I’ve been afraid of snakes for a long time.
This is both rational and irrational — some snakes can kill you, but the not the ones around here — but it is in indisputable fact.
My wife knows it. My kids definitely know it, and they delight in showing me pictures of snakes or hissing at me while holding a stuffed animal snake.
This sort of light teasing I can absorb. Seeing snakes in a neutral setting like a zoo, which is really the only place I would see a dangerous one, is not preferred.
When our oldest daughter’s friend had a birthday party a year ago at “Snake Discovery: A Reptile Experience,” it was 100% obvious that my wife (who actually enjoys snakes) was going to bring her and that I was going to stay home, many miles from the snakes.
This phobia doesn’t stem from any specific or dangerous moment from my past. To my knowledge, in the first 47 years of my life, I encountered exactly three snakes in the wild:
Once, when I was about 12, a traveling baseball team I was on played in an out-of-town tournament a few hours from my hometown of Grand Forks, N.D. I don’t remember the exact destination, other than that there were baseball fields on-site and it felt like some sort of rural lake resort.
I do know that before one game, my warmup partner threw a ball over my head and it rolled into a patch of tall grass. When I went to retrieve it, a small snake slithered right past my hand. I don’t think I’ve jumped higher before or after that moment.
And about 10 years ago, when I was golfing somewhere in the South, our group saw a medium-sized snake slither into a water hazard under a bridge. We speculated wildly that it was poisonous, but research later revealed it was harmless.
In the moment, though, it was tremendous motivation to hit the ball accurately for once in my life.
A little less than a year ago, near Minnehaha Falls, our son and I spotted another small snake in the tall grass. He desperately wanted to see as many as possible after that, while I desperately wanted to avoid them.
But then we moved to Eagan in early June. I’ve chronicled in great detail why we moved and what I have learned since we moved.
What I did not know is that our mortgage documents also apparently contained an exposure therapy clause, whereby a person is “gradually exposed to the things, situations and activities you fear.” I should circle back with our realtors.
I’ve seen more wild snakes in the last few months within a mile of our new house than I had in my entire life up to that point, and that doesn’t include the three dead ones (one of which our son insisted on flipping over with a stick to inspect in greater detail).
I have seen two living snakes in the last week, four of them in the last three months, which I know because I have a very specific mental catalogue of each time it has happened.
The first one: We were on a family walk not long after moving into our new house. Just a block or two away from home, we saw a snake slide off the street and into someone’s bushes, not far away from where a neighbor was doing some yard work.
The neighbor smiled but did not seem particularly impressed or distressed. Our three kids reacted like they had just seen the most amazing thing, and our son must have told the next 10 people he met about the snake.
I was oddly chill about it (for me), having seen the snake clearly and weighing our kids’ enthusiasm against my pre-existing fear.
Huh, a snake in our neighborhood?
The second one: A couple months ago during another family walk at nearby Lebanon Hills Regional Park, there was another one. Not everyone saw it, but I did. This caused a significant amount of FOMO among our children, who do not want to miss out on anything.
The third one: I should have remembered their fear of missing out. My wife and I were walking our pug on a paved path not far from our house last Friday. Ollie, who is giant for a pug, was digging around in the brush nearby when a snake came slithering away from his general direction. Ollie jumped in the air. The snake stopped in the middle of the paved path, and I could see its little tongue. Then it quickly slid away and down a hole. I had a little adrenaline jolt, our dog was pissed, but otherwise it was just … starting to become business as usual?
This happened in the mid-afternoon, not long before I picked our son up from the last day of his first full week of preschool. He was tired, hot, crabby and hungry when I picked him up, and I thought it would cheer him up when I told him we saw a snake. Instead, he started sobbing. “Why did you tell me that?” he wailed. “I wanted to see it!”
The fourth one: I was out for a run in Lebanon Hills by myself a few days ago when I encountered another snake right in the middle of my path. This was the biggest of the four I had seen, somewhere between two and three feet long, but still thin and clearly a garter snake with the same greenish markings like the rest of them.
Remembering how upset our son had been just a few days before when I told him about Snake Three, I instinctively pulled out my phone and started chasing the snake to try to get a picture so he could see it, too. I was already running, so I thought I had an edge, but it scooted around a tree and down a hole before I could get a picture.
Only after missing the shot did I stop to think: What are you doing? Are you chasing a snake? What. Are. You. Doing?
I haven’t told our son about that one yet, but I have started to piece together some pretty interesting snake theories while ruminating about the four encounters.
Eagan is full of hills, and I always seem to see snakes on a some sort of downward or upward plane. Many years later there are still snakes on a plane (bad TV dub for added amusement).
I’m not an aging conspiracy theorist/quarterback, but I did find myself doing my own research on garter snakes.
Intellectually, I have have always known that pretty much any snake I might see in the wild would be harmless. Garter snakes fit that description, though my strangely increasing comfort level was not helped by this Wikipedia passage:
Garter snakes were long thought to be non-venomous, but discoveries in the early 2000s revealed that they produce a neurotoxic venom. Despite this, garter snakes cannot seriously injure or kill humans with the small amounts of comparatively mild venom they produce and they also lack an effective means of delivering it.
Oh? So just a little bit of poison, no big deal.
In general, though, I have to say that the exposure therapy I absolutely did not sign up for is … really working.
There’s probably a larger lesson to be learned about fearing things we don’t really understand, but honestly I’m just glad that I’ve become snake-neutral and we don’t have to move again.
And the next time one of our kids gets invited to a reptile-themed birthday party with giant snakes?
My wife is still the one who is going.