Grandfather Rattlesnake
We had just arrived at the far end of the lake and I was walking through the ferns down to the water when I found myself standing on a rattlesnake. This sequence is weird in memory. I was walking towards the water. I came too, or woke up from out of a dream into a primordial feeling of uncertainty; something was wrong. Beneath the toes of my boots, down below the ferns, large black coils writhed and tightened. The snake’s rattle was lifted between my feet and the rattle was twitching. The realization slowly arose up into consciousness: I was standing on a large rattlesnake. The feeling of uncertainty turned into terror as I leapt backwards, yelling. It only occurs to me now that I had been hearing the rattle the whole time: it was as if this low rhythmic twitching had cast a spell over me that had arrested my mind and motion without my command.
We watched as the snake remained coiled in the ferns. It did not move. We wondered if it were sick. The rattle had stilled. The campsite being otherwise ideal, we decided to stay, regardless of this rattlesnake. I set up my hammock some extra feet off the ground in case any snake should want to attack me in the night. We made a fire and ate magic mushrooms. This was my first mushroom trip.
I wanted to take mushrooms in the forest in order to have more intense feelings with trees. This is pretty much what happened. Midway into the trip I lay in my hammock as the trees swayed and the high canopy bounced and swung above me zinging down continuous green vortices of light. Compassion, sympathy, and generosity: all this was being beamed to me in that sanctuary of living light; it was clear that the trees were aware of me and that they liked me. The trip progressed through the afternoon as the sun began to set, exploding that whole end of the lake into a cacophony of swamp songs, and late-summer beatitude crisscrossed by the flight paths of insects. Bird song echoed in long refrains, frogs yammered down in the cattails. The air moved and shone with warmth and lucidity and seemed to be embodied with the force-of-life itself. A deep resonating insectoid hum increased in volume as the light flared up from the hypnotic neon-green leaves of every tree. The lake lapped and shone and reflected all this back to us in silvers and yellows and deep purple. Everything was thrumming with extreme and exuberant woodland drama: it was the end of the day in high summer.
Needing to gather water before it got dark we both walked down to the lake, brandishing long sticks, wary of the rattlesnake but still tripping hard. We did not see the snake and assumed that it had left the area. Perching on a small rock island with room enough for both of us I attempted to pump water into my water bottle with my filter. Because the water was very silty, the filter became clogged, and once clogged had to be taken apart and the ceramic cylinder cleaned and put it back together. This was no easy task for it is typical of hard tripping that simple man-made mechanical objects cease to have any meaning or sense. I was very puzzled by the various valves and was attempting, without success, to screw the parts back together, when the rattlesnake leapt from the ferns of the high bank into the lake and swam towards us. We watched frozen in terror, thinking that the snake was going to climb the rock after us and that we would have to swim for it. The snake churned through the water, its head held high, its forked tongue issuing as if to taste the air. It swam in powerful sidewinding motion not more than two feet alongside of our rock and continued on across the twenty-five yards of open water to the other side of the lake and was gone into the deepening shadows of the forest.
Timber rattlers (crotalus horridus) are native to the Catskills and are the only rattlesnake to live this far north. They are the largest of the rattlesnakes. They are going extinct. Whereas the cottontail, or the diamond back are aggressive and will seek out or chase those who come into its vicinity, the timber rattler is less hostile and will only strike if provoked. Despite its chill demeanor, the timber rattler is the most deadly of the rattlesnakes because of its size: the likelihood of death, when a human is bitten, is much higher, due to the larger amount of venom delivered in the strike. This venom of northern timber rattlers in particular is packed with hemotoxins. Hemotoxins attack the immediate flesh around the fang punctures, disassembling the structural components of blood vessels and tissues, causing immediate hemorrhaging, while inhibiting the body’s natural coagulation of blood. Another component of rattlesnake toxin, phospholipases, cause the death of muscle tissue by attacking their cellular membranes; this effectively melts holes in the musculature from within. Had I been bitten I likely would not have been able to walk. Because our vehicle was a two-mile hike through the forest, it would have been some hours before I would have received medical attention thus increasing probability of death.
When I told my friend Mark—a longtime explorer of the forest—about this encounter, he said: “And what did Grandfather Rattlesnake have to tell you?”
