He Lives Here, Too

Above, though his head is not easy to make out, is the business end of an Eastern Black Racer, more commonly known as a Blacksnake.

Maybe one of the reasons we have such an inborn fear of snakes is their talent always to appear when you're least expecting to see one, but never when you're on the watch.

This one popped into view a few days ago, as I was about to open a side door into our house.

It was startling, though not heart-stopping, to see a 4-foot long, dark, glistening snake fully extended vertically on the side of my house, a few inches from a door handle that I was about to grasp.

Blacksnakes are by far the most numerous kind of snake around here, and the only ones that don't find it unreasonable, though they don't make any sort of a habit of it, to get up close and personal with your house. I see them several times a year nearly every year, and because our house siding is of rough oak boards, it's easy for them to slide even up under the eaves of our roof where I have found at least one shedded skin. But so far they have held back from making a surprise appearance inside, which would not be impossible or a totally unheard-of thing for one to do.

However, years ago, one did treat us to a personal performance, by shedding its skin in full view on the other side of one of our windows. At the time some of my wife's relatives were visiting from Boston.

I maneuvered this one down off there and out under the deck, where I took the picture.

I've killed Copperheads because they're poisonous, and I've killed Water Snakes when they were too hard to tell from Copperheads, but if I've ever killed a Blacksnake it was probably just one huge fellow that had made a habit of stealing eggs and swallowing baby chicks, and in so doing he had developed so much girth that he had gotten wedged while trying to slide through the chicken wire. Otherwise Blacksnakes come in handy for keeping things like the field mice in check, and maybe the voles, too, though I feel that a herd of cats is more thoroughgoing about that.

In my younger and more confident days, I have grabbed snakes with my bare hands and carried them to places where they would be more likely to mind their own business, and I wanted to get hold of this one and deport him to the other side of the creek. I did try to grab it, some, just short of his head, but he jumped into the menacing posture that you see in the picture and I deferred. His bite wouldn't have been lethal, but bites by anything at all (with the possible exception only of female humans and then only by a certain few) are not my idea of fun. I ended up just pushing this one with a stick down to the ground and down the slope, hopefully to other adventures elsewhere.

This snake lives here, but he and his kind are like people that you don't mind being around, though it isn't necessary to see them every day, or even every month.

As undesirable as it might seem to urbanites, seeing snakes from time to time is all a part of country living, and also it's something to report to someone like H. down the road, just to hear his response, because these days it's reassuring to note something, anything, that is still exactly the same way I remember it, and his response would be as surefire as the Sun rising in the east.

"Did you kill him?" H. will ask purely on reflex, while knowing full well that I didn't and full of scorn because of that.   He automatically kills any snake he sees, no matter what the variety. 

Just as in the case of any New Yorker, Minnesotan, or Texan, by being a native-born Virginian H. is four beers short of my six-pack of finesse.