Of snake and man: How fear can easily lead to conflict

My wife shrieked in terror from the front porch.

I hurried to find her, aiming for the sound of distress. I flung the door open and my wife rushed in past me. A large man was approaching, and my first thought was that he had frightened her.

But it turns out he was not the boogeyman. He was just delivering a package, and he set it on the porch with a smile. “Snake in the garage,” he said. “Huh …What?” I had left the large roll-up garage door open for a minute while I carried something into the house.

“You got a snake in your garage. I saw it go in there.”

I stepped quickly to the entrance just in time to see my slithery visitor — shiny black scales and a gray belly — disappear like lightning behind a large cardboard carton next to the wall. This guy was fast!

I think most humans naturally respond to snakes in a negative, visceral way. We’re afraid of them. Nature has implanted some sort of enmity between us — creatures who walk upright on two legs and those that glide forth on their bellies. The fear is rooted in our differences. I won’t say I wasn’t a bit nervous (I’ll use the word cautious) as I ever-soslowly peered behind the cardboard carton.

The snake looked like a pile of dark rope, woven around itself like a loose knot tied by a lazy sailor. It didn’t move. The fellow was hiding, I thought, and probably hoping for the best in this encounter with a huge two-legged beast he didn’t understand.

I have no idea about the degree to which a snake can reason, but I don’t imagine it’s a lot.

I’ve been around snakes before, mainly when I lived in the rocky desert mountains near San Diego, California. In that area, it was rattlesnakes — and lots of them.

I read books and observed, learning their habits and their warning signs. The more I understood, the less irrationally fearful I became, though healthy caution remained. Rattlesnakes are, after all, venomous.

I encountered dozens of the reptiles on my mountain. Once, a goodsized rattler even got into my house, maybe intending to cuddle in bed. Believe me: that was exciting!

Rattlesnakes were not mysterious, but I had no idea about the black-and-gray snake in my garage. There are many benign species in the world. Was this one lethal or harmless? I didn’t want to find out the hard way, so I retrieved a shovel and held the blade over the coil behind the carton.

I knew the snake could come to life in a fraction of a second, wreaking God knows what mayhem. All I had to do was plunge the shovel downward.

I’m glad I didn’t. Instead, I voted for life, for peace with my fellow creatures. I wanted to know more about this one, not take his life out of fear. So I put the shovel down and went to my computer.

I found the species right away — a black racer, which is common where I live. It’s not venomous and it shies away from people. It eats frogs, which are abundant in the creek below my home.

And so I determined to guide the snake out of the garage and back into the woods. It must have had the same idea because I returned just in time to see its black tail whipping into the tall grass outside. And I was glad.

Reflecting on this experience in light of today’s geopolitical turmoil, it occurred to me that the gulf of understanding between a snake and a man is at least somewhat understandable. We live in alien worlds.

How much easier it ought to be, then, to find common cause with members of our own species, with whom we share so much.

Yes, we have legs! We also have big brains, opposing thumbs and an appreciation of beauty. We are capable of organizing to act in unison. We have the ability to love our mothers (something I daresay snakes lack).

Differences of culture and language among humans are trivial compared with what they have in common, yet these differences somehow divide us to the point of war. I don’t get it.

The story of mankind is ultimately a sad one, a tale of lost opportunity. We share a common heritage — a little planet in the vastness of space upon which we somehow came to live — and yet we find it difficult to get along, to protect our interests as a species, to live in peace, to look beyond our local patch of ground.

Instead, we turn to the shovels.

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CAO YIMING / XINHUA A resident casts a crayfish net at an agriculture and marine demonstration base in Shangtang village, Wuxuan county, Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region, on Wednesday. The base, where rice is also harvested, is expanding income channels of rural residents and helping them to escape poverty.