In summer, there’s nothing that rattles my cage more than snake ignorance. As a Georgia refugee, I feel if anyone can subscribe to an irrational hatred of serpents it’s me — and I don’t mean for religious reasons, I mean for fishing reasons and swimming reasons. I never went to Holiness churches where people fooled with serpents, and, except for once, was never subjected to speaking in tongues. I have to say that experience was more of an endurance test than any face-to-face encounter with one of our local reptiles.

I do have snake stories. Everybody does, though mine don’t usually end with my having chopped the thing into 5-inch lengths or hanging a bullet riddled skin on a garage wall after dispatching it with buckshot. My first snake encounter was when I spotted a corn snake in a barn, yelling to my mother with a mild children’s speech impediment, STEAK, STEAK! My mother responded by saying to her corpulent daughter, apt to holler for food with, “Yes, honey, we’re going to have some steak for supper.” With two older brothers, I was used to not being heard, let alone understood, so I frequently found solace in the loblolly pine woods beyond our neighborhood. In those dark woods, I occasionally encouraged snakes to kindly leave the vicinity of where ever forts or lean-tos were being erected by me and my childhood pals. This is not to say I didn’t frequently encounter other children, teenagers, and their ignorant parents killing any snake, any time, poisonous or not poisonous, just for being a snake.

My favorite snake story goes thus: I am in the wilds of north Georgia’s Chattahoochee National Forest where I’m a scientist’s lackey collecting salamanders for a survey in the Kelly Ridge area of Towns County. My job is to slink around the woods among the boulder fields and fecund logs gathering a few of these amphibious creatures. When I lean down to a collect a picture-perfect specimen of a salamander sitting on a moss-covered boulder, I cast my eye not three inches from where my hand was just placed to look eye to eye with a medium-size timber rattler.

Coiled but not rattling, he seemed to be studying the rosewood serpent pendant around my neck which my husband bought me for a dollar in Costa Rica. Recognizing I was snake-people, the timber rattler bore a hard expression of “leave, you just took my dinner, so leave me in peace.”

When I know I’m going to be in snake habitat, I wear my snake-charm, and so far this superstition — along with my awe and respect for the good snakes — has spared me of their ire.

Saving snakes serves a greater good

Snakes in roads cause me distress. Just yesterday on Bennett Road (one of the most picturesque roads in Macon County) my husband spotted a three-and-a-half-foot long snake on the warm pavement and pulled into a drive so that I could return it to the woods. It nearly got killed by an ostentatious white SUV before I could aid its delivery across the blacktop. It was a beautifully vivid garter snake who I hope survives a partially injured tail tip.

I don’t want to cuddle with said specimens, mind you, I merely want to see them exist abetted not by our St. Patrick-style hangover of unchecked conquest. This particular snake is probably well fed with frogs and bugs from where Iotla Creek spills into the Little Tennessee, with a predilection for palmetto bugs brought up from the warmer climes in the duffle bags of numerous visitants.

I find snakes ever more graceful yet helpless at the same time. I tend to imagine them as lovely gliding people with no arms and legs, trying to get from one point to the next and frustrated at how quickly their habitat turns into our next highway project. Every time I skirt down Siler Road, to the Macon County library I think of the many King snakes I saw killed in the road last summer as the library enjoyed its new environs at the end of the rural two-lane with its big paved parking lot and first summer of unprecedented traffic. The once-upon-a-time farm that was there has quickly become anywhere-America with an oncoming Sonic and Fats restaurants flanking its westerly entrance, scheduled by the DOT to eventually cross the Little Tennessee river where the fast food patrons can contemplate nature as they chink their ribs with saturated fats.

Incidentally, of the 7,000 to 8,000 snakebites that occur annually in the U.S., only five or six actually end up killing anyone. So how ‘bout those fastfood stats on childhood obesity? Taking a shovel to a well-lit fast food menu instead of a snake would be of more service to the greater good.

I know snakes can kill, and I’m very sorry they occasionally bite and kill domestic animals and rarely, humans. But I despise anyone who wantonly kills a non-poisonous snake merely because they haven’t cultivated an appreciation for them, whether they do it with a shovel or with their own DOT-sanctioned development plan. Timber rattler numbers aren’t rising and they are currently listed as a species of special concern in North Carolina, heading sharply toward endangered status.

I’ll enjoy declining roadkill as a pleasant side-effect of our economic recession, and I hope you’ll shame your neighbors as I did when I caught a young woman backing up to hit a banded water snake on the paved road near my home. I rolled down the window to ask if she even knew what kind of snake she was rolling back to kill, but she couldn’t get off her cell phone long enough to respond except to appear quizzically slack-jawed that anyone would care.

Carry on, snake-people.

(Angela Martin is a musician and writer living in Macon County. She can be reached elmomartin@verizon.net.)