Shucking Corn and Thinking ‘Bout Snakes.

For a July Saturday morning in Kentucky, this is one of the good ones.  About 7:00 am out on the front porch and there are just enough clouds rolling through the skies to provide cover from the early, hot summer sun.  There is a cool, sweet breeze coming in from the east and rolling down through the woods from the ridge above.  The Good Lord smiled on me and mine when he allowed us to be at this place, at this time, and not in some crazy place like…say for instance…Washington, DC.   After breathless coverage, 24/7, of the “Russia Thang”, a few minutes on the front porch on Saturday morning goes a long ways towards putting the world back in its proper order. 

More and more, our nation seems to be divided between its urban cultures and its rural cultures.  I fall squarely into the rural culture segment, but I will readily acknowledge the many wonderful benefits that go with the urban lifestyle.  I remember the television lawyer show Boston Legal where with each episode’s ending, William Shatner and James Spader would sit out on their high-rise balcony, cigars in mouth and drinks in hand, and gaze out over a gloriously beautiful skyline of the city at night.  A strikingly similar perspective is offered by the Amazon crime series Bosch where the lead character lives in a hillside, glassed-in home with a breath-taking view of the Los Angeles skyline.  Cities have their problems; but they also have their museums, varied restaurants, exhilarating commercial vitality, bars and pubs with live entertainment, headline acts performing on a year-round basis, professional sports attractions, and wonderful employment opportunities offering exciting and challenging career choices.  When people live and work in such close proximity, there is an undeniable spirit or essence that literally beats like a heart.  It rises up with the good times and aches terribly during the bad.  Unfortunately, the urban environments can also foster in many of their residents an attitude of superiority that trivializes much of the urban lifestyle and demeans the core luster of city living.  

Rural living has some downside too; but there is also much to be valued in the country.  There is a special worth to the spatial independence of rural living, the slower-paced and more personable environment that permeates everyday life in the country, being on personal terms with your children’s teachers or your family doctor or the Circuit Judge.  The really nice museums and restaurants might not be just down the block, but they are typically within an hour or two commute at most.  City parks?  My whole farm is a park for my grandchildren.  There are soreheads and bad characters in town and out; but at least in the country, most of them are well known and identified rather quickly.  And all that balcony skyline gazing that I previously mentioned?  I wouldn’t trade my front porch for both Shatner’s and Bosch’s night visions.  Even though the rural culture clearly cultivates a certain level of contempt for our city neighbors, I think we view city-dwellers not as an inferior species, but rather as a poor lot that has not yet discovered the glories of country living.  It is really more of sympathy than a dislike.  Man’s hand, through monumental courage, ingenious engineering, and sheer will to build, has created urban visions that can challenge even the most gifted imagination.  But any person who can experience the simple beauty and primal majesty of the deep woods, a pasture field or meadow, a crop field fully ripened, a stream running though the trees and rocks like a silver ribbon, a doe watching over its twin yearlings as they forage, an inland lake where the white tips of the waves plays tricks on the eye and gives glimpses of things not understood, the clouds wisping across a wide-open, clear blue morning sky or a star-studded and perfectly clear nightscape when the heavens seem to go on forever...well, that person must truly realize that this magnificent and wondrous balance of life and elements cannot be far removed from the hand of God.  Man may have built the skyscrapers and the bridges, the tunnels and the freeways, the dams and sidewalks; but he did not build the wonders of rural America that I have mentioned.

How great is it that we all have the option to live urban, rural, or at many of levels that lie between those two in this great nation?  If we, as a citizenry, could simply get over ourselves and our tunnel-visions and openly embrace the reality that where we live and how we live is a matter of liberty and a matter of choice.  It is not right or wrong; it is America.  Spader and Shatner saw the same things off of their balcony that I saw off of my front porch this morning; a glorious world created by God and given to us, by His grace, to enjoy and maintain. 

Now let’s turn the discussion to snakes.  There are two kinds of snakes in this world; the animal kind and the human kind.  Our attitudes towards both kinds are very irrational.  Not only that, but it seems that the irrational attitudes we hold towards each kind are somehow reversed from the order they should logically be in.  Let’s take the animal kind of snake.  There is a wide range of “snakey” places in this nation and this world, but on average, much of the country is not unlike my native Kentucky.  We have 33 species of snakes in my home state, with four of them being venomous.  Nationwide, there are annually about 7,000 – 8,000 venomous snake bites resulting in about 5 fatalities.  The biggest contributor to this sniping is the rattlesnake.  The point to be made here is that a bite from a venomous snake is rare; a death from a venomous snake bite is even rarer still.  Now if YOU are the one being bit, there is nothing rare about it; I’m just saying that there is a lot of stuff out there that is likely to get you before a venomous snake.  However, in most of the people I know, there is an inexplicable fear of a snake…any snake.  Very few folks have the expertise to distinguish the venomous snakes from the non-venomous snakes and many, many of those folks take the approach that all snakes need to be killed on sight.  What is it in a reptilian creature which is at most a few feet long, has no arms/legs/claws, is understandably more fearful of us than we are of it, and spends it waking  hours trying it’s best to stay out of our sight  that makes us view them as such threats?  Is it that old diabolical story going back to the Garden of Eden?  Is it the simple fear of the unknown?  Is it the prehistoric, somewhat mesmerizing appearance of the snake; so beautiful and so evil at the same moment?  I do not know the answer to this odd way we look at snakes, but I know that the raccoons, possums, groundhogs, deer, and rabbits have done a lot more damage around my place than any snake ever did.   

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Now the human kind of snake is a creature that should truly be feared.  These types come with all appendages and faculties that make the human the unique creature we are.  Unfortunately, they have that little “bent” in their character that makes them want to lie in the grass and wait for opportunities to strike.  It makes them say one thing to our face, and another thing entirely behind our backs.  It makes them promise one thing with the full intention of never following through and then going in a different, more self-serving direction.  It makes them pull those of us who are not as strong in character as we should be into the dark sides of the human creature and go places where we should never go.  Many of these of these people are the most evil characters we have ever known; people like serial killers, pedophiles, barbaric dictators, those who traffic in human flesh and the many others that prey on the weak and vulnerable among us.  We find these human kinds of snakes sprinkled in every nook and cranny of our culture and society.  From the community church, to the U.S. Senate, to the White House Administration, to the schools and day cares, from the rich and swanky world of the privileged, to the depths of poverty where many are imprisoned by circumstances beyond their control and others choose that level because it is the path of least resistance.  Now here is the part of this deal that I find so interesting; the same folks that will immediately kill an absolutely harmless 9 inch long green snake with a grubbing hoe will embrace the human snake.  They will sit down with them at a church supper.  They will contribute hard-earned dollars to their political adventures.  They will hold them forth as heroes, mentors, and examples of good living and accomplishment.  Many of our culture’s so-called role models turn out to be the human kind of snake.  And it certainly goes without saying that far more human tragedy is heaped upon our civilization by the human kind of snake than the animal kind of snake.  Now in all fairness, many of these human snakes are pretty damn devious and mighty hard to detect.  Remember what I said about the animal snake being mesmerizingly beautiful and evil at the same time?  Our human snakes are masters at showing us that beautiful part and hiding that evil part…aren’t they? 

I guess I will close my herpetological discussion by wondering this…How different might this world be if we took the same care to spot the human kind of snake as we do while walking through deep Kentucky woods in August and September and watching out for those animal kinds of snakes?  I do not advocate taking grubbing hoes to the WDC politicians or looking for group hugs with copperheads; I’m simply saying that a bit of equity and impartial observation might lead us to a more prudent threat assessment.