An Unlikely Guardian
This story has had several iterations as both a poem and an essay. This version is the most elaborate but has not been previously published.
The Guardian
Ray Zimmerman
1
The guardian moves in circles. She does not coil, does not prepare to strike. With no identifiable objective, she circles beside the road. Was she injured by a passing car? Is she warming up, absorbing heat from the pavement? Is she preparing to give birth? What business is she about on this mountaintop in northeast Alabama?
I stop the car but don’t get out. I don’t want to meet the Guardian. I am enough of a woodsman to have a healthy respect for the power of a mature timber rattlesnake. I am not motivated to uncurl the scaly body and take an accurate measurement of the serpent’s length. The snake inspires fear in the emotions of those who encounter her.
2
The entry for serpents in An Illustrated Dictionary of Traditional Symbols fills more space than any other entry. Because of their round phallic shape, they are considered male symbols. Because of their sinuous movement, they are female symbols as well. They are associated with both sexuality and primal forces. Their rippling wavelike motion gives them an association with water.
Snakes are potent symbols of the life force. A serpent coils around the caduceus, the staff associated with physicians. The stylized stripes of barber poles have the same origin. When Gilgamesh of Babylonian lore sought an herb to revive his deceased friend Enkidu, a serpent emerged from a spring, consumed the herb, and shed its skin, a symbol of immortality.
3
The snake has a well-muscled body. Faster than a rumor, she can uncoil, strike, and sink her fangs. The fangs sink up to an inch deep in unprotected tissue. The hollow fangs of vipers have been compared to hypodermic needles, but they do not deliver life-saving medicines.
Fangs are hollow teeth attached to venom sacks behind the eyes. The venom is modified saliva, a cocktail mix of systemic poisons and enzymes that both kills and digests a hapless mouse or chipmunk. The snake’s jaws unhinge and the skin stretches to engulf the victim, whole. By that time, the venom has done its work and the victim is already partly digested.
I once worked at a nature center in the Kentucky woods. A visitor looking at the display of native snakes rolled up his pants leg to reveal a dent in his calf about the size of a large soup spoon. “Rattlesnake?” I asked. He nodded his head. Later I saw him speaking with his companion. “He knew what it was,” he told her. The bite was a monument to his encounter with fangs.
4
I notice the guardian’s color, light gray with dark bands, and a black tail. She blends in perfectly with the limestone rocks and hunts by ambush. What could serve as a more powerful symbol of the primal forces of nature, fragmented but still present in the small patches of the wild country remaining on Lookout Mountain, a 90 mile long ridge that stretches from Chattanooga, Tennessee to Gadsden, Alabama?
5
Many animals rely on their eyes and ears when hunting. A snake relies on smell. The flicking tongue catches molecules in the ambient air and deposits them on the roof of the mouth, in a special structure called the Jacobson’s organ. The Jacobson’s organ is a chemoreceptor much like the human nose and taste buds. It allows the snake to seek and find prey from a chemical trace in the air.
Rattlesnakes and their kin also rely on heat-sensing pits, indentations between the eyes and nostrils that detect a warm-blooded animal’s presence by sensing its body heat. This sense is so accurate that a striking rattlesnake can hit a mouse in total darkness. These pits give rattlesnakes, copperheads, and their new world relatives the name “pit vipers.”
Snakes are so skilled at using these senses to find food that they are perfect eating machines. Each is a digestive tract covered with skin. Their main activities are movement, feeding, and reproduction. Since they lack eyelids, they sleep with their eyes open.
6
Leathery shells cover the eggs of most snakes. They lay their eggs in places where sun and soil will keep them warm until time to hatch. This is not so for the Guardian. She has a wide body, bulging like the biceps of a bodybuilder. Inside her body, she carries membranous eggs without shells. They hatch when expelled. These snakes are born alive.
The young snakes will have a rattle, just like mom, but only after they have shed their skin. They get the first button of their new rattle when they first shed. Each time they shed, they add another button. They will shake their rattles as a warning. The hiker should beware their presence when stopping to admire a pink lady’s slipper orchid or a Catesby’s trillium with delicate, lavender, recurved petals. They may be there just off the trail, in the brush, saying, “Don’t tread on me.”
When a climber rappels down a rock face or climbs back up reaching for a handhold, the guardians may be lurking. They protect the wilderness and keep it wild. So long as they are present, not too many tourists wear away the paths, tear limbs from trees, or camp on top of the wild orchids.
7
The guardian lies beside the road. She is four feet long and covered with scaly skin. Each scale possesses a ridge, a line down its center. The ridge is a keel in the language of herpetologists.
I photograph the guardian from inside my car. With my door closed and the window down, five feet of pavement and a steel door separate me from coiled muscles, striking body, and venom-laden fangs.
I turn off the engine to stop the shake of the car and camera. This prevents blurred photographs. I have not turned on the emergency flashers to warn oncoming cars. Few cars travel on this Alabama highway, especially on weekdays.
8
References to serpents abound in Judeo/Christian literature. One of the most unusual appears in the Old Testament book of Numbers. As Moses led uneasy followers through the wilderness, they became disenchanted and began to grumble. Some of these rebellious followers asked him if he had led them out of the land of Egypt to die.
The Lord heard their complaints and sent serpents among them. Many were bitten and died. Then Moses made a bronze serpent and lifted it on a pole. Those who looked upon the bronze serpent were healed and lived.
Another passage from the New Testament book of Mark says, “They shall take up serpents and not be harmed.” This passage inspired the snake-handling branch of the Holiness church. This religion is indigenous to southeast Tennessee, and present in this portion of Alabama.
9
The guardian stops moving, perhaps because the engine’s vibrations have stopped. Snakes have very poor hearing. She is unaware of the clicking of my camera’s shutter. She could have felt the vibrations of the car’s engine.
Time is outside my awareness. Present, past, and future merge in the flow of the moment. I am alone, lost in the flow. I photograph the guardian . . . “Smile!”
You can read my interview with a rattlesnake expert in the Hellbender Press. https://hellbenderpress.org/news/rattled