I brake for snakes

This past Friday I was driving along when I saw a squiggly vision on the pavement in front of me. A snake. Probably a black snake, but I didn’t really take time to examine it. I swerved and hoped for the best. I looked in my rearview mirror and gave a sigh of relief. I missed it.

I thought about turning around and trying to help the snake to safety, but I couldn’t figure out how to do that on a curvy two-lane busy road with no shoulders. It also occurred to me that I had no idea how to hurry a snake across the road.

I flashed my lights at the next oncoming car, meaning “be prepared to swerve around the snake.” Probably the driver thought I meant look out for the speed trap or the accident ahead or one of those rare, unmarked construction zones. I worried about that snake all afternoon. On my way home I looked for a flattened snake on the pavement and didn’t see one. That made my day. (I am easy to please.)

My childhood wasn’t full of little cages for bugs or buckets for frogs. I am quite content to leave these critters in their own habitats. I will carry a daddy-long-legs outside but call my other half to step on or otherwise take care of other spiders, especially the black ones.

I did come face to face with a vole once. I was kneeling, weeding the garden, and he poked his head out of the hole right next to me. That is the only time I ever thought voles were cute. They are marauders, pillaging my gardens like no other critter. Even the deer leave the roots alone.

Contrary to all rules of the road, I sometimes swerve to avoid squirrels. I know they are dumb enough to turn around and run the way I swerve, but all of my instincts – which are attached to my brake foot and my steering hands – converge at that moment to try to save the squirrel. So far, all squirrels have managed to miss my car.

I have never understood my instincts to save squirrels. They are rodents. They eat enough sunflower seeds to break our budget, and when they are bored, they chew on the deck railing. So my other half, after swearing it would not kill them, electrified our metal birdfeeder. It works, but every spring we have a new batch of adolescent critters to educate. It usually takes more than one zap for them to learn that no matter how enticing those sunflower seeds are, it is not going to happen.

Our very fashionable “water feature” becomes a frog pond every year. I can’t bear to assassinate all those tadpoles in favor of a clean pond. My other half has given in – or lets me take the blame for a murky pond. Then he doesn’t have to come across as a sap for frogs.