Snakes and the Tree of Knowledge

This stop on the Camino a Ítaca takes us back to the swamps of Northern Florida, aquiring new skill sets and seeing the world through very different eyes. Read the original English below or click over to the published version in Spanish. Tambien se puede ver el original en castellano abajo en PDF.

I’ve always hated snakes. It’s a reaction that is as old as Eve but my personal dislike for them started when I was almost bitten by a rattlesnake while fishing with my grandfather in British Columbia. Years later, hacking through the dense growth in northern Florida with my friend Washington, every shadow reminded me of my grandfather flinging the rattler into the lake and watching it writhe as it sank into the pale green deep of the oddly named, Yellow Lake.

I’ve had many jobs in my life, starting at fourteen at Toys ‘R Us stocking Cabbage Patch dolls during the Christmas holiday rush. I’ve been an all-night radio DJ, a relic in something called a record store, an English teacher for heavily armed Yemeni tribesmen and a guitar player behind chicken wire in a bad Country band in northern Canada, just to name a few. But by far the most demanding job I’ve had was setting fence posts with Washington.

It was a time when I was between tours and desperately needed to make some money. I was sitting at the bar after the last gig of the tour, peeling the labels off my beer bottle in the humidity, when an older man sitting next to me suggested, “If you’re looking for work and don’t mind getting some calluses on your hands beyond those on your fingertips, you can come work with me.”

Northern Florida is about as far away as you can get from Miami. In smaller towns the racial divide is still illustrated by the train tracks that run through towns with Indian names like Suwannee, Ocala and Alachua. Early the next morning I waited by those tracks for Washington to pick me up and get to work.  

Over the next few weeks with him, I learned about more than just digging ditches. Washington knew exactly where alligators were most likely to be, as well as the lethal Water Moccasins that made their nests, but he also knew how to read people and navigate sticky social situations quickly. 

“Aren’t you afraid of snakes?” I asked one day as we waded into yet another swamp. “No,” he replied, “the snakes here ain’t nowhere near as bad as they were back in ‘Nam.” The fact he was in the war didn’t surprise me. He was about the right age and a disproportionate amount of Blacks were conscripted.

“When were you drafted?”

“Drafted? Not, me. I wasn’t drafted, I joined up back in 1965.”

“Really? Did you want to go to war?”

“Man, how was I supposed to know there was a war going on!? I never knew a place called Vietnam existed, let alone the Vietcong. Do you think those white men were going to tell me I had to go overseas and shoot at them people when I joined?”

I often think of Washington, whose wisdom guided him well but whose life could have easily had a premature end due to a lack of information, or worse, information that was purposely withheld from him. Then I think of the tanned, smiling people coming back from summer holidays bragging about how out of touch they have been and how happy they are and I remember something else Washington told me as he paraphrased the great Muhammad Ali.

 “Snakes aren’t mean, they’re just doing what they gotta do, it's their nature. It’s the Man you got to watch out for. If you don’t keep informed, his forked tongue will get you bit every time. They’re so mean they make medicine sick.’