San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
ODE TO A TWOHEADED SNAKE
Rare reptile at the old Steinhart Aquarium was the communal pet of our imagination in the Bay Area
It’s a miracle 100 kids didn’t get lost every day at the old California Academy of Sciences.
The architecture style was early 19th century labyrinth, which seemed to follow M.C. Escher and “Inception” rules of physics. When I first went there in the 1970s and early 1980s, they just let the kids loose to wander aimlessly without iPhones or chaperones, trusting their homing instincts to make it back to the school bus at 4:15 p.m.
No one had a map. You’d enter the next room and it was a coin flip whether you came across the spiral ramp up to the hypnotically glorious fish roundabout (my first experience with meditation), or a far less exciting room full of minerals. There were live dolphins in Golden Gate Park back then. You never knew you were there until you turned a corner and saw them whooshing by at eye level in the floortoceiling Cal Academy windows.
Which is all to say, there was still an element of surprise to being a kid. And the greatest surprise in all of San Francisco was the twoheaded snake.
Everyone had different traditions in San Francisco back then. I went fishing in Lake Merced with my grandmother and we would seek out any concrete slides in the city, yet never ate at Doggie Diner. Some kids went to Golden Gate Park, some hung out at the piers. But everyone in the Bay Area went to the Steinhart Aquarium, and everybody knew the twoheaded snake. For about two decades it was the communal pet of the Bay Area.
Reptiles are already an otherworldly experience, a chance to reroute your brain into a prehistoric mindset. But the twoheaded snake was a journey beyond that into pure fantasy. The Cal Academy might as well have had Pegasus in captivity, or a leprechaun. In the realm of things that seemed possible in 1978, Kermit the Frog riding a bicycle made more biological sense than that twoheaded snake.
The snake had one of the smaller enclosures in an Lshaped bank of terrariums, but you always knew it was ahead by the closely packed kids gathered around. Like the Señor Sisig food truck, the crowd seemed to attract a crowd.
The snake — and this part may be pure imagination — seemed to love the limelight. With the approximate length and girth of a pair of jumper cables, it never seemed to go into hiding like many of the other reptiles. Tongues flickering, the twoheaded snake didn’t let its fans down.
Here are a few facts about the snake, from The Chronicle archive. There were at least two of them. Officials announced a baby twoheaded garter snake in 1966, that was apparently born at the academy and didn’t survive to see the 1970s. The second snake that most of us got to know was a gopher snake found by a Napa teacher in 1969 and brought to the academy. Both heads could eat and drink. The dominant right head ate a fullgrown mouse every 10 days. The left head ate baby mice. The snake was a survivor. A 1973 epidemic caused by a dysentery amoeba killed all of the pythons and anacondas and many of the smaller snakes. Twohead emerged unscathed.
By 1984, it was the oldest twoheaded reptile in captivity, exceeding the 12 to 15 years that gopher snakes can live in the wild.
When I last saw the twoheaded reptile in 1987 or 1988, while (barely) chaperoning kids at a Burlingame Recreation Department summer camp, it was already the Lawrence Ferlinghetti of gopher snakes. An academy official told me in 2009 that the snake was 22 years old when it died, ancient for the gopher snake and almost certainly still a record for twoheaded snakes. When the earthquakedamaged academy was razed and reopened in 2008, officials wisely complemented the full reboot with nods to the past. The Foucault’s pendulum, seahorse fencing, and … the floating carcass of the twoheaded snake, kept in what looked like a Costcosize Skippy peanut butter jar with the label pulled off.
(It was later replaced with a more tasteful photo display, which remains.)
There’s less of an element of surprise for kids in 2020, and that has been a good thing for the communal pet.
My kids talk about Claude the albino alligator at the Steinhart Aquarium, the star of the Cal Academy website, like he’s a member of the family. Webcams allow us to track baby animals in real time around the world. Social media allows us to share our interactions with the freeroaming coyotes and fencedin bison of Golden Gate Park, the goats of Children’s Fairyland and the seagulls of Oracle Park. (One seagull has its own Twitter account.) And if there aren’t enough animals in our lives, inanimate objects have been brought to life. #KarltheFog
But the twoheaded snake will always stand alone, in that everyone who grew up here remembers it while not being quite sure if the whole thing was a dream. From a time when all the answers weren’t at the tips of our fingers — and that let our imaginations soar.