Northern Water Basilisk

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 ****.)