Report from Snake Island

Out of respect for the other ophidiphobes reading this, I’ll spare you a photo, but they’re right down there at the base of that half-dead tree.

We spent three days last month surrounded by snakes. First one – “There’s a snake over here,” said the teen – and then two, and then five. Banded in shades of black and brown and buff, the largest maybe four feet long and three inches in girth, these northern water snakes were not venomous or aggressive, or terribly interested in us at all. They lived in a burrow under an old tree at the edge of our island campsite in the Turtle Flambeau Flowage, and slithered out in the mornings to bask on the shore. Over the course of the day they moved and shape-shifted, coiling into snaky love knots with each other, following the sun’s warmth to the edge of the lake. One day the big one swam away, its head poking above the water as it skirted the shoreline, leaving a perfect “V” in its wake. 

I don’t like snakes. When I first saw the big one, following the boy’s pointed finger and expecting something small and garter, I shrieked and fled to the far side of camp. It’s not rational; I know they are harmless. But they disturb me, these serpents, so inscrutable in their serpentine ways. They have no legs, no warm-blooded behaviors, and few commonalities that I can map onto my own save that if you poke one with a stick it will hiss – not that we did that, give me a break. The last time I encountered a large snake in the wild, a long fox snake coiled next to the Stavkirke on Washington Island, where I was spending the summer failing to write a book, I dry heaved into the shrubbery.

But this day, I forced myself to go back and peer down the small slope beyond the hollow tree to the beach. I looked at the snakes to confront my revulsion, which is the same thing, of course, as fear.

We had canoed to Snake Island on a Monday afternoon, after leaving early in the morning from Kenosha and getting as far as Whitewater before realizing that we had forgotten half the food in the basement fridge. After turning around, we met up with my sister-in-law on the side of the road near Lake Geneva. Shaking her head and laughing, she handed over the cooler. The plan was to stay put, using the days to paddle around the flowage from this base camp. We weren’t going to move; I was just going to have to deal. Coming back the second day from gathering some firewood, we saw another big snake in the water, a salamander thrashing in its mouth.

There on the island we heard loons and kingfishers and crows. A bald eagle took wing on the regular. We made camp under a stand of oaks and I was bewitched by the perfection of every single acorn, taking pictures of them until my phone died. We set up our hammock between two of the oaks at the edge of a four-foot drop to the water. Down below, in the shallows, were dozens of empty shells and a few fish carcasses – evidence, we speculated, of some nearby otter. 

Diversions on this two-campsite island being limited, tracking the activities of our slithery neighbors became commonplace. “Snake report!” someone would idly call. “Oh, look, the little one went over by that rock. Now there’s only four; where’d the black one go?” And by the end of three days I was acclimated, reporting in as avidly as a teenaged boy.

When I went in for my first chemo treatment, the nurse joked that every time she approached me with the needle to access my port I cringed to the back of my recliner. Eleven months later, that same nurse unplugged me from my final perjeta drip and sent me on my way, mock apologizing for the lack of ceremony. “That’s OK,” said. “I’ve had enough drama for the time being.”

We all shift and coil to meet the shape of our experiences. On Snake Island I lost interest in the fear that once was a defining trait: “Hi I’m Martha: I love soup and circus, and I don’t like snakes.” There in this calm and beautiful place, my fear wasn’t cute or interesting, it was silly, an obstacle to my enjoyment of a vacation I wasn’t able to take this time last year.

One day, as we mildly observed the snakes, Paul looked up and said, “Oh wow.” I followed his gaze to the next little island over, to the shape of a canid at the water’s edge. Too small to be a wolf, its oversized ears tell us it’s a coyote. It stares back at us, aware it’s being watched, before slipping into the water and starting to swim across the channel to a new piece of land. As it paddles, I wonder about the life of this solo mammal that, having legs and eyes and teeth I am able to load up with projected goals and feelings. Does it just swim from island to island, looking for food? Does it ever get to rest and recover? Does it have a family? Friends? Like the big snake, its head slices through the water and I can’t see the “V” but I imagine it is there.

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I’m back! I hope you’ve all had a wonderful covid-surge-free summer. I’ll write again soon with reports from my amazing, revelatory trip to New York, and more. In the meantime, a quick note about islands. 

I love islands, from the San Juans of my childhood (still the most beautiful place on earth) to Washington Island, where I drifted that snakey summer, to the islands of Puerto Rico, where I have spent so much time working and playing these past ten years. The internal economies of islands fascinate me. These places to which access must be managed, where resources are limited, and the population is inextricably bound up in complicated community foster modes of creative living unique unto themselves. They are also unusually vulnerable, to climate emergencies and to the predations of 21st-century capitalism. 

I’ve watched in horror these past weeks as the catastrophic fires have consumed West Maui, a place I’ve only been once but at a formative time that remains fixed in memory. The fires may be out now, but as anyone who survived Hurricane Maria can tell you, the crisis is only beginning. Already we’re hearing reports of a chaotic response from federal and local emergency management, of recovery efforts strangled by red tape, and of vultures hovering, bundles of cash in their beaks, hungry for cheap land and water and the profits it might promise. Different island, same disaster capitalism. Meanwhile, residents go on solving problems themselves, banding together and helping each other, something celebrated as resiliency or “ohana” but also the pudding proof that in a colonized state, the government was never designed in their interest in the first place.

If you are moved to help, I made a small donation to Maui Mutual Aid and friends in Hawaii recommend the Hawaii Community Foundation’s Maui Strong Fund as well.