the snake reared up like a cobra and struck at the side of the tank. A thin trickle of venom ran down the glass, and that electrical sensation was there in my bones again, followed by a strange sort of deadness which I now know was a sense of looming doom. At last we got out the identification guides. Eventually, we found it: a thin little straw coloured snake with a head the colour of chocolate. Adam had brought a baby brown snake into our house. Only a baby, perhaps, but still one of the deadliest snakes in the world, and probably with less control than an adult of the species over how much venom it might inject when angered. We knew then that we would have to release it as soon as possible, so we went away to discuss where, and how.

When we returned, the snake was gone, and the cover-glass slipped to one side at the top of the tank. It took us hours to search under every chair and table, behind the curtains, under the fridge. Eventually we found it, curled on top of a plastic bag in my mother’s sewing room. Of course, Adam had gone home by this stage, and it was left to my father to put on some thick leather gloves and pick up the snake, holding it behind the jaw, just like Eric Worrell, the famous herpetologist, whom I worshipped.

The next thing a normal family would do would be to get the snake out of the house as soon as possible, but we weren’t a normal family. The next thing we did was to get the camera. My father was still holding the snake, so he couldn’t take the photograph. My mother had suddenly shown considerable enthusiasm for cleaning behind the fridge. So it was me with the camera, doing one of my very first macro shots, as the snake’s tongue flickered blackly against its tiny, scaly lips. My fingers trembled, but I mastered myself, held the camera steady, and pressed the shutter. While I did it, that electrical pulse was running down my skeleton, from the orbits of my skull to my metatarsals, like when a strange lightning seizure would overtake my old black and white TV, zeroing down the screen, culminating in sudden blackness.

And then, I seem to remember, without another word, my father still carrying the snake, we all walked back out to the stone, and after I rolled it back into place, the lithe little fellow wove his long, dry, stubble-coloured body back to where his home was - and there was me realising for the first time that we had all just done something very, very stupid.

*

There are two species of venomous snake in New England, both now endangered: the timber rattlesnake and the copperhead. Both are pit vipers, so named because they have pit organs - heat-sensitive cavities between the nose and eye which enable them to detect warm-blooded prey. Because of this, they know you long before they see you. Copperheads have hourglass-shaped patterns of lighter and darker scales running the lengths of their bodies - alternating zones of burnished and tarnished copper. Timber rattlesnakes are more variable in colour - some almost black, others mottled dark brown and a buff yellow the colour of the dry stalks of wheat or barley. Copperheads like lowland areas, and tend to frequent the edges of meadows. They love habitats which are a mosaic of marshland, grassland and streams. Timber rattlesnakes like more mountainous areas, but they too come down to frequent wetlands and fields.

When Emily Dickinson wrote in 1865:

A narrow Fellow in the Grass
Occasionally rides -

she could therefore have been writing about either species.

Her poem is in the form of a riddle - one which instantly identifies the snake as a member of the fellowship of living things - using the colloquial language of a social introduction, but also with a broken syntax which suggests the shock, or thrill, of the encounter:

You may have met him? Did you not
His notice instant is -

It is not the human observer who owns the power of “notice”, it is the snake, who, when seen, becomes the sole object of attention as the instinct of self-preservation kicks in. The snake is going about his own business, gliding through the grass, and it is the movement of the grass itself under the influence of his body which is the first thing Dickinson notices:

The Grass divides as with a Comb,
A spotted Shaft is seen,
And then it closes at your Feet
And opens further on -

She oscillates between the passive voice (“is seen”) and the active (“it closes at your feet”), because this moment is, of course, both an archetypal one and one of very specific, personal danger, but the snake is already “further on”, as we know from the echo of his passing in the vibration of the grass stems. By the time the “spotted Shaft” has registered on the human consciousness as a snake, the danger has passed.

Then comes the cascade of memory - as it does for me whenever I have a serendipitous encounter with a snake: the sudden rushing catalogue of all the other encounters we have been through and survived. In my case, these include two dugites I have seen departing from the edges of paths in the past week, their bodies about as thick as my wrist, a tiger snake which lay coiled in front of me and began to raise its neck and swell its hood before I beat a hasty retreat some time last year, another dugite which once crossed a path between both my feet and my dog’s in mid-stride whilst I was walking to the beach, talking on my mobile phone to a friend I was dating at the exact instant when she broke up with me - and it never paid me or my dog any heed - and digging back much further into my memory, harmless grass snakes which weaved their bodies in and out of the crevices in a drystone wall beside a stream in an English village, and, when I was a child living in eastern Australia, a red-bellied black snake which passed straight by my mother, entered a pond and swam away across it.

He likes a Boggy Acre -
A Floor too cool for Corn -
But when a Boy and Barefoot
I more than once at Noon

Have passed I thought a Whip Lash
Unbraiding in the Sun
When stooping to secure it
It wrinkled And was gone -

There it is again - the archetypal generalisation which is Snake, and the sudden irruption of the individual reptile, with a confession not dissimilar from my own. In her childhood innocence, in a moment when gender was a choice and not an imposition, barefoot and vulnerable, she once stooped to “secure” a snake, but it chose to avoid her. It happens at “Noon” - a favourite moment for Dickinson, and one which anticipates the coming “Zero”. In ‘A Clock Stopped’, a poem which specifically addresses the moment when death stops the clockwork which is a human life, she describes the moment of Noon as “degreeless”. Here it is a moment when the barefoot “Boy” who was Emily Dickinson could easily have met with death. “It wrinkled” when she reached for it, so “And” deserves a capital, because what happens next may spell life or death for her.

Yet the focus of these stanzas is not so much on the snake’s power to deal death, but on his habits and preferences, and on his beauty. He “likes a Boggy Acre”, which is true: wetlands are havens for frogs and rodents, both of which snakes love to eat. He doesn’t just frequent it; he “likes” it, as he likes the feel of “A Floor too cool for Corn” on his belly, which he has previously warmed up in the morning sun. He is a “Whip Lash / Unbraiding in the Sun”, a thing of beauty which a child might impulsively stoop to secure. But some time later, she learnt, as we all should, to give the snake respect, as a member of “Nature’s People” who must not be underestimated:

Several of Nature’s People
I know, and they know me
I feel for them a transport
Of Cordiality

But never met this Fellow
Attended or alone
Without a tighter Breathing
And Zero at the Bone.

Zero at the bone. That is what I felt that day, when Adam stooped to pick up the baby brown snake, again when its venom ran down the glass of the terrarium, and once more as I gathered my nerves to focus the camera, adjust the f-stop and press the shutter. Zero is the moment when we realise, in the words of the Gregorian chant, “Media vita in morte sumus” - “In the midst of life we are in death”. It is a moment when the evidence of our senses tells us that we are woven into the natural order of things, subject to instincts, susceptible to venoms, and capable of being entranced by beauty simultaneously with the moment of our terror. It ought to be the moment when we acknowledge that Nature has the power, and not us, and the more we meddle, the less we really know. We may profess knowledge, but there comes a moment when all of us step out barefoot into an unknown, degreeless Noon.

*

Doubtless, there were reasons why Adam seemed to me to be a rascal and a sinner. His mother was a Polish immigrant, effectively a refugee. I was already taller than her at the time of the encounter with the brown snake. Adam’s father was nowhere to be seen. His brother, who made vast surrealist paintings in the style of Hieronymus Bosch, was in trouble with the police for manufacturing amphetamines. I was too young to understand that it would take far worse things than a hibernating venomous snake, and a feeling of Zero at the bone, to stop him taking a risk. He had secured the sleeping snake with expert precision. And now that I think about it, as Adam was carrying the snake out of its element toward our house - a terrible thing to do to a creature so wild, but not so terrible as to kill a snake, which is what too many people do - and as I kept him company down the path through the head high, wheat-coloured grass, there was nothing deliberately malicious about his action. It was misguided, but probably innocent. And I remember how he kept raising the snake up in his hands and looking in its eye as its tongue began to flicker. I doubt very much whether the snake was sharing his emotion, but eye to eye with the reptile, Adam’s face was that of a young man transported, whether by the risk and danger itself, or by something deeper.

I suspect he had experienced his own share of human venom. Beside it, this tête-à-tête with a brown snake was something like - Cordiality.