A Tale of Two Rattlesnakes
Those of you who know me well may know something about my fascination with rattlesnakes. Although I grew up around them, I never feared them until the Summer of 2019. They have since become a kind of guru for me. Here are the two stories, plus some reflection.
Summer 2019
It was a hot day, well over 90 degrees, perhaps 95. I decided to go for a trail run, because I wanted some sun, and I figured the trails would be empty—Bay Area people cannot really handle heat well. I decided not to bring my phone, because I didn’t want it clunking around in the pocket of my running shorts. A couple miles up the hill, in a wild grove of what I remember as juniper bushes, I was caught off guard by a loud, menacing noise: “ShhhHHHHH!” Words cannot express the emotion that noise caused in me.
I jumped back like I’ve never done before or since. Before I knew it I was fifty or so feet away from the snake. My heart was racing unlike ever before or since. I walked back toward it, to see if it was still there; it was. My heart raced. The snake must have been five feet long, and was puffed up to about six inches in diameter, in striking position. I was about four feet away from it when it rattled. I wondered if I should wait for the snake to leave and keep on up the hill, but a series of increasingly deflating thoughts occurred to me: I did not have my phone; I had not seen another person since I left the parking lot two miles away; I was on a minor trail that people hardly used; I didn’t know if there would be more snakes around; and come to think of it, I didn’t really understand the behavior of rattlesnakes, period. I decided that, on this day, this hill belonged to that snake.
I could hardly keep my balance on the way back to the car. So much adrenaline had burst through my body so quickly that it felt like I’d just run a marathon. I was sick to my stomach. What would I have done if I’d been bit? I’d have had to run back to the major trail from which my trail branched, where I might not have seen anybody for an hour or more. I’d have lost my leg; in fact, I’d very likely have died, because of the distance. The scariest fact of all was that I didn’t really know how to react to a rattlesnake bite.
When I got home I felt sick. I didn’t want to look up rattlesnakes, but I did; and that’s when I really began to realize how close I’d come to dying. I should have at least brought my phone. This is perhaps close to what my friend, Bas, has called a “minor fateful decision.” For weeks literally all I could think about, and all I could research, were rattlesnakes, pit vipers, and venomous snakes in general. I must have spent hundreds of hours learning all that I could about this most dangerous animal in California, until I had a very clear and distinct idea of how to respond, should I ever find myself in that situation again.
It took about three weeks before I could bring myself to return to the site of the incident. I approached cautiously, as if the snake would still be there—and of course it wasn’t. But my heart raced anyway. As the Scientologists would say, I cleared the incident.
After that, I became somewhat obsessed with rattlesnakes. I would actively search for them in the hills. And having learned about their behavior, I would play with them, to verify the claims I’d heard on the internet. For example, rattlesnakes are extremely predictable creatures. If you startle them, they will recoil into striking pose and rattle, basically reminding nature of its compact: “Please don’t come near me. I don’t want any trouble. Please don’t come near me. I’ll leave as soon as you do. But if you come near me I’ll kill you. I don’t want to kill you, because I need this venom for my prey. But I will kill you. Please back away.” They won’t leave unless you do; they will hold their ground. And if you get within their striking radius, it’s stochastic from there: the closer you get, the probability of a strike tends to 1. But outside the striking radius, you are basically completely safe. They will not charge toward you; they will stay planted exactly where they are. (This, of course, only really applies to Southern Pacific rattlesnakes, and most of their cousins; the Mojave Green can be a bit more aggressive, though mostly similar.)
So I would find rattlesnakes, and play at the edge of their strike radius. I did this with about five rattlesnakes. I would eye their length, times it by 2/3, and, e.g., walk as close to that edge as I could, or flail sticks around, etc. I never once got a snake to strike. They really don’t want to strike. Conservation of energy. At a certain point I realized: “I’ve learned what I came here for. At this point I’m just interfering with nature, without point. This is now unethical. Thank you, guru. We shall only meet by accident from now on, and I will heed our compact.”
Summer 2021
It was a Saturday. I was visiting my parents, the first stop on a month-long road trip around the western US. We’d spent the day out on their boat in Newport Harbor. It was a surprisingly pleasant day. I got to drive the boat, and we saw dolphins.
On the drive back home I noticed the hills: “There be snakes up there.” It occurred to me, it had been a while since I’d seen a live rattler. I was feeling due for a hike, and it would be pleasant to see one. “I’ve gotta get up there.”
The day had already been too tiring to hike that evening, and the sun was beginning to set by the time we got home. Good hour for rattlesnakes, but it didn’t feel right. My dad and I decided to sit in the jacuzzi instead. My mom joined on the chair beside us. We talked for about an hour. My mom decided it was time to get ready for bed and started walking back toward the house. As she started to step through the threshold of the back sliding door, she jumped back violently: “Ow! OWWW!” I will never forget these sounds she made. It is rather unbelievable how much information they communicated. They triggered a completely new state in my entire body in the course of less than 2 or 3 seconds.
“WHAT?!” my dad screamed. He thought there may have been an intruder in the house. We flew up from the jacuzzi.
“A snake just bit me!”
“WHAT?!” my dad yelled.
She hobbled, panicked, back toward us. From where I met her I could see the snake coiled in a defensive position on the back door mat. I said, “It’s a rattlesnake.” My mom asked, “What do I do?” I told her to lie down on the nearby chaise lounge chair and I put a nearby end table on the chair to elevate her foot. Meanwhile my dad killed the snake. I told her, “Mom, the most important thing right now is that you keep your heartrate as low as possible. You need to breathe. Just breathe. We are going to take care of it.”
My dad went inside, and came back out proposing to move her inside where there was better light. I didn’t want to move her; I didn’t need light to know she’d been envenomated, and what to do. At any rate, whether she had been envenomated or not, our response should not have been different. But I trusted my dad. As he helped her up from the lounge chair, I asked whether he had called 911; he had not, so I ran inside for my phone, came back out, and called.
I told the dispatch operator very clearly and assertively, “My mom just got bit by a rattlesnake.” She asked for my address and dispatched an ambulance. She told me to make sure the front of the house was visible and that they could get inside. I relayed this to my dad. I heard my mom ask, “Am I going to die?” I chuckled and said, “No, mom, you are not going to die.”
Meanwhile I knelt beside my mom and held her hand and helped her breathe. The operator stayed on the line and gave me instructions. She asked, “How is her foot situated now?” I said, “She is sitting in a chair and her foot is elevated.” The operator said, “OK, do not elevate her foot. Wrap it lightly, allowing a finger to be inserted into the wrap. I will stay on the line until the paramedic arrives.” I relayed this to my dad, who wrapped it.
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing on the phone. The wrap was wrong, and I knew it – a bandage holds a rattlesnake’s venom in the limb, where it does its damage – but I complied anyway. I didn’t have time to argue with her. It occurred to me that, in any case, I would let my dad carry on, because my mom needed help controlling her heartrate. I recalled that the most important thing was to keep her calm and still, so that the venom would circulate through the body as little as possible; and the importance of the position of the leg paled in comparison. I held my mom’s hands and had her look directly into my eyes. I ignored anything the dispatch operator said from that point on, but stayed on the line.
I inhaled and exhaled as calmly as I could. As she looked into my eyes I thought about how this was going to unfold. I knew how it was going to unfold. It was going to be bad, but it was going to be OK. My mom looked very scared. I knew that if I did not keep helping her that she would lose control and have a panic attack. We breathed, one long breath at a time. I could see her experiencing the venom more and more.
About three minutes pass and she asks, “Am I going to lose my foot?” In retrospect, I realize that about four minutes had passed between her two questions. I don’t know what she was thinking, but it took her four minutes to think through from the question about whether she would die to the question about whether she would lose her foot.
“No, you are not going to lose your foot. You are probably not going to even lose a toe. You are going to fully recover, but it is going to be a while. We just need to stay calm right now. That’s the best thing we can do.”
I realized that my confidence – my knowledge – was what was actually keeping her calm. Whether she was forming images in her mind or not, her being was contacting her future through me. Her future was the ground, and my ability to be thinking ahead was founded on the knowledge I accrued after my own encounters with the snakes.
She asked, “When is the pain going to stop?” I answered quickly, “When you get antivenom.” I came to discover that I was wrong – the pain didn’t really stop until she got stronger painkillers at the hospital, and the antivenom didn’t do anything for the pain – but she needed more than “I don’t really know.” I gave her something to set her mind on, which even if wrong was roughly around the same time she got the painkillers.
When the ambulance came we loaded her onto the gurney and my dad helped the paramedics out to the ambulance. I immediately took a picture of the snake and secured it underneath a heavy glass bowl, so the dog or anything else wouldn’t mess with it. And I immediately started packing up my mom’s things, as well as getting my dad’s phone, wallet, etc. ready for him on the counter. I knew it was going to be a few days. I realized I was in boxer briefs this entire time (I’d forgotten a bathing suit). (You ever wonder what would happen if there was an emergency and you were naked? Turns out you won’t care in the moment.) I changed and packed my things for a few days at the hospital. By the time my dad came back in the house all he needed to do was get dressed and throw some clothes in a bag.
When my dad came back in he was annoyed. While there is a hospital that basically has a whole division dedicated to rattlesnake bites about a half-hour away – Loma Linda – they were taking her to a lesser regional hospital. They couldn’t even assure him that they would have antivenom. We got ready and started driving.
On the way to the lesser regional hospital, we got a call that they did take her to Loma Linda after all; the regional hospital didn’t have any antivenom. We drove mostly in silence, but would occasionally make a point about what we’d just gone through. All in all, we did pretty well. We didn’t think we could have made our response more efficient by 30 seconds.
We ended up spending two days at the hospital. I slept in my van in the garage and let my dad stay with her. They were only allowing one family member up at a time because of Covid. Several family members stopped by the hospital to visit, and I fielded them in the parking garage, and was basically just supporting that way.
Six months later she was basically fully recovered, but still had some pain and stiffness. Within a year she was perhaps 90–95% recovered, and from there it has been very slow, logarithmic, asymptotic. She will say near 100%, but not 100%.
I could, of course, go on and on. But I will stop here. (George Leonard would say: “One never finishes writing, one just stops.”) But I will include a few reflections.
The snake didn’t rattle. While rattlesnakes usually rattle, this one didn’t. This could be because it was young, because it was caught off-guard, because she was moving too quickly, or because it was somehow genetically mutated; or maybe it did rattle, my mom just didn’t hear it (though we didn’t hear it either, and usually they rattle loud enough that we should have). This is worth noting, as far as understanding these creatures goes. They rattle the vast majority of the time, but they don’t always. Your eyes are needed in addition to your ears. That instinct you have to watch the trail – even though you sometimes might think, “Is it good to be looking at my feet all the time?” – you probably shouldn’t fight that instinct too strongly.
My response. One thing that struck me in retrospect was that, in the high stress situation, I reacted extremely calmly. One thing I neglected to mention is that this whole thing was recorded by my parents’ Ring camera. I won’t post the video, but as I watched myself, I realize that, although I was very stressed, I was extremely physically grounded. For example, I don’t think I was likely to stumble; I was on the balls of my feet, moving swiftly. I remember being very matter-of-fact, too. I could hear my call to 911, and I did not include one too many or one too few syllables. I spoke perfectly, calmly, every sentence formed exactly correctly. I did not miss a single cue. I was amazed by this, about myself. I never thought I could make a good soldier, but in this moment, I acted as you would want a soldier to act. The stress pulled my body taut, into extreme order, order unlike I’ve felt before or since. This is a strange thing to learn about oneself so relatively late in life—29 years old.
Knowledge and calm. I realized this somewhat in the moment, but in retrospect it has struck me as particularly interesting, philosophically: the cause of my mother’s calm was my knowledge. There is, I think, a very important point about, e.g., the faux-calmness cultivated by pseudo-contemplatives. People practice, e.g., meditation, and develop a kind of “cool” in their day-to-day demeanor. But insofar as it is not actually grounded in knowledge about different possible situations and outcomes, it is worthless. The calm you want, which is truly valuable, is a product of knowledge, and not a rehearsed low-energy, stultified state. It is what Steven meant in sending me off to do the thing I kept wanting to get up and do. Learn the possible threats that exist in your world, study them, and you will develop a genuine calm. The difference between, say, Leibniz or John Muir and the Buddha is not as great as you might think.
Odds and Gods and causes of which we know naught. Another thing I think about is the odds. What are the odds that (a) in 25 years in that house, well within rattlesnake country, where in the summer rattlesnakes are seen by people in the neighborhood daily, that this would be my mom’s first sight of a rattlesnake in the yard, (b) I would be there at the time, when I only visit about 5 days per year, having the knowledge of rattlesnakes I have, and (c) that I would have been thinking just a few hours earlier that it had been too long since I’d last seen a rattlesnake. Odds like these make you think about God, or at least about forces in nature that science has not yet met. If God, then I wonder what God wanted. If causes of which we know naught, then two possibilities: (i) I had a kind of obfuscated precognition, or (ii) my desire to meet a snake somehow pulled that snake toward us. Of course, it is always possible that it’s just good ol’ randomness. But still: odds like these make you think of God and causes of which we know naught.