Woster: Stewing over a fear of snakes (2024)

As I rode a bike along the river bottom where we live, I encountered a big bull snake and immediately got a case of ophidiophobia.

Eighty years old and last weekend was the first time I knew that an intense fear of snakes has an official name — ophidiophobia. The article I read said the phobia may stem from a negative experience such as being bitten by a snake.

Well, I have never experienced a snake bite. If I go another 80 years without that experience, I won’t leave the earth thinking I missed something.

The phobia can also develop from “watching another’s fear and internalizing it,’’ the article said. That makes sense. Both of my parents were deathly afraid of snakes. They chose a poor place to farm, then, because nearby Medicine Butte supposedly had rattlesnake dens scattered all over its slopes. I saw the folks’ fear, and I know I internalized it.

I certainly reacted to the snake sliding across the gravel road during my weekend ride. I put a safe distance between me and the snake. I found a sturdy, long branch to brandish as I walked back to make sure I had identified the reptile correctly. I didn’t want it to be a rattlesnake, although I don’t know what I would have done if it had been.

In a loose coil, the snake eyed my approach. I read somewhere that snakes can smell fear. I also read that they aren’t smart enough to know what fear is. I have thought about that the past couple of evenings. I can’t decide if it’s a good thing or a bad thing, which makes me wonder why the author of the article mentioned it at all. I also wondered who first discovered snakes can smell things.

To cut to the chase, I identified the snake as non-poisonous (I hoped). It slipped and slid over the river bank into the rocks. With no harm done, I still found myself shaking gently as I pedaled home and put the bike in the garage. I recalled how my dad used to chase down every rattlesnake he saw and how he leaned against the Jeep and shook, drawing loud, ragged breaths, after he dispatched the critters. Like father, like son, except that my encounter ended with everyone unharmed, physically. Perhaps the snake lay in the rip-rap shaking, too.

My family isn’t alone in a fear of snakes. I read that movie actor Matt Damon has such a fear of snakes that he cried on the set of “We Bought a Zoo’’ when snakes were spread over the movie set. Whether that’s true or not, it gives me some comfort.

The same article quoted a Southern Methodist University study that suggested all humans have a genetic phobia to snakes. And it attributed that fear in part to “a long evolutionary history in which giant pythons preyed on people.’’ Well, OK, but wouldn’t it be the most natural thing in the world, if you lived where pythons preyed on humans, to develop a certain level of fear?

I said we lived on the prairie where rattlesnakes shared our piece of the land, right? When I became old enough to stack hay, my dad gave me many instructions. One of them was to keep an eye out for rattlers in the loads of hay being lifted to where I shaped the stack with a pitchfork. If I saw a rattlesnake, he said I should “take the pitchfork and toss it off the stack.’’

The first time I saw a rattlesnake sliding through a fresh pile of hay, yup, I took the pitchfork and tossed it off the stack. I threw the pitchfork one way, and I jumped the other way, leaving the rattlesnake somewhere in the stack. My big brother, Jim, had to go up and finish the job. He knew there was a snake somewhere, but he went, anyway. That’s courage, or lack of ophidiophobia. Or maybe he was just grateful it wasn’t a giant python.

I know that when I read about those human-chasing pythons, I was immensely grateful the snake I saw in the road was only a bull-snake.