"Snakes Alive!"

His kelly green frog Wellies hopped across the bridge before I had even gathered our things, a bucket and scoop net to catch crawdads and a cooler containing a picnic lunch; the boy knew the way well. "Wait for daddy," I shouted ahead. Grasshoppers scattered in his wake as the boy, impervious as ever to my commands, hurried onward. I wanted to walk in first where the trail to our favorite spot on the river narrowed before finally disappearing in a tangle of weeds. If someone was going to surprise a snake, better it be me. "Silas, wait for daddy," I repeated, louder this time. But his purposeful pace continued unabated, and I felt my shirt already grabbing me where the shoulder strap held the cooler to my back. It jostled back and forth like the sun-drenched blond tendrils that kept pulling further and further ahead.

The bridge behind us spanned a thin finger of the river. We were headed a half mile upstream. The river forked there, carving parallel waterways around a thin green island before its tines united just downstream from the bridge. The river island was our playground.

The boy paused at the edge of the weeds that stood between him and the rushing water and grinned back at me. Before he could disappear like Shoeless Joe into an Iowa cornfield, I played the snake card: "Watch out for snakes!" He pulled a Wellie out of the weeds and waited. As I covered the ground between us, I pondered the ethics of telling him that there may well be a nest of snakes under his bed, poised to strike if he gets up before 8 a.m. on a weekend morning. Snakes, apparently, garner more respect than dad.

"You can go first, daddy," he said reluctantly, and I cautiously tiptoed into the growth, more concerned about leaving leaves of three be than bothering cold-blooded reptiles. I pinned back the briars, careful to find a smooth length of stem, and ushered the boy through, then nimbly took my place back in the front of the line. I am the protector. This process repeated itself until we came to our last hurdle, an uprooted tree trunk that a once-flooded river had left like a privacy fence for the pebbled beach behind it. I wedged the cooler into a section of roots, put my hands on the trunk and sprung over like I was leaping a chain-link fence. I was in midair and at the mercy of gravity when I saw it. A cottonmouth had been kind enough not to make a liar out me.


Arms outstretched, Silas said, "Pick me," which is short for "I would like to be lifted over the log now." "Pick me, pick me," he repeated impatiently, but daddy moved only enough to outstretch a palm in his direction and issue a "shush" that was likely inaudible over the river. The words "no service" scrolled across my mind--my cellphone was useless out here--and I had visions of stripping away fabric from my t-shirt and tying them tight to stymie the circulation of my tainted blood. I imagined myself contorted into some Cirque du Soleil position to suck the poison out of my own bite. I thought about the snake I nearly stepped on as a child; I was straddling it, looking for the next dry rock to leap to in the creek bed, when my friend's eye managed to separate its camouflage pattern from the rock it was sunning itself on, the rock I was standing on. Having your friend point to the area between your legs and yell, "Dude, snake!" is awkward in any context, and it was certainly enough to paralyze me for a moment. But the snake remained coiled, never moving to strike. My calf muscles tightened. My toes dug in. Finally, I jumped free. We stoned it to death from the safety of the bank.

So here I am paralyzed again, though this time the snake, thankfully, is not between my legs, but a couple of feet away. All but its tail end undulates in the shallowest of water. The last two or three inches of its tail, wrapped around a water-logged branch on the bottom, is a delicate anchor against the current. The snake faces upstream, waiting on the river to serve its next meal. I wish this snake no harm, and hope it feels the same towards me. Its head is rigid despite the rippling of its body; its right eye seems trained on me.

And Silas is wondering what's wrong. "Daddy?" he whispers. "There really is a snake," I whisper back out of the side of my mouth, my palm still outstretched but my head turned away from him, monitoring the river serpent. My peripheal vision reveals a boy trembling from head to toe like he just moved from warm water to cold air. His eyes spread like the whites of an egg dropped in a frying pan. There is more excitement than fear. "Can I see?" he whispers. "Yes, but you've got to try to be still and quiet. Come here." My palm curls around; the two fingers left extended beckon him. He trundles to the trunk, and I slowly rotate my torso until I can get my hands around his. I stood him on the trunk, where he supported himself with an arm around my shoulder. We watched.

For several minutes the only sounds came from the running water and the rippling of tiny waves on the smooth stones beneath my feet. The water's shimmering movement, matched by the subtle swaying of the snake's dark bands, was all that stirred. Finally, with a twist of its tail, the snake pulled anchor, turned downstream, and let the river rush him away from this intrusion.