Killing the Mama Snake

I’ve learned in the course of my long life that all things come at the correct time although never at the time I want. And so yesterday morning, as the weather chilled and fall comes on, I heard that my Mama Snake, the great old Western Diamondback Rattlesnake that has lived for twelve years outside the door to studio at Apache Mesa Ranch, has been killed.

It happened Friday, another day of heat and dryness here in our drought-parched high desert. My friend drove out to the ranch to take care of a maintenance issue: sediment has accumulated in the two big concrete tanks that are the only way to hold water from the well. Now we use them only for wildlife.

He took a plumber with him, an old friend named Raoul. Raoul like nearly all the men who work here is Hispanic, a skilled plumber, and I know the two men joked and enjoyed each other’s company on the ninety-minute drive south and east from Santa Fe.

The plumber was left at the ranch to drain the tanks and get rid of the sentiment while my friend drove off on other errands in Las Vegas.

When he came back an hour later, Raoul announced with pride, “I killed it for you!” and held up the six-foot-long mottled skin of my Rattlesnake.

It was a female.

I knew then I must write my story of this place. Not so much in terms of my twelve-year ownership and personal involvement with this ranch, but as a continuing story of the intersection of cultures here that seem to have no history or sense of conservation in common: the largely Spanish-speaking ranching descendants of the early settlers, the later-arriving Mexicans who often feel disregarded here as more and more escaping Anglos move in, and those Anglos, myself among them, who bring well-founded but often misunderstood new ideas (or new to other people) about the meaning and value of the natural world around us.

This includes, for me, the powerful feminine forces embodied in my Snake. The Divine Feminine is often symbolized by a great snake as in the Snake Goddess sculptures I saw in the Athens museum. They came from the great palace at Knossos on Crete, where some form of snake worship was practiced. But this is all foreign to New Mexico as it moves from being a largely agricultural state to increasing dependency on oil and gas and tourism.

I live here in a culture of dominance: man over nature, Nature Red in Tooth and Claw, and my mama Rattlesnake was dangerous, especially to tourists in sandals and shorts. After thirty years here, I’m not a tourist, and I’m well aware that my Mama Snake could kill me—the Divine Feminine is always closely associated with death. So of course I’m cautious. But my necessary caution doesn’t lead to hate or fear as it seems to do so often with women who shudder with alarm at mention of snakes—or spiders. And it’s not only women. On a rafting trip down the Colorado, we pulled off on a bank to explore some ruins. I wandered off and saw a true marvel of nature, a Pink Grand Canyon Rattlensake, coiled asleep. But when I ran back to tell the others, they were only concerned about the threat she posed and had no wish to see her, even at a distance.

Raoul who murdered my Mama Snake by bashing in her skull with a stick ( I hope she had time to rear up and hiss at him), skinned her expertly and devoured her that night in a stew. So at least she went to feed a human being, but one of the multitudes who believe we are put on this earth to exterminate creatures we don’t understand.

Then he nailed her skin to a board.

I do not know how I can spread my cloak of benevolence over my 1300 acres on Apache Mesa. All the men who do the necessary work of the place are Spanish speakers; the best workers in the world but deeply imbued with distrust and hatred of outlaw forms of life. When my Mama Snake’s eggs, which she had certainly already laid, hatch, how will I protect them from murder?

I don’t know the answer.

In New Mexico Apache Mesa