Driving out the snakes (Part One)
The first thing the snake guy says to me when he gets out of his minivan is “I’ve got a snake with me. Want to touch it?” There’s something about the way he says it that’s insinuating and just a little dirty. I must give him a look because he says “OK. OK. Too soon right?”
“Yeah,” I say. “Too soon.”
We’re standing in front of the 1895 Queen Anne-style Victorian two-story that my husband and I purchased a month and a half before. The house has a smug feel to it, the fish scale siding that nestles against its high peak glinting in the mid-afternoon sun, its many windows blank eyes watching for our next move. It’s a Sunday afternoon, forty-six days after we signed the papers that transferred this house and its six acres into our possession, forty-six days after we discovered that the dwelling we thought we had purchased—a simple but elegant farmhouse tempered by age but lovingly cared for over the years—was, in fact, something entirely different.
My back hurts. A bitter scrum of plaster dust coats my lips. Blood pounds against my skull, and my hands feel swollen, as though the gristle under my skin is straining to break free. The snake guy, on the other hand, appears fully functional. He bounces in place. He talks a mile a minute. He’s easily a full inch shorter than me, and I reflect on how hard he must work to find dates—what with the double whammy of a genetic height challenge and his love of reptiles. I’m being uncharitable, I know, but lately, I find it hard to remain positive about anything. Just the week before, I had sent an email to a former student saying, “I’m in the middle of a shit-storm over here in Madison. If it’s not one thing, it’s another.” That’s the closest I can come to describing what’s happening to us.
The snake guy claps his hands and rubs them together. He’s taking in the scenery around the farmhouse—our tall white barn with its lean-to garage, the pile of discarded carpet mounded in front of the garage door, the winding path up to the front porch that has a baby elephant-sized pile of black contractor bags mounded on it, and just down the hillside from the house, the massive pile of splintered floor and trim boards.
“What a place you’ve got,” he says. “I love the view.”
That’s what everyone says when they come to our farm. That’s what we said when we first saw it. That’s what we still say. We talk about the view from the front porch for hours—about how the sun creeps over the ridge and across the valley in the morning, about how the sun blazes down into the tree line in the afternoon burning itself out into pink traces, about how the redtail hawks that live in the forest on the ridge love to play tag in the wind, about how the sun floods the interior of the farmhouse with a delicious glow. The view, we agree, makes up for a lot of disappointment.
“Thanks,” I say. “The view really sold us on the place.”
My husband walks out of the house now and down the path toward us. His hair sticks up mad professor-style, and his respirator dangles around his neck. He pulls a glove off and sticks a hand out toward the snake guy. I introduce them formally—Tom, Jesse, Jesse, Tom.
“How many acres do you have?” Tom asks.
My husband coordinates the numbers in our household, so he starts rattling off the acres and dimensions and other pertinent details about our land. I know some of them by heart—5.97 acres, 720 feet on one side, 920 on the other, $50,000 in unexpected repairs—but there are others that mean nothing to me. The twenty-some contractors I spoke to and rejected in the first bleak days after we realized our mistake, the $8,190 our buyer’s agent earned when we bought the farm, the amount the sellers have offered for remediation. These numbers are pointless, a constriction in my throat, a useless exercise. If I stay focused, if I block out these other numbers, I can make it through each day seamlessly and without pain.
Tom has adopted a patina of fascination for my husband’s sake; but I can see how his eyes are darting around the yard, looking for crannies and other dark hiding places that snakes love. My husband keeps talking about the house and the land, offering up details that only we are interested in, but I love him for his enthusiasm. He loves this land, this house, this barn, this life we are creating here in rural Wisconsin. He believes in it, and since I have trouble with this lately, it’s nice to know that someone still does; but I’m afraid we’re going to lose Tom if we don’t let him hunt down a snake or two.
“Do you want to see the living room now?” I ask, and I walk down the path toward the front door. Tom follows, sidestepping so he can face me while we walk.
“So, you think it’s a bullsnake,” he says. “I’m thinking fox snake. It’s almost always a fox snake around here. Bullsnakes are rare.”
“The neighbor says there’s a big old bullsnake living in the barn,” I say. “He seems to know his snakes.”
Tom gets a dreamy look on his face. “Maybe we’ll see it today,” he says. “If we’re lucky.”
I make a sound that measures in somewhere between agreement and disagreement. We’ve come to the front steps now, and I gesture to the bushes that flank the right side of the porch. “I know there’s a snake living in those bushes. I’ve seen in three times. I think it holes up in that crack there.”
“The porch could be hollow concrete,” Tom says. “He could be living there.”
I reflect on how anything is possible out here in the hinterlands of Dane County. We are a good 30 minutes from the city, and our neighbor has already informed us that the woods above his house rustle with snakes. Of course, possibility is the reason we decided to move to the farm in the first place. We had used up our possibilities in the city. Our yard was too small, our neighbors too close, our lungs too full of carbon monoxide. Our house in the city backed up to a 100-acre nature conservancy, and at night we could hear the coyotes calling to each other; but it still never seemed like enough space. We bought the farm for the raw what-if of rural living, and now we have it—more of it than I need.