Coiled by Anna Maria Spagna
When a snake is coiled, she is ready to strike, though sometimes the coil is a defensive bluff, pure tactic, and she’s protecting herself, her soft vulnerable underbelly, from predators or threats, real and perceived, and sometimes she is simply trying to stay warm.
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When my wife and I bought our property in a remote mountain valley twenty-five years ago, long before I could legally call L my “wife,” people warned us the place was snaky. They meant it literally—lots of rattlesnakes—and claimed there was a den, or more than one, not far upvalley. This made sense. Our property sits south-facing, sun-hot for snake warmth, and not far from the river; we’d see them often crossing the dirt road heading for a drink, presumably, on the hottest days of the year. There was plenty of cover, too, especially back then, and even now: downed logs and sheets of old metal roofing, unused vehicles, flood debris, general rural detritus, not much different from any of our neighbors’ properties. L and I claimed to be unconcerned, maybe even delighted, by the snake news. We’d seen snakes aplenty at our jobs, maintaining hiking trails and a historic apple orchard—slow moving rattlers, small and non-aggressive—and now we saw them regularly on our land. Four or five a year. Coiled in the compost, coiled under wild currants in the shade, coiled most often near the frost-free hydrant, which drips.
When I say we’d see four or five rattlesnakes a year, I mean the live ones. We’d see many more dead snakes on the road. Some were probably hit by accident, but many neighbors and visitors to the valley swerved on purpose to smush them, and few things piss me off more. She’s just a snake, for goddsake, just a thirsty fucking snake. The flattened carcasses sicken me. Once a buddy of mine from Texas salvaged a corpse before it was run over multiple times. He brought it to our house, skinned and boned it, and cooked snake tacos—not the first time I’d eaten rattlesnake meat, I ate it from the barbecue once as a kid in the Mojave, and yes, yes, both times it tasted like chicken—and he salted the trademark diamond-backed skin, stretched it, and pinned it to plywood on the porch for a keepsake. Maybe a hat band. Maybe a belt. But Daisy, the cat, found the skin overnight and had a salty snack, and so went the story of one salvaged snake. Just one.
Of course, our neighbors kill snakes other ways, any way, kill them willy nilly: shoot them with twenty twos, clobber them with shovels. Even our one-time land partner, who also grew up in the desert, kin to rattlers in a way, had no qualms about smashing their small skulls with heavy rocks. In our valley, as in so many places, killing rattlesnakes is just-what-you-do. Still, when I worked maintaining hiking trails, a job where you have a higher-than-average risk of a snake bite, we took the opposite tack. Though we knew where snakes lived–under which rocks, near which creeks, Boulder Creek, in particular—we let them be. Always. We saw them year after year, watched them coil and fatten and add rattles. Horse packers and hikers begged us to tell them where the snakes lived, claiming they needed to know for protection, but protection meant murder, and so, well, to hell with it. We never told. The wilderness belongs to the snakes after all, not to us.
At home, L and I held our tenuous truce. Each of our cats, Daisy and Joon, had close calls: Joon had an afternoon-long stand-off with a rattler in the driveway from atop a stump, Daisy had a vicious scuffle with a buzzing baby snake (young oness are more dangerous, according to lore, because they can’t control their own venom) in a bramble thicket and leaped out backwards unhurt. Once I reached for my helmet on the ground beside my motorbike only to find a snake coiled and warming herself under the muffler. I stepped back and threw some sand to scare her away, the same way we did when we watched a rattlesnake climb the handle of a hand-push mower in the woodshed, heading for a robin’s three blue eggs in a nest on a cross-beam. Part of me believed because we defended rattlesnakes, because we gave them a wide berth, they would not bite us.
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We’ve lived as lesbians, openly, in the wild woods for decades with the same kind of stubborn ignorance. If we treat our neighbors—and I use this word broadly—with respect and kindness, we’ve believed, they will reciprocate. So far, it’s proven true, though the tension feels tenser these days, and you can only read of shootings and bombings at gay nightclubs so many times before you start to wonder. A friend gave us a vibrant rainbow windsock, and when I went to hang it where cars could see it passing on the road, L moved it to the other side of the woodshed, where you’d only see it if you’d been invited to our house. Just to be on the safe side, she said.
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These snakes have been part of my life for a very long time, half my hours on this earth, and I am still ignorant about them. Because I often resist fact-filled ways of knowing, I didn’t know until I finally looked it up whether our local snakes are Western rattlesnakes or timber rattlesnakes—people here use both terms—and when I learned they may, in fact, be Northern Pacific rattlesnakes, the parsing itself bored me, made me impatient, before a few clicks later I discovered they’re all the same anyway: Crotalus Oroganus. My close-enough truth, my subjective anecdotal knowing was correct, for once.
Slow moving, check. Non-aggressive, right.
Correct, maybe, but not complete. While we used to think snakes grow one rattle a year, turns out it’s really 2-3 a year. The snakes we thought were old, like the ones on Boulder Creek, probably weren’t. The internet purports that they have a range of two to three acres, which again hews to our experience, but some researchers claim they move as little as ten feet a day, when I know they can move ten feet in seconds when I startle them.
As for my certainty that they’re crossing the road to get a drink? Total bullshit. They do not drink running water but collect the droplets of rain from their own scales. Then why do they cross the road? No one knows. Maybe to find mates. One researcher takes them and puts them near roads to see what happens. Even she doesn’t know the answer.
But what about the most pressing question: how dangerous are the snakes?
One day, a couple of years ago, our friend, Hannah, came to the house breathless to say her elderly cat, Lucy, had been bit. Lucy’s a very small cat, a tough one, survivor of 14 years, sharing space in this remote mountain valley with bear and owls and bobcat and cougar. Never a scuffle, never a scratch. Now her paw swelled like a baseball bat. We live several hours, by boat, from a vet. Things didn’t look good for Lucy, but we raced her to the boat dock anyway, and found, by happenstance and crazy luck, a vet had just arrived on the ferry for his annual pet rounds. The vet looked Lucy over and determined she had likely been bit by a rattlesnake—two puncture wounds, fang-distance apart—but no venom had been released. That’s the way with most snake bites, he said. If the snake had sent venom, Lucy would be dead. Instead, she had a bad wound. We drove around looking for someone with a prescription for Prednisone. Hannah soaked her paw in Epson salts, and all was well.
Here’s what we learned from the vet: if rattlesnakes shoot venom, it’s bad, yes, but they usually don’t. Most bites are harmless. And the people who get poisoned most often? Young men, bit on their forearms or hands, which suggests they were harassing the snakes to start with.
I do not harass snakes, ever. I see them most often coiled mid-trail when I’m running, looking very much like cinnamon rolls. I see them and shiver, stop to catch my breath, to still my heart. Not just from fear. Rattlesnakes hibernate together, coiled for warmth: the more the merrier. You can see photos online if you are brave: up to ninety at a time—ninety!—small ones with their mother, different species coiled together, tangled like ropes. When I open these photos, I feel the same sick rush from my navel to my throat as I do standing too close to the edge of a canyon. I can watch a video of one snake or two, but put them in a group, and my skin crawls. I can’t even let myself imagine the dens where they writhe over one another, for warmth, dozens of baby rattlesnakes, or grown ones.
Research shows fear of snakes and spiders to be an inherited instinct, an innate tendency, maybe even an evolutionary advantage. L will leap from any arachnid and sometimes scream, and I ridicule her for this, shamelessly, though I shouldn’t. About a third of humans have an intense fear of snakes. I’m not in this third, not for spiders not for snakes, but I would be lying if I said snakes don’t give me the willies.
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L and I met in the early nineties, the era of don’t-ask-don’t-tell, when AIDS patients were scorned, when passing or pretending to be straight felt like protection, like necessity, like just-what-you-do. We were outed for the first time before we’d admitted our feelings to ourselves. A woman who worked on the ferry we rode regularly wrote a card presuming we were “like her” and invited us to stay with her if we ever needed a place. We always needed a place to stay, so even though I rejected her premonition outright and cruelly—sorry, not like you—I slept one night in the trailer she shared with her girlfriend, and I can recall with considerable clarity the moldy smell of the trailer, my own tight-chested sleeplessness, a feeling like disgust or revulsion, a deep shameful terror, and my friend’s brave fragility, too.
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Listen, the snake’s not a metaphor, it’s only a snake. She’s neither endangered nor opportunist. She lives in the shade of brush, in dust and smoke. The reason I don’t kill snakes is the same reason I don’t own a gun: I’m afraid as soon as I give in to fear, as soon as the desire to protect myself takes over, I’ll lose what makes me tick. Fear, after all, comes with the territory: this snaky piece of land, these tenuous days.
“If my grandfather spotted a rattlesnake while driving,” Joan Didion wrote, “he would stop his car and go into the brush after it. To do less, he advised me more than once, was to endanger whoever later entered the brush, and so violate what he called ‘the code of the West.”
This code of the West business, such weak tea, neighborliness as a smokescreen for violence. It occurs to me that all these years while I have been congratulating myself for tolerating the rattlesnakes, I’ve been honing another code of rural places: live and let live, a code of tolerance that reeks of revulsion barely contained.
Last fall, I attended a queer storytelling event in a small-town coffee shop in upstate New York where, for three years, I’d been teaching at a small college, living 3,000 miles from home with only our new cat, Maybelle, for company. Over rainbow-frosted cookies in an over-packed room, a man in his sixties recounted the opposition to his and his partner’s adoption of children in the nineties, as though the nineties were ancient history. A machinist described meeting her wife, a massage therapist, and courting her clandestinely for years. A young teen stood to announce their pansexuality. I did not stand to speak; I didn’t think I had any stories worth telling. L and I had moved to the woods, as far from civilization as you can get in the lower 48, because, we said, we loved the wilderness, we craved it. We built our own home, survived long winters, forest fires and floods, the loss of friends and neighbors. We hiked and skied and camped miles in the backcountry alone and together. People often praised our courage, but the truth is we were also scared. We moved to the woods, in part, to hide.
Living alone in New York mid-pandemic, I resorted to television for comfort. One night, I clicked on 30 Rock, a show L and I adored back in the day. In the first episode, Jack Donaghy sets Liz Lemon up with a lesbian, and she is exasperated because she is not a lesbian. That’s it. That’s the plot. What was so funny about the insinuation? Why was (is?) lesbianism something to be accused of? I could not set aside my annoyance, so I switched to Saturday Night Live and found the famous episode Betty White hosted in 2010. And again. There were queer innuendoes in almost every sketch, none featuring queer performers, and none particularly funny. In one sketch, set in the early 1900s, Betty White, as a grandmother, calls Amy Poehler, in grubby fishing gear, a lesbian, over and over. Lesbian! she yells. Maybe the skit was meant to skewer homophobia of a bygone era, but it felt more like an excuse to watch a white-haired lady yell “lesbian” like a toddler repeating a swear word loudly. What I’m trying to say, what became clear to me only on the couch in New York, though maybe it should’ve been obvious to me thirty years earlier, is this: If L and I were, on occasion, shy or uncertain or scared, we had good reason.
In New York, I proposed a course in Queer Ecologies—a cutting-edge interdisciplinary course in a department hell-bent on data—and set about teaching two full sections, even though when I did, I felt off-kilter, unsure, exposed. It was, after all, how I’d always felt about my sexual identity. Not gay enough to dance at the AIDS fundraiser in the city, too gay for the square dance in the orchard (though we danced at both.) My syllabus was too queer for my department, my classroom manner was too straight-laced for students desperate for a safe space, a wild unstarched space, a place to explore. So, explore we did. We examined the concept of nature, what’s natural and what’s not and who decides. We read poetry and novels and dove into the science, too, the burgeoning recognition of queer behavior in animals: seahorses, Canada geese, mule deer, Japanese macaques, fruit flies, and bullfrogs. And snakes, of course. Garter snakes, for example, wear female perfume and mate with other males every year. Eastern diamondback males fight other males aggressively, until the relationship turns romantic. I loved the class, loved exploring boundaries and exploding ignorance. I loved the interactions and the sense of community, and when the too-short semester ended, I knew I would miss all of it, but my main concern was getting the cat, Maybelle, across the continent on an airplane.
And, of course, the rattlesnakes.
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The first snake appeared less than a week after our arrival, under the corner of the porch. I sat in a beach chair, low to the ground, while Maybelle roamed a three-or-four foot radius. I read, and she sniffed corners or bathed herself on a scruff of lawn, some clover, a low bed of yellowed moss. The radio had been playing low on a tiny portable speaker, but I heard the rattle and leaped to my feet. Maybelle, who can move wicked fast, who shrinks from vacuums and sprints for squirrels, sat stone-still, frozen in curiosity or consternation. I scooped her up to lock her inside and returned to take stock, and there the snake remained, stretched out between the legs of an old stool, a metal pail of sprinkler parts, an empty have-a-heart trap for packrats, never used, and a green watering can on its side.
The snake left eventually, and I let the cat back out.
The next day Maybelle was safely inside while L and I took a hike, all wildflowers and snowy peak views. We returned at midday, climbed the front steps and heard a loud rattle below. She’d coiled fully round the handle of the watering can.
We decided fast to kill her—there’s a dog in this valley missing one eye from a snake bite; it’s not as if lack of venom makes the danger unreal—but by the time we put on long pants and boots, the snake was gone. We patrolled the yard with shovels and saw her only once by the fire pit we rarely use. The rattlesnake escaped to live another day. Just one.
The next day, I was wearing sandals as I escorted the cat around the perimeter of the house, and again heard the distinctive sound, the one that makes your heart race from fear, yes, and a kind of awe. Fiddlers often put snake rattles in their instruments to ward off evil spirits or mice or spiders or to give them a sweeter tone, but when you hear this sound and see a coiled snake inches from your bare feet, instinct takes charge.
None of this, I fear, is pretty:
L came running and hacked a shovel down hard edge-first. The snake was pinned but not dead. Just writhing in place. L twisted the shovel, swore again and again, and began to cry.
“I’m sorry, baby,” she said to the snake using the same cooing tone we use with the cat. “I’m sorry baby.”
I put on rubber boots and went to the shed for an axe. I chopped hard once, burying the snake and the axe head in soft duff. Not enough.
“Go to the other side,” L said, “so she doesn’t watch you.”
This time I lifted the axe higher, the way I would if I were going after a sturdy root in the trail. The blade was dull as hell. If the snake were wood, I’d chop at an angle—I’d often scoffed at amateurs chopping straight down—but here straight-down felt more certain, powerful, final. I lifted the tool high and came down with all my might. We put the two halves of the once-snake, still writhing, in a metal pail meant for woodstove ashes and perched it on a chopping block where the cat kept trying to climb, following the smell.
I want to say I felt regret, but I didn’t. I felt relief. The snake was gone, and though surely there were others, I felt safer because I trusted I could do it again.
I couldn’t.
The next time a snake appeared, two days later, coiled atop the garden hose, I fetched a neighbor with a shotgun. He arrived and shot once, but the gun misfired, so our neighbor shot again. The head disintegrated. The rest of the body wriggled free.
I felt sick.
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I keep trying to understand fear.
When Nikki Giovanni died recently, her poem “Allowables,” about killing a brown recluse spider circulated widely on social media. “I don’t think I’m allowed,” she writes, “To kill something because I am frightened.” Such plainspoken wisdom. We killed two snakes, or we were, at least, responsible for the deaths of two snakes. I am ashamed of this fact, but I am trying not to let the shame eat me. What made me do it? Was it ignorance or instinct or permission gleaned from my upbringing or culture or neighborhood? Most honest people know we’re most afraid of what’s inside ourselves. I am not afraid of my queerness, but there is a place in my heart where I hold myself coiled tight. Don’t we all know this place? The trick to surviving—to thriving—in the wild and anywhere else is not to project this fear outside of ourselves, not let it morph into paranoia or violence.
This fall we will move to a medium-sized rural town, a small city, one with many box stores, many Trump flags. I admit I am a little unnerved, but I am determined to be brave, to hold fast to the many truths three decades in the wild has taught us. Among them, this: snakes are snakes are snakes. They are fanged and scaled, reclusive and, when provoked, defensive. They move fast, they hide, and when the weather turns cold, they den intertwined tightly with one another, just trying to stay warm, to survive another day.
Meanwhile, mid-summer, the solution was simple. We bought a snake catcher—a set of long metal tongs like the ones workers use to pick up trash at an amusement park or on the roadside, only longer with grippier teeth. Before summer’s end, we’d move three more snakes off the property, and as the years go by, we’ll move many more, and while it’s unquestionably more ethical to relocate a snake than to kill one, I have to admit, it is still very scary.
Ana Maria Spagna is the author, most recently, of Pushed: Miners, a Merchant and (Maybe) a Massacre. Her previous books on nature, work, history, community, and human rights include Uplake, Potluck, Reclaimers, and Test Ride on the Sunnyland Bus. She lives and writes in the North Cascades.
12 March 2025
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