I spent last week at a lake in Maine with my family. This was our
fourth summer vacationing at this particular lake and our ninth summer spending a week
on a Central-Maine lake. After decades of experience in and around Maine lakes, we
had our first (and, please God, our last) encounter with a water snake.
On Sunday, our first day at the lake, Uncle Steve joked that a
water snake had brushed against his leg while we were swimming.
His joke was my nightmare.
Monday while my dad was on the lawn with my
parents' dog Sophie, she started lunging and Dad announced that Sophie had
found a large snake. I was in the water and did not fully process the
"large" part until I later got out and saw the snake from a
distance. I have only ever seen garter snakes in Maine. Garter
snakes are small and, as I have watched people pick them up and handle them, they do not seem very
scary.
The Maine Inland Fisheries & Wildlife website explains that garter
snakes' first reaction to a disturbance is to escape, but if they are
threatened and do attack, their bite "may be alarming, but will rarely
break the skin." The snake on the lawn was no garter snake.
Its body was thick and although it was coiled,
it was clearly quite long.
This was the
biggest snake I have seen outside a zoo and it was genuinely scary.
On Wednesday night, we came across the lake house guest book and discovered that
the guests from the previous week had seen a large snake swim by the dock.
Holy ****.
We couldn’t believe that the python we had seen on the lawn was a
swimmer.
Terrifying.
As I walked down to the water on Thursday
morning with my cousin Molly, I mentioned that I was completely freaked out about
the snake.
As we approached the water, I
screamed, realizing that the snake was on the lawn on the other side of the
dock from us.
It took Molly a minute to
see the snake and then she joined me in panicking.
USteve heard the commotion from up on the
porch.
When I told him the snake was
back, he could see it from the porch, which is a decent distance from the
water.
This snake is big, guys.
USteve joined us at the water’s edge. Thank goodness this lake house is private, because there was a ton of screaming
and swearing going on.
The pitch of our
terror increased when the snake slipped into the water and swam with speed and
agility.
Once we saw the snake uncoiled
in the water, we could see that it was three to four feet long.
Holy ****.
USteve was standing on the water’s edge,
closer to the snake than me and Molly, who had retreated to the end of the
dock.
While the snake was in the water,
Molly yelled, “It’s turning back around!” and USteve let out a booming “F” and
raced onto the dock with us.
At this
point, the chaos on the dock woke Ryan up and his face appeared at his
second-floor bedroom window.
We
explained/screeched that the snake was back and was in the water.
Not long after, Ryan came walking down the
lawn with a police baton in one hand and a butterfly net in the other.
Needless to say, he did not capture the
snake.
After a while, it finally retreated
up some rocks and into a patch of overgrown plants on the lawn.
I am pretty sure the fear I experienced that
morning shaved a few years off my life.
That afternoon, USteve started Googling “northern water snake,” as the
guests from the previous week had identified the hell serpent thusly.
The previously mentioned Maine snake site
calls the northern water snake a “very robust snake.”
(What a neutral way of saying that it is big and
scary.)
The site also states, “It is
known to defend itself aggressively and can deliver a painful but non-venomous
bite.”
Holy ****.
I wasn’t sure I would ever dare to swim in
this lake again.
The weather last week
was very rainy and I spent most of that precious sunny day anxiously
scanning the water line and rocks for the snake.
But I am a hero: I got
back in the water that evening and swam again the next two days. (I am a third-rate hero:
Usteve, Ryan, and my mum beat me into the water and I was on the verge of
whizzing myself for a good portion of my water time.) I now suffer from snake PTSD. I saw a garter snake on the lawn on Friday—a small,
non-threatening garter snake—and I screamed, swore, and clutched my dad as if
we were under attack by a rattler. He helpfully recommended I "get a grip."
Below is a photo my mum took of the snake the first time we saw it on the lawn. You cannot begin to grasp the
terror it inspires until you see it:
1)
In real life
2)
Swimming
It seemed much more basilisk-like in person. (Full disclosure, I just got the heebie-jeebies looking at photos of northern water snakes. Holy ****.)
