What are you afraid of?

  Ever since I can remember, I have been afraid of snakes. I couldn’t tell you why that is. I mean, I know that I am afraid of snakes, but I have no idea what caused the fear to take root. Some itch in my monkey brain, I supposed. I think everyone secretly is afraid of at least one animal. Most people are afraid of animals like sharks, spiders, or some variety of large cat, because the reaction to avoid them helps us from an evolutionary perspective (“not dying” seems to be one of the most useful traits a species can have). But I’m not afraid of other animals the same way I am snakes; snakes hold a unique hatred in my heart. 

Nothing about a snake makes “sense”. Snakes are so fully dissimilar from anything else that their differences aren’t cute, they’re downright disturbing. Every animal I can think of uses some sort of appendages to aid with locomotion: humans and mammals use legs, fish use fins, birds use wings, etc. Even the weirdos of the animal world, like crabs, moles, and centipedes have some set of legs they can manipulate to move around. Snakes? Oh no. Snakes are an appendage. They move around (some at blistering speeds) by wiggling themselves back and forth like horizontal versions of the inflatable men you find outside used car dealerships. 

    But the “fun” doesn’t end there. Many use their body/appendage as a spring to coil and catapult themselves at unsuspecting victims, or to reach down from tree branches like an extended neck, ready to drop onto anything who happened to walk below. Not to mention that their tiny mouths often house fangs longer than their head is thick, which need to be stored in special fleshy pockets when not in use so that they don’t accidentally poison themselves. Snakes come equipped with a variety of poison/venom/whatever, including neurotoxins which can shut your nervous system down within minutes, and hemotoxins, which can either turn your blood into a soup and force you to bleed yourself to death or turn your blood into a jello-like putty that clogs your own veins within minutes. I hate snakes.

    When I was 13, I had my first (and only, thankfully) incident with a snake in the wild. I was walking down a trail alone back to my campsite, spaced out, when suddenly I felt that something was wrong and looked down. Not five feet in front of me was what looked like a little section of black garden hose, slowly unraveling itself. I am proud of how I reacted. I wasn’t “stunned for what felt like an eternity” like horror tropes would imply, I did a perfect turn-about on one foot and started power walking back down the trail I had come from (but not running, as I didn’t want to make myself look like prey). I took the long, 20-minute walk all the way around to the other entrance to our campsite, looking over my shoulder as frequently as possible to make sure I wasn’t being followed.

    I was so shocked about the incident that I completely forgot to tell my dad until that same snake made an appearance at our campsite a few days later, accompanied by a half-eaten frog. He was taken aback that I had seen the snake previously, but my description of it matched well enough that he believed me. We figured out the snake was a cottonmouth (though I refused to do any googling, so as to not expose myself unintentionally to any pictures of snakes), which are known to be some of the least “fun” snakes out there.

    I don’t know how or why I became so afraid of snakes, but it’s something I have come to accept. In a strange way, I share a sort of begrudging respect for snakes in how they have so thoroughly permeated my consciousness and made me so afraid. We have a love/hate relationship, in a way (which is dominated by hate, of course). I think it's healthy to have this sort of understanding of one's fear. It's better to accept it for what it is instead of cowering from it. 

-William King