Disconcerting Midsummer Detour

by George Jacobi

When it happened, I couldn’t have been more than 12, but it’s among my most vivid memories of that age. Services had ended in our little stone Episcopalian church and congregants were in the small parking lot, chatting and preparing to drive home. A commotion attracted me and my brother. As a crowd stood around, a man gleefully beat to death a garter snake while ranting proudly about how dangerous “copperheads” were. Truly an ironic garden of Eden moment.

I was already the kid who loved and admired wildlife. And I leaned into reptiles and amphibians, I suspect partly a nod to their lack of respect, something I felt personally familiar with. This agonizing episode was the first I remember in which ego, aggression, and ignorance dealt death to nature. It wouldn’t be the last. In fact, just last week a teenager fishing on the Farmington River asked his father, sitting on the bench by me, if the water snake he netted was a poisonous moccasin. O-kay. This time I was able to perform a rescue and an education. I’m guessing you know the nearest water moccasin is in the Great Dismal Swamp, Virginia, and the very rare copperhead is now at home only in the traprock ridges.

Last month I touched on the similar ‘reptilian brain’ impulse some have to run over turtles. Why is man’s first instinct to kill? Americans did our best to knock off our two national symbols as well, the buffalo and the bald eagle. Did Descartes convince us that animals have no emotions? Did western religion convince us that they have no souls? It’s deeper than the Bible – it’s Paleolithic. Psychology tells us that ancient emotions include anger, fear, and play. Is it thus a reflex from when Leakey’s “Lucy” was chased across the Rift Valley by a 14-foot black mamba?

I’m no saint. More than once, I’ve discovered a school of striped bass on the feed, easy to catch. Even though I was fishing catch and release with a barbless hook, I would boat a few dozen before I had enough. Yes, it’s thrilling. But what exactly was it that I had enough of? Sport? Play? An uncomfortable question to ask. Our competitive urge to revel (play) yet win, and our communal urge (tribalism) are easy to warp. We follow crowd behavior thoughtlessly; we follow dangerous leaders thoughtlessly.

There are limitations to human perception. What troubles me most is the tendency in many to discourage their own awareness. Marrying unconscious prejudice with defensive reflex may cause us to aim carnage at ourselves. We immediately want to destroy the “other”, anything that makes us uneasy. Some apparently have even lost the knack of seeing evil in others, but that’s a subject for a political essay, not a conservation one.

Why are insight and intuition rare while instinct is prehistoric? Well, we don’t encourage them in any significant way. More self-knowledge, imagination, ingenuity, should be cultivated in school. Our minds are constructed of our experiences. Lack of education about our dependence on the planet beneath our feet enables many people to fear it. Robert Kull in Solitude: “Our fundamental difficulty is that we do not directly perceive ourselves as biological beings in a living world.” Civilization itself promotes separation from the environment. Many of us no longer even live in a living world.  Obliviousness might be excused in city dwellers, but many of us in this verdant valley are colorblind for green.

That childhood experience was one in which I felt helplessness in the face of power, barbarity, and momentum. Violence toward creatures is a red flag that the same might soon be aimed at other people, so let me end where I began. That little church had a steep sand bank behind the parking lot, and over that ridge was the elementary school I attended. I was again nearby (and again helpless) when a deranged, violent video-game-obsessed individual opened fire there and killed 27 children and adults in Sandy Hook School. Ah, man.

It took a few years before I emotionally reclaimed the joys of ‘the Hook’ as a kid: sand lot baseball, frog ponds and brooks, meadows and rivers. But I did. FYI – most of the garter snakes I’ve picked up in my life never even bit me. Better behavior than humans. I hope that instead of having to continually memorialize the heartbreak of Pleistocene behavior, we evolve past it. Meanwhile, I’d suggest that the purpose of humanity, starting today, is to be caretakers of the magnificent panoply of living species and the environment we share with them. How about it?

Garter snake and broad-banded copperhead photos: Michelle Poudrette