“the monk, the cobra, & Me

When my family arrives in Thailand on my father’s second overseas assignment, my mother buys a book of Thai folktales. A sun rises on the cover under the title “The Land of A Thousand Smiles.” I run my fingers over images I’ve never seen before. Thai dancers, their fingers bent back in graceful curves. Garuda, a red and gold God with kite-like wings. Women in chut thai, traditional Thai dress with fabric belts and jeweled sashes. My favorite pages tell a story about a monk and a cobra.

A monk on a spiritual journey goes to an isolated cabin. While meditating, he opens his eyes and sees a giant cobra in front of his door. There is no other way out. The cobra’s neck is raised, its eyes on the monk. Trembling in terror, the monk cannot move, cannot escape. For hours, he does not take his eyes off the snake, its neck swaying as it remains on his doorstep. They continue to stare at each other for some time until, exhausted, the monk gives up the fight. He bows to the cobra, collapses on the floor, and falls into a deep sleep. As the sun rises, he wakes up. The cobra is gone.

I read this story over and over as a child. I don’t have the book anymore, but the tale never leaves my mind.

We must all bow to what we are scared of, the tale whispers to me still. It is the only way it will let us pass.

*

My father works in Saraburi, approximately three hours away from Nonthaburi, a northern suburb of Bangkok where the rest of us live. My parents make sure we live close to an international school, which means my father is only home on weekends and every other Wednesday night. When he’s not home, my sister and I sleep on piles of blankets on the floor of my parents’ bedroom — something we love to do.

I am on this makeshift bed when we are gearing up for our third move, this time to Holland. I dream that I am at the foot of a row of gigantic water slides watching cobras writhe their way towards me. Their hoods flare and they sway as they rush downhill, a wall of slithering bodies. Their eyes are on me, and there’s nothing I can do but wait.

I wake up, terrified. My mother tells me that people dream of snakes during periods of change. “Because they shed their skins in order to grow,” she says, returning me to the foot of her bed.

Pulling the covers over my chest, she adds: “I dream about snakes before each move.”

Before returning to the States for college, I will shed my skin the seven times my father’s job demands, so it follows that snakes curl up in my unconscious, dream- like apparitions that manifest in times of distress.

*

In Thailand, I encounter snakes outside of my dreams, too. In our gated expat community, snakes curl up in lampshades, give birth in pool filters, and slip into shoes.

One day, my mother opens the front door, home from tennis, and lets us know the guards have captured a four-foot snake. “You can go see it before they kill it, if you want,” she tells us. My sister and I walk across the street. The guard holds the snake up by its tail and head, a thick, semi-circle. He holds its jaws between his thumb and index finger. He shakes his head.

“Bad,” he says.

Someone encourages me to touch the snake’s immobile body. My fingers flutter against its muscles, downward so as to not disturb its scales. For some reason, I’m upset. “Do they have to kill it?” I ask my mother when we return.

“It’ll just come back,” she says.

*

When my classmates and I visit the Bangkok snake farm where antivenom is made (which is a good thing, they tell us during the presentation, given every single employee has been bitten at least once), I peek into cramped cages where vipers hide, defecate, and lay eggs.

In the farm’s museum, I pause to look at snakes’ heads, embalmed and displayed for visitors. I imagine the museum employees decapitating them when I see their flattened necks floating in blue liquid. During the snake handling demonstration, I watch as spitting cobras are pulled from wicker baskets, silver hooks wrapped around the two pale bands at their throats. The handlers provoke these snakes to spit as school children cheer. They squeeze the sides of their heads so their mouths gape open and their fangs jut out. They drain their venom before shoving the snakes back into small baskets.

The baskets shake.

I would be angry too, I think.

*

I’m in middle school. I wander into the Witchcraft, Wicca & Paganism section in a local bookstore. I run my hands along spines, finally pulling out a hardcover book. I look at the cover and am stunned: It pictures a slight, blonde, naked woman sitting in a circle of candles and rocks, her limbs barely covering her breasts and pubis. But I can’t take my eyes off the black snake wrapped around her shoulders.

I bring the book to my mother, who has never denied me one. She does not disappoint: “I went through this phase, too,” she tells me, taking the book and putting it in the crook of her arm. “Anything else?”

In the weeks that come, I try some half-hearted spells. I am not old enough to seek out most of the ingredients. I can tell, already, that Wicca is a spiritual commitment I’m not ready to make.

Plus, I don’t have a familiar. I try to put one of the family cats into a magic circle, but she keeps stepping out of the space I marked, nearly knocking over candles that would set my room on fire. I can’t help but feel if I don’t have a snake — don’t want a snake — as a familiar, I haven’t fully committed.

Later in life, I discover a Wicca-inspired jewelry company. I follow its Instagram account and see pictures of pet snakes posed with jewels: pieces of Lorraine crosses, bat heads, claws, talons. They also make jewelry from life cast, mummified snakes. I adorn myself — my ears, my wrists, my fingers — with these silver snakes.

*

I am in my senior year of undergrad at a small college in North Carolina when, in my Appalachian literature class, I read a novel called “Saving Grace” by Lee Smith. It’s a bildungsroman, and the protagonist’s father is a preacher who takes Mark 16:18 literally. “They shall take up serpents,” the Bible passage reads, “and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover.”

My professor is encouraging and has Smith’s email address. I ask, “How did you go about researching serpent handling for your novel? In what areas of Appalachia did you conduct your research?”

She tells me that the first service she attended was at a church in Big Rock, Virginia, when she was 11 years old. She was taken there by an older cousin who was trying to scare her. When she was older, she went with her friends to see the Jolo snake handlers and was “thrilled and scared to death, screaming and giggling all the way home on that steep, curvy mountain road.”

“Those images are indelible,” she tells me. “They never leave you. Again and again in later years, they’d come back to me, almost like they were haunting me.”

I meet a photography professor who also studies the topic and ask him to bring me to a service. He is hesitant. Serpent handling is illegal in North Carolina, so they generally don’t invite strangers to worship. He has gained the congregation’s trust; I haven’t.

He looks me up and down. “It would help if you had a Southern accent,” he says.

I continue my project anyway. I find a book called “Snake Handlers: God-Fearers? Or, Fanatics?” in the library. Someone has scrawled in black ink on every page, a biblical call and response: 

After the sentence “God could let the serpent bite to punish the person, to chastise him,” they respond: “The Lord chastises his children to teach them.”

After “When the Holy Ghost comes upon you, it can get in your hands and you’ll then be anointed to handle serpents,” they reply: “The Holy Ghost is in you if you receive it.”

And after “I don’t have control over them. But I always know what I’m doing,” they exclaim: “Amen!”

I bring the book to my college’s copy center, where a sign reads “EXCESSIVE PHOTOCOPYING OF ANY MATERIAL (SUCH AS AN ENTIRE BOOK) IS PROHIBITED.” I wait in line and hand the book over to the woman in charge. “I need this entire book copied for my research, for the annotations.” She flips through it, looks back up at me, pauses.

“I’ll make an exception,” she says, turning away.

Back in my dorm room I stare at the photographs, that sick feeling returning to my stomach. This first batch shows venomous, distinctly American snakes wound around hands, necks, and crosses: diamondback rattlesnakes, black-spotted water moccasins, golden-brown copperheads. But I soon learn there is an exotic snake trade among Appalachian collectors; their cars weave across state lines, the cobras, vipers, and kraits from my childhood in their trunks.

In the photographs, the congregation members handling these snakes wear ecstatic expressions on their faces. Trance-like, frenzied, rapturous. There is something uncanny about the scenes, about limbs meeting limbless bodies, mouths crying out in jubilation over the encounter. After services, the snakes are returned to wooden boxes with holy symbols and verses carved into them — serpent boxes. Cages.

“This isn’t about God,” I think. “It’s about fear.” I run my fingers over the pictures. These snakes are playing dead. They’ve given up.

Not always, though. A handful of years later, after the research project is nestled in boxes in my parents’ garage, I watch “Snake Salvation” with my husband. The show follows a handful of men who preach at serpent handling churches in Tennessee and Kentucky. I’m enthralled, totally in love with the show.

The series is cut short, however, when one dies from a snake bite because he refuses to seek help.

After “When the healer prayed and laid hands on Bea, the pain stopped,” they respond: “The Lord is a great physician!”

*

Shortly after my husband and I make an unexpected move from New York City to Virginia for my job at the college of William & Mary, we start watching old episodes of “The Mole,” a gameshow where contestants must work as a group to add money to a pot that only one of them will win. Working among them is “the Mole,” tasked by the producers with sabotaging the group’s money-making efforts. Anderson Cooper hosts.

In one episode, three contestants on a mission are made to stay in three distinct rooms until they are told otherwise. If all the contestants do so, $100,000 will be added to the pot. One contestant is led by Cooper to a glass box. He tells her to sit on a small stool until he returns. After a few minutes, cockroaches rain down on her head, shoulders — bounce off her body onto the ground. She completes her mission. Another contestant is led to a room containing an uncomfortable wire bed. Cooper tells him to remain on the bed until told otherwise. After he is left alone, “Tiny Bubbles” begins to play. The song plays all night long, in all kinds of speeds, arrangements, and octaves. He completes his mission.

“He got off so easy,” my husband remarks.

Then, Cooper opens the final door for the final contestant. In a bare, concrete room with no furniture and a low ceiling, a six-foot python slithers across the floor. The camera is at the snake’s eye-level, its pink tongue flickering in and out of its mouth as it smells its surroundings. The contestant is clearly distressed, bending down to enter the room, never taking her eyes off the snake. Cooper leaves and, while the contestant does acrobatics to avoid the unusually active reptile as it moves across the floor, she seems to be managing.

Then the lights go out.

The contestant feels the snake at her feet and demands to be let out of the room.

I close my eyes and try to imagine what I would do. There’s no chance of getting hurt, of course, despite how active and provoked the snake is. If I listened closely enough, I could get a sense of where it was…

“That’s completely absurd,” my husband says, interrupting my fantasy. “Her mission was, by far, the most difficult. I would never do it.”

“Not even for a hundred thousand dollars?” I ask.

“Not for a million,” he responds, dead serious.

I’m a little shocked. We could use the money.

As it turns out, this contestant is not the mole and is not trying to sabotage the game. She gets to the final round before being crowned the runner-up. She is visibly disappointed — of course.

“Bet she’s glad she didn’t stay in that room,” my husband says, rising from the couch to get a bowl of cereal.

*

I manage to stay off Facebook for years, but when I eventually make an account I join multiple snake identification groups — upon the recommendation of my mother. Now, when I scroll through my feed, every five or so posts comes an image of a snake with captions such as, “Bagwell Texas. He just slithered down my driveway. ID?” or, “found this lil guy in my kitchen, would like some identification so my mom doesn’t flip out.” When group administrators and experts identify snakes as venomous, they’ll affectionately call them “nope ropes” or “danger noodles.” Most members are advocates for these snakes, even the cottonmouths, the rattlesnakes, the water moccasins.

I am still startled whenever one of these snakes shows up amidst my friends’ children, weddings, birthdays, and anniversaries — but I am heartened by the members’ assurance that we can all coexist.

“Just keep a respectful distance and everyone will be okay,” one writes.

*

Right before our move from New York to Virginia, I dream our back patio is covered in snakes. I am standing on a small slab of concrete, surrounded by them. I can’t get to the door. They slither around me, black and green, hooded and flat-necked. They curl up in lounge chairs, run their bodies over my daughter’s toys. I stand still, looking for a way out. To get inside, I must step on them. I know if I do, they will strike.

I breathe and move forward. Then, I wake up.

*
The last time I am in a king cobra’s presence, it’s at the Metro Richmond Zoo in Virginia. When I ask my daughter if she wants to visit the reptile room, she says no — she wants a cone-ice. But on our way out, I convince her to visit the snakes. The line stretches out the door as our bodies move in a circle around the various transparent cages. The walls have signs on them that say, “Don’t tap on the glass! It causes the snakes stress.”

I see at least three people ignore this rule over the course of a minute.

“Look, it’s a snake!” my daughter exclaims, pointing at a Gaboon viper. We continue to march forward, passing cages that seem empty, cages with snakes bundled tight in a corner, wound around an obscured branch or camouflaged under some wood or leaves. Reluctant exhibits, the snakes don’t care that we are there to leer. Only a tree boa runs its body against the glass, knocking its head to the side after it bounces off the clear pane. It looks at us. I’m heartened by how lively it seems, disheartened by its clear desire to breach its confines.

Then I see the king cobra. Its white-grey body is curled up. Its tail juts out, a rough, pointed strip. Its body is visible yet lifeless in the enclosure — its face is turned away from us, towards the back of a hole in a log.

“Is it sleeping?” my daughter asks.

“Yes, baby” I respond. But I’m not sure I believe myself.

When I exit the zoo, holding my daughter, I wonder when I’ll tell her that snakes represent change. I wonder when she’ll learn that snakes conjure curiosity, enticing us towards worldly pleasures instead of holy austerity. I wonder when to tell her she’ll never meet a snake by mutual choice, that snakes are far too easy to grab hold of and render immobile for an animal so feared. I wonder how many snakes she’ll meet on trails covered by autumn leaves; on pavements during evening walks; on walls in her grandparents’ garage.

I wonder if it’ll ever mean as much to her as it does to me that snakes’ venom creates antivenom, that when they strike us, only they can save us. I wonder if I can, as my mother did for me, teach her to meet snakes — to meet fear — at the door with respect.