Nature Journal #10 - "The Snakes Are About"

    After walking through and reflecting on the two readings for tomorrow’s class, beginning with White’s “The Snakes Are About,” something that I found interesting and challenging about White’s story was how attuned to and possessive he became over one snake in particular: the “well-grown female with a scar on her neck” (p. 477). After White’s claim earlier on in his story that he handles the snakes as little as possible and does not “want to steal them from themselves by making them pets,” he goes on to describe the intense process by which he catches them and decides to bring them, thrashing and biting and trying desperately to get back to the comfortable shade of the undergrowth, into his home. Perhaps I am reading too far into this, but White’s curiosity about the snakes — his thirst to “meditate upon them like a jeweler for months” — seems to take precedence over leaving the snakes where they ought to be: where they want to live. In other words, something that I wrestled with while walking through White’s intense process of capturing the animals was whether I agreed that he should be doing that in the first place; in some ways, this effort as a whole seemed to be singularly for his enjoyment and benefit, disregarding the snakes’ preferences to live a life untouched by man. As I read, I wondered if — especially in the case of the scarred female snake – White was more so holding the snakes hostage for his benefit at the expense of their own. Certainly, he feels a sense of respect and admiration for the creatures “dry, cool, and strong,” and he expresses some understanding that the effort to domesticate a pet snake would degrade both parties and that it’s “nice to see the strange wild things loose, living their ancient unpredictable lives with such grace” (p. 476). This basic understanding, however, does not stop him from becoming so enthralled with the female snake to the point where he seems to break his own rules, allowing himself to feel a sense of friendship and closeness to her and keeping an especially close eye on her. In the end, after taming the animal and then relinquishing her back to the outdoors, there’s a tragic end to the story. Sometime later, White discovers the animal slaughtered with a stick, “harmless, useless, dead, very beautiful, easy prey” (p. 479). It was almost like, despite himself and his understanding that his befriending the snake would not end well for either party, White had loved the snake to death — the creature being killed because it had grown to trust mankind to not hurt it, to respect and safeguard its beauty.