Day 12

REBECCA STETSON WERNER with NICHOLAS S. WERNER

I included a picture of murky water in the album I created following our family’s cross-country road trip several years ago. It’s a terrible picture, washed out by overexposure, blurred by movement, and lacking any definition. Because I took the picture and remember that day so vividly, because I have context and perspective, I know that the flat rock in the image is large enough to be shared by three people, toes curled over its edge, testing the water. And that the debris on that rock is sticks, snapped by a thirteen-year-old girl who stood there contemplating her method for submersion.

Rippled lines and small bubbles reveal a current in the water, but I also remember its sound, a gently persistent flow, parted by the supports of the run-down, cracked, concrete bridge I stood on. I can summon the oppressive heat, the chirping of crickets, the olfactory stew of gasoline, dirt, and grass, and then a faraway whiff of sweetness. Below the choppy surface, through the silty churning, I can just make out the patterning of the river bottom, covered in rounded rocks and mud, the water, the boulder, and the river bottom all the same drab hue.

I chose to place the blurry picture in the album quite intentionally, perhaps more representative of what happened that day than any of the sharper, more aesthetically pleasing photographs around it. Within that agitated water, the few darker lines might be something. In those ambiguous details, the picture holds possibilities, contains stories that await their telling.

Where were we when we saw the snakes in the river? I think I'm gonna write about it.

It’s a text from Nicholas, my seventeen-year-old son, settling into his homework in his room upstairs. With each assignment for his essay writing class, I watch him travel through his young life—the big and small events, funny and difficult moments, snapshots of a place or time—and pull something from the swirl. He’s learning to choose a worthy story, to tell it meaningfully, to wrestle with the nuances of truth and self-exposure. Constructing a personal narrative, and the self-reflection and awareness it reveals, is a new, transforming, capacity of this age; he constructs his own telling of who he is. It’s a class I wish I had taken when I was his age. Frankly, it’s a class I wish I could take now.

That’s funny, I started an essay about that day a few years ago, I text back, trying to remember the essay’s working title.

I push the pot off the burner and walk to my office. Pulling down a photo album, I run my fingertips over the four-years-younger faces and limbs of our three children hiking, as they always seem to do, from oldest to youngest: Nicholas, Julia, and then Elliott. My husband, Jonathan, follows behind.

I flip to the several pages devoted to a little place somewhere along a straightish line between Mammoth Cave in Kentucky and the Grand Canyon. It is easy to find because a colorful pamphlet entitled Snakes of Missouri and a sarcastic postcard we mailed home to ourselves are tucked there. The postcard’s image is of a stunning river gorge filled with swimming vacationers. On the back, Elliott has written the simple message, We did not swim here, with a doodle of himself looking irritable, steam rising from his spiky hair.

My photos show our children looking down into an obviously rushing river, white foam against the large rocks, their faces just as sweaty, pink, and cranky as in Elliott’s sketch. They give me the stink eye while eating lunch at a picnic table. This section of the album also includes several pictures of signage reflecting the theme of how not to die idiotically in nature. My best specimen is the metal sign below a flash flood siren depicting an anxious human stick figure retreating to higher ground, chased by a line of rising water. Below that, a laminated paper sign hangs from zip ties: no swimming today, due to high waters.

There follow several pictures—artsy, my children would call them while rolling their eyes—of old farmhouses and barns, rusted tin roof lines showing generations of additions, wildflowers growing taller than sagging porches, hay bales awaiting pickup in rolling fields. And then, a picture of a wooden sign, Hasty Cemetery, a decrepit concrete slab bridge visible just beyond it. Next, our children explore a shallow stream bed, skipping rocks, running through tall grasses, arms and legs fully extended, then crouching on rocks midstream, their expressions joyfully animated.

And finally, the murky water, the last image of this series. I turn on the desk lamp and, as I do every time I look at it, lean in to see if there is anything discernible within the monochromatic swirl. My phone pings again.

I remember the snake lady.

I turn the page and there she is. A ranger squints under a picnic structure’s harsh fluorescent lights, a row of covered plastic pails between her and the night’s darkness beyond.

Nicholas, gathering details, asks, What state was it in?

I reach for the road trip journals beside the photo album and look at the decorated covers, our children’s writing, like their faces, four years younger. Missery, I type back, manually overriding my phone’s attempt to autocorrect my joke.

“Are you saying we haaaave to use these?” thirteen-year-old Nicholas asks, eyeing the three new journals I purchased for their car activity bags, extending the word have to a full three seconds, assessing my level of commitment.

A United States map hangs on the wall behind me, with a lumpy route originating from our home in Portland, Maine, destinations bedazzled with sparkly craft materials left over from when the kids were younger—a purple butterfly over Shenandoah, a silver jewel over the Grand Canyon, a horned glittery something on Yellowstone. I am trying to make tangible the vastness across which Jonathan and I will be driving our minivan, every cubic inch of it stuffed with our bodies and the gear we think necessary, with just enough space left to see the six thousand miles of our cross-country road trip out our windows.

Our children have grown up in pants with ripped knees and leaves in their hair, and they know the smell of mud and dew. Their attachment to each other is inextricably linked to the natural places where they have played and grown together. Attempting to guide them toward a deep love of the earth and desire to protect it, I want them to now explore the wild and protected places of their drivable world.

We have waited until everyone can read independently during long driving days, can avoid gross things in public bathrooms, and will hopefully remember this intense whole-family experience. But so quickly when they can became while we still can, our family still whole for now, but our children’s summers with us disappearing in the same order they hike. I sense the shifting and sometimes rough terrain already. Dynamics, growth, and change feel unsettling, requiring adjustments between each other, and sometimes this growth feels a bit like loss. In this trip, I see an opportunity for us to look out at the unknown landscapes before us, to develop the story of who we are to each other now and inform who we will become, with the natural world still a leading character in this shared narrative.

The kids fill their blank journal pages with their own projections, their own versions of this family adventure. Elliott, a possible future artist, covers his pages with drawings of wildlife and their landscapes, colored with pencils from his activity bag. Julia, a possible future author of cheerful self-help books, writes long exuberant descriptive narratives. And Nicholas, a possible future curmudgeon/financier, experimenting with a tone, scribbles comic strips about the misadventures and mishaps of an imprisoned family, his landscape often, ironically, limited to the small and increasingly stinky minivan.

In each entry, his thirteen-year-old capacity for both self-awareness and self-consciousness, his developmental struggle for agency and autonomy, is projected onto the page with insight, sarcasm, truth, and wit, only intensified by my competing desire for togetherness. In his doodles, I lie in a sweaty exhausted heap while my children prance up the trail in the Grand Tetons. I anxiously chase them with a leash near a ledge in the Grand Canyon. And as their captor, I am struck by lightning after forcing a hike under darkening skies in the Badlands.

Nicholas spends more time on his journal’s title page than any other: Death By Road Trip. A story of pain, suffering, and missery. He decorates the title with a skull and crossbones dripping green reptilian blood. Several pages of doodles in, he writes:

Day 12

We are in Missouri and we were going to go swiming in a river, but it was flooded so we couldn’t.

Then we were going to go swimming in another creek and we had been splashing around when we saw 2 large black snakes in the water. We freaked and ran.

Then we got ice cream and went to a weird snake talk and a guy let a stick bug crawl on his face, but other than that it was a normal day.

P.S. The snakes We found out Weren’t poisonous

Somewhere down a long dusty Missouri road, without interpretable signage or a ranger’s protective care, grappling with our own competing needs, and all of us very, very hot, we stand beside a creek. We are assessing the creek’s potential to offer relief from tension, heat, and worry, hoping for a moment of memorable family joy. I am desperate to prove that this trip, the arduous miles, the minivan’s slow destruction, are worth it. We swim with snakes. 

The story of pain, first described by an ornery thirteen-year-old, will get told quite differently four years later by that same boy. With a changed perspective and new capacities, he tells it for a new audience in his “Snakes” essay for his high school writing class. My own essay, written a few years back, entitled “Erratic,” tells it slant, a narrative constructed by another, someone who was there, but looking through a different lens. He and I experience, interpret, and attribute meaning independently of each other, as is, increasingly, our way; both true, but each holding truths that are our own.

Our tumultuous family bonding treks create inside family jokes and some of my most uncomfortable, yet fondest, memories. I know our mishaps are actually what makes them valuable. This does not mean I am any less embarrassed by our family’s circus caravan.

Elliott is reading Garfield comics to us and we are all laughing, hard. Elliott at the portly feline humor, the rest of us at his infectious giggles and the between-us amusement that comics you can’t see just aren’t that funny. We are all a bit giddy, several rather disastrous days behind us. 

We have spent the past week jammed together into the family minivan, released only occasionally into open spaces on our desperate drive cross-country.

It’s hot outside the minivan, over 100 degrees, and a series of severe thunderstorms have been our traveling companions. In Pennsylvania, we dashed through green-hued air to take cover during a tornado warning. We did not swim in the West Virginia lake closed for high bacteria counts. In rural Kentucky, the high river water tugged at groaning guidelines as a tiny ferry labored to inch our minivan across. 

We are in Missouri, the heat is unbearable, the waters are high, an underlying cantankerous mood on the verge of surfacing. All I want is a good swim. 

The photogenic swimming hole I had steered us toward was closed due to dangerously high water. Seeking shade and a new plan in an open field, we stop beside an enormous boulder, bigger than our minivan, an erratic, I think to myself. I am familiar with large boulders precariously dangling from mountainside cliffs, jaggedly rising out of lakes, geologically out of place, brought to our Maine landscapes by ancient glacial movement. This boulder, a sign tells us, was brought here by water, not ice, and just three years ago during a flash flood.

Our difficulty finding a place to swim is as disorienting as the miles and the changing landscape between us and Maine, where temperatures are lower and swimmable water easier to find. Trying to avoid a heat-induced all-family meltdown, we eat lunch in a shaded picnic area. I pull out my camera and hide behind it, while I worry about whether this trip is working, my growing but currently wilting children, climate change, severe weather, and the unpredictability of nature and family dynamics. Elliott chases lizards through some bushes.

At the visitor center, we ask when the river might open again, hoping that if a flood can come on in a flash, then so might a draining. 

My mom finds rangers to be embarrassingly fascinating, and this one recommends we visit another spot. “Y’all will know you have gone far enough when you pass Hasty Cemetery.” Great little detail, Mrs. Ranger, really reassuring. 

I silently enjoy a young ranger’s use of the word creek, the word and pronunciation not Maine-speak, as she directs us to a place where the local teenagers swim. The word, the place, sound perfect, a road trip find.

It is the communal anticipation of this place, more than Elliott’s reading of partial information about the antics of a cat, that has this minivan in hysterics. 

Damp with perspiration, we drive for an intolerable amount of time.

We get lost three times, which I try to hide with stops for pictures of farmsteads, gorgeously sweltering in the sun. 

Finally, we park by said cemetery; despite its hasty nature, there is no sign of exposed limbs, thank goodness. 

I snap a picture of the Hasty Cemetery sign marking a small assortment of headstones tipping left and right, already imagining the scrapbook pages this afternoon will create, seeing humor in the role of signage today. 

Overheated, irritable, we cascade out of the van like the water we so desperately seek, into the intoxicating humidity.

I climb onto the bridge where I listen to the hot breeze above and the trickling water below. Elliott splashes in the shallow waters, leaping to a small island, rustling through its long grasses, and then grasping a small pebble and throwing it as far as he can. Jonathan, Nicholas, and Julia scramble over large rocks to the deeper water, their tight voices and moods easing. Julia tosses sticks into the current and watches them float downstream, down-crick.

Having unearthed a quiet sanctuary from the oppressive heat, we all are quickly in much better moods. 

This is why we are here, I think to myself.

The bottom of the creek is rocky, and boulders protrude from the water, allowing us to pick our way along them to the middle. I venture the farthest, tottering precariously on a sharp-edged rock. 

As they weigh a gradual entry against a sudden plunge, dancing to cool their feet on the sun-baked rocks, each of us sees movement, and we stare silently at something we have never seen before. 

From the bank’s thick undergrowth appear two quickly moving embodiments of an uncontrollable situation. Initially unidentifiable, visible first only as two ropes, dark and silent, incomprehensibly agile, they elicit paralyzing fear.

This is where we die, I think, as bliss becomes fear, these sinuous lines materializing into snakes.

Stumbling backward yet somehow keeping my footing, I execute the quickest route back to the bank in a rare instance of coordinated athleticism. 

I feel Elliott beside me, his hand suddenly in mine, and hear Nicholas splashing, scrambling, and screeching “Snakes!” I am unmoving and silent, processing what is happening, my eyes on the water, and on Jonathan and Julia, still down in the creek.

Their bodies slither muscularly, their heads above water, moving in a definite path toward Julia and my dad. The two of them clumsily entangle mid-leap in mid-air, falling with a huge splash, my mom’s gasp beside me louder still. 

I strain to find the snakes in the churning water and see they have stopped their forward movement, and then sinuously turn and move slowly back to the shadows.

Startled, the two snakes turn their ominous heads away. Julia and my dad half-swim, half-run the gap to the bank. 

Elliott and Nicholas take off running to meet them at the end of the bridge and they sprint, in a chaotic tangle, grabbing at each other, eyes wide, yelling nonsense, away from me. I am left alone on the bridge to watch the snake’s serpentine ride of the current until they are out of sight, and gone.

Sopping wet, we collapse in the cemetery grass, no longer worried about semi-exposed corpses. After spurting, gasping yelps, we all break into terrified laughter, our adrenaline and emotion expressed in a high-pitched frenetic family cackle.

We do what Mainers do when times are tough and above fifty degrees. We go for ice cream. 

That night, we attend our campground’s ranger talk, a thunderstorm approaching, not knowing the topic until we arrive: Snakes of Missouri. “What strange timing,” I snort, eyeing the five covered pails and the picnic pavilion’s metal roof. “Better here than in our tent,” I decide, as thunder crashes and hail pings off the roof.

What a strange place, I think. There are no dangerous snakes back home, only harmless garter snakes startled often by my children’s bare running feet. What a strange day, I think, waiting for the presentation to begin, a stick bug traversing a father’s face, his instinct to flick and gasp better controlled than my own.

I focus on the frizzy gray hair and reflective glasses of the ranger whose snake is nonconsensually in my usually snake-free bubble, wrapped menacingly around her arm. Since my sphere of anguine safety has already been violated today, I brush my fingers across the scaly skin, feeling the strength below. How could this strange woman and I have such varied ideas about the same creature? 

The ranger tells us about removing a large cottonmouth from the visitor center’s picnic area earlier that day. “What time was that?” Jonathan asks, feigning disinterest. “Around lunch,” she answers. 

We learn how to identify Missouri’s native snakes, their preferred habitats and behaviors, and that though there are very few poisonous snakes, their toxins ingested if eaten, the tall grasses and brush of Missouri seem to be slithering with venomous snakes, their deadly toxins injected by their fangs. I am processing our unseen cottonmouth picnic companion and the copperhead habitat where Elliott has been thrashing about for days when Nicholas interrupts my thoughts.

I blurt out, “We saw two snakes in a river. Their heads stuck out of the water.” She caresses the beast she is holding, the one I pet minutes before. “That means they weren’t venomous. If they were, their whole bodies would float on the surface. Like this guy, he’s chock-full of the stuff.” 

My eyes on that snake, I reach out and grasp Julia and Elliott’s shoulders a bit too hard. “Did you hear that? They weren’t poisonous!” We didn’t even almost die.

“Venomous,” they correct me, looking white around the eyes.

“Venomous,” I correct my falsely cheerful mother. I settle into a state of sarcastic amusement. “This is exactly the kind of day I was afraid we would have on this road trip,” I snicker with my mom, dashing through a downpour to our campsite, located beside the campground’s scenic pit toilet. 

Flipping through Julia’s journal from the road trip, I find her entry from Day 12: “We were all a little scarred.” Was it a spelling mistake or intentional profundity?

I’ve always wondered if we ruined nature for our children. If the bug bites and scrapes, the chaotic retreats down mountain trails as lightning flashed, the frantic singing in bear-filled woods, the swimming in snake-infested waters may have caused more fear than ease.

“So. Anguine.” I say to Nicholas, raising an eyebrow, having just finished reading his essay. 

He smirks. “I looked that one up.”

“I needed to look it up, too,” I admit. “It’s a good word.”

Anguine: of, related to, or suggestive of a snake. Not just another word for a snake, this word speaks to the perceptual experience of an initial ambiguity, the movement from nothing, to perceived, to being. From ripples in water, to snakelike, to snake. An evocative moment, when looking into murky water or out at the next unknown, searching for something true about yourself. When we experience the first pricklings of awe, change, loss, or fear. When we realize we have no control, should have no control, in a place, over a being, over the meaning they create. When we draw upon a richly textured landscape full of shadows, patterns, memory, and disruptions to what we thought we knew. Moving from unknown to known, from lost to aware, from fear to strength, from uncertainty to purpose. Only then can we begin the process of growth, of defining, or redefining, ourselves.

Soon after I read Nicholas’s essay, I am standing beside him, gazing out at a familiar vast woods and line of mountains beyond. When our tour guide asks him what he thinks he might study in college, I am surprised by his answer. I whisper with him as we walk across a campus where so much of myself was defined, of which so much, these many years later, is being redefined but still pulled from the same swirl of truths. “So, environmental science?”

He smiles sideways. “Yeah, well, I had to come up with something. I really have no idea. But Earth has a lot of problems that someone needs to help. It might as well be me.”

Sometimes it takes a couple of snakes in the river to jolt things, vividly, into perspective.