Even out here in the sun-bitten intersection of the Sonoran and Chihuahuan deserts, where snakes are as common as dust devils, eight snakes in one day caught my attention.
The keen winds that sweep the valley between the Chiricahua and Peloncillo Mountains can make slithering along the ground on your belly seem like a reasonable way to get around. Spring and fall gusts can wobble mere humans, but snakes just hug tighter to the ground. Like prickly pear and cholla, snakes are icons of the southern Arizona landscape. Thirteen of the 16 species of rattlesnakes in the U.S. live in Arizona. But even out here in the sun-bitten intersection of the Sonoran and Chihuahuan deserts, where snakes are as common as dust devils, eight snakes in one day caught my attention.
Mountain Time: A Field Guide to Astonishment is an essay collection that explores the inner and outer natures of remarkable human and nonhuman beings. It is a book about paying attention—with the mind and with the heart. The essays confront the ethical and personal challenges Renata Golden faced in a harsh and isolated environment and examine the power of nature to influence her understanding of the human spirit. The lessons she learned on the borders of Arizona, New Mexico, and Mexico jolted her out of her customary way of seeing the world—which is the transformative power of a thin place, where the borders between the sublime and the profane melt away.
Not all the snakes I saw that October day were alive, and not all were rattlers. At sunrise I noticed movement in the pine outside the bedroom window. A four-foot Sonoran whipsnake—a greenish-gray nonvenomous snake with a white underbelly and a slender head—was making a vertical ascent along the trunk, using only friction and muscle to cling to the bark. It was a remarkable accomplishment, considering that neither the trunk nor the snake had limbs. I watched awestruck until the snake settled into a crotch of the tree, level with the tiny balcony off the second-floor bedroom. Minutes earlier I had been sleeping 20 feet away with the glass door open wide. The fact that snakes could climb trees caught me by surprise. I knew from this day forward I would move through the world differently, watching under my feet and above my head simultaneously, reevaluating what is safe.
Ophidiophobia. Fear of snakes, which can manifest as that queasy feeling at the thought of being close to one, or worse, actually touching one. The belief that snakes are slithery, slimy creatures that are better dead. Not all snakes are dangerous, although their reputation suggests otherwise. The world’s largest religions blame the serpent for the original couple’s eviction from paradise; Christianity, Judaism, and Islam all cast the snake as a shrewd liar who promised Eve that through her loyalty, her eyes would be opened. By realizing their capacity for evil as well as good, the couple became more human. There is no reason to blame the snake for its knowledge of our most basic nature.
On that October morning, I carried an early breakfast of toasted homemade bread with farmers’ market jam to the back patio that faced the canyon. I sipped black coffee and watched shadows melt down the Chiricahua Mountains in Arizona as the sun rose behind me over the Peloncillo Mountains in New Mexico. Liquid orange poured down from the Chiricahua ridgeline, spilling over boulders and crags, painting the face of Portal Peak. It was a spectacle guaranteed to impress, and it occurred every morning.
I limited myself to a single cup of coffee to get ready for another spectacle—the annual international Quarter Horse race in a corner of the Malpai Borderlands that straddles two states and two countries. Before the border wall and before Homeland Security money funded an extravagantly oversized facility on the border at Antelope Wells, just a five-foot wire fence divided New Mexico from Mexico. Every October, visitors on both sides enjoyed a program of two-horse races along a dusty quarter-mile track. In each race, one Mexican horse and jockey raced one American horse and jockey, with the fence running between them. The riders were local cowboys and the horses were working quarter horses and cow ponies. There was no betting window, no public address system, no photo finish replay. Pesos and dollars exchanged hands; punters gathered at the finish line to call the dead heats. After the results were settled over a beer or tequila, it happened again for the next race.
Malpai. A bastardization of “mal pais,” the Spanish words for “bad country.” A terrain known as desert pavement, formed after centuries of wind scour off layers of sand and dust, leaving a smooth crust.
I tore myself from the view to grab the laundry from the washer. Here in the desert, I took advantage of the heat and hung my clothes on a line strung between poles behind the house. When you’re carrying a full laundry basket, it’s hard to see your feet. A gopher snake, however, had a clear view of me. It had ventured from underneath the house and curled into a cozy coil in front of a clothesline pole. Gopher snakes are friendly, nonvenomous snakes that do an excellent job of rodent control. They also perform a brilliant impression of a rattlesnake when they are about to get stepped on. There is no mistaking that sound—I could hear it even as I screamed, dropped the basket, and sent wet clothes flying.
I reflexively reached for the snake stick I bought on eBay. The contraption resembled one of those devices designed to help shopkeepers retrieve a small item from a top shelf—a long aluminum pole with padded calipers at one end, which you closed by squeezing the handle at the other end. I kept it handy during snake season from April to October. The end of the season, August through early October, is the snakiest time, as baby snakes—neonates—venture out on their own and adults scout for enough food to last through hibernation. I positioned the tongs behind the snake’s head and squeezed gently while carrying the hapless snake outside the yard. Still shaking, I gathered up the muddy laundry.
Defensive behavior. A protective response to a perceived threat. A scared gopher snake can hiss loudly enough to be heard above any ambient noise, like boots on gravel or wet laundry falling from a basket. The snake can also vibrate its tail fast enough to sound like a rattle. They sometimes flatten their heads trying to take on the triangular shape of a rattlesnake’s head, but this can be difficult to see when you yourself get into defensive mode.
Just a week earlier, I discovered that a gopher snake, no doubt the same one that surprised me by the clothesline, had shed its skin along the edge of the concrete porch. It left behind an entire intact tube of supple snakeskin, complete with eyes and open mouth. The snakeskin was warm and weightless in my hand, slightly damp, unexpectedly luscious. Unlike a tanned hide from a dead snake—the kind used for belts and boots—a shed skin dries quickly when exposed to the elements and within minutes becomes so fragile it can be torn by a breath. For a week or two, the snake wears two coats at once, until built-up fluids and enzymes allow the old outer layer to separate from its fresh, clean body. The snake then shimmies out of the tight sheath that no longer fits, which stretches slightly as it peels off. If I had come across the snake minutes earlier, I would have discovered not a scary serpent, but a creature made vulnerable by allowing itself to grow.
Ecdysis. The process of shedding one’s skin in one continuous layer. Several times a year, a snake grows a new layer of keratinous scales under the old layer, which turns opaque. Each layer of shed skin leaves behind another segment in a rattlesnake’s rattle. The number of segments won’t tell you how old a snake is, however, because snakes shed their skins at different rates as they age, and rattles can get broken off. But I doubt you want to get close enough to count them, anyway.
I was hanging the last of the newly rinsed laundry when the frenzied birds in the yard began to screech and feint. Their reliable warning system always signaled snake. A three-foot Mohave rattlesnake was winding its way from behind a mesquite tree about 40 feet from where I stood. A bite from a Mohave is ten times deadlier than a bite from a Western diamondback because it has two types of venom. When you’re bitten by a Mohave, you’re first attacked by a neurotoxin that paralyzes you before the second hemotoxic venom kicks in. Western diamondbacks, on the other hand, have only the single hemotoxin that destroys blood cells and tissues. A woman in Horseshoe Canyon once stepped on a Western diamondback in her yard late at night. She had lived in the Chiricahua Mountains for 20 years and knew better than to walk at night in sandals, but probably thought Just this once and I’m not going far. No moon lit her way; the nearest streetlight was the one in Rodeo, New Mexico, eight miles away. After hours of throbbing pain, she took an expensive helicopter ride from an emergency room in Douglas to a hospital in Tucson. The next time I saw her was at a community potluck to introduce three new Border Patrol agents. She walked on crutches with one foot wrapped in bandages; on her other foot she wore a sturdy new work boot. She said the experience was a lesson in being present and moving with awareness. She carried no malice toward the snake; rather, she said, her connection with the desert would only deepen as her foot healed. My lesson was to carry a brighter flashlight and wear sturdy work boots.
When I spotted the Mohave, I reached for the tongs again before I realized I had reached the limits of my courage. Instead I called Barney, a retired herpetologist in Cave Creek Canyon, who was doing research on the relocation of “nuisance rattlesnakes.” After years of moving snakes from harm’s way, Barney’s findings showed that a rattlesnake knew its home range intimately and seldom left its self-imposed boundaries, unless forced.
“Do you think I can somehow corner the snake and keep it from running away until you can get here?” I asked, sounding braver than I felt. “Don’t worry,” Barney replied. “I’m on my way.”
Mercifully, Barney arrived within 15 minutes and the snake hadn’t moved far. Using his extra-long, heavy-gauge metal tongs, he deftly caught the snake and loaded it into a thermal lunch box. Barney thanked me for my donation to his research and waved as he drove off with the rattlesnake sitting beside him on the front seat of his pickup.
According to Barney, rattlesnakes frequent the same hunting and hibernation sites year after year. It used to be thought that if a snake is removed far outside its usual home range, it would wander erratically, exposing itself to predators and other dangers, trying to find its way back home. Old school science presumed that any snakes relocated far from home would die within a year, unable to adapt to their new environment. New technology with surgically implanted radio transmitters offers new data to show that most snakes will either find their way home, if not moved too far, or will settle into their new surroundings. It’s as if snakes determine their value of home by weighing the price of safety against the pull of familiarity.
Some say that not until we become truly frightened are we able to take steps toward change. Is that a gift from our fear? Here in the landscape of snakes, I welcomed their messages.
Keratin. A rattlesnake’s tail is made of hollow, interlocking segments of keratin that the snake can shake up to 90 times a second. The rattle is designed to send a danger signal to intruders, persuading them to stay away. A rattlesnake would rather scare you than bite you. It costs a rattlesnake significant energy to strike—energy it would prefer to expend on more important things, like catching a meal in a drought-stricken landscape.
In her memoir The Turquoise Ledge, Leslie Marmon Silko writes of the rattlesnakes that lived under her furniture. Raised at Laguna Pueblo in New Mexico, she believes a snake is a messenger from the underworld, carrying communication back and forth. The message a snake brings, she writes, is to prepare for change. Snakes don’t care whether I am a believer or not; they carry the power of their message regardless.
Brilles. Transparent scales snakes have instead of eyelids to cover their eyes. Snakes can’t blink; they sleep with their eyes open, giving the appearance that they are ever-vigilant. When a snake sheds its skin, it sheds the brilles (referred to as “eye caps” or “eye shields” by herpetologists) as well.
Silko wrote that it is possible to be a friend of snakes, that the rattlesnakes that lived under her house in Tucson learned her and her dogs’ routines. She said they understood that she meant them no harm. In return for her acceptance, arrowheads and pieces of turquoise began to appear as gifts on her doorstep. Some say that not until we become truly frightened are we able to take steps toward change. Is that a gift from our fear? Here in the landscape of snakes, I welcomed their messages.
Decline. Snakes in Arizona are in a slow but steady decline. Drought, fires, and habitat loss contribute to smaller population numbers and reduced movement in an already narrow range. Poaching also contributes to their decline; rattlesnakes can fetch hundreds of dollars on the black market, despite the fact that they don’t make very good pets.
I left my house at noon, aware that the races wouldn’t start until the heat of the day had faded. I drove the five miles down Sulphur Canyon Road across the Arizona state line, then passed the turnoff to Cave Creek Canyon and headed east into the New Mexico bootheel. Around Hachita I aimed south through the Playas Valley on the eastern slope of the Animas Mountains. The road stretched flat and straight, dipping into an occasional dry wash. Signs that once commanded “Watch for water” had been edited with spray paint to implore passersby to “Pray for rain.” A mosaic of sotol, agave, and century plants bristled among the lovegrass and snakeweed. Irrigated fields dotted the base of a ridge; a small herd of pronghorn grazed in the distance. The asphalt road sang a monotone under the tires of my SUV. First one then another live Western diamondback watched me from the verge as I passed; a mile further lay a dead one, smashed by a pickup truck and pecked at by turkey vultures.
People go out of their way to drive over snakes and take special delight in running over rattlers. But even a dead rattlesnake is dangerous; because of its slow-to-respond nervous system, a snake can bite for a full hour after its head has been severed from its body. Rattlesnakes are not aggressive, but will strike if kicked, kissed, or poked with a stick. In the United States, 8,000 people are bitten every year by venomous snakes. Most of the victims are drunk at the time.
Ridge-nosed rattlesnake. The only U.S. rattlesnake species listed as endangered by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service; a subspecies, the Arizona ridge-nosed, is protected in Arizona. It lives in mountain ranges in southern Arizona and New Mexico. Another subspecies, the New Mexico ridge-nosed, is found only at the bottom of Indian Creek Canyon near Animas Peak. Biologists searched for the snake in this remote canyon in 1974 but after several months found only 11 individuals. Indian Creek Canyon is so remote and rugged there are no plans to update the survey.
As the odometer ticked off another mile, the mesquite grew further apart, exposing bare rock and sand. Greens and blues went missing; distant peaks appeared burnt and raw. The colors of the landscape seemed pulled from a single tube of sienna, the pigment of prehistoric cave art. The way I drove morphed, too. Instead of staring through my windshield, intent on my destination, I slowed down, swiveling my neck and marveling at the landscape. I slowed to a crawl as another dead diamondback paralleled the edge of the pavement. Grateful for the lack of traffic, I wished for a bumper sticker that read “I brake for snakes.”
Thirty minutes later I arrived in Antelope Wells, the smallest and least-used U.S. border crossing into Mexico. Population two, its only inhabitants were Customs and Border Protection personnel, who lived in trailers behind the crossing station. A uniformed agent waved me through. On the Mexican side, federales with automatic rifles stopped me to ask where I was going. I explained in Spanish that I was there for the horse race and their side looked like more fun. “Quiero ir a la fiesta,” I said, looking past them for the party. On the American side, ranchers backed their pickups perpendicular to the fence and sat on their tailgates, boots dangling over the edge, to watch the races. On the Mexican side, roving musicians worked the crowd while preteens danced to rancheras and corridos from a boom box on a makeshift stage. Expressionless, the federales allowed me to park.
I wandered through the small crowd of women selling burritos from camping stoves and vendors hawking cervesas from coolers. A girl with a single long braid charged me one American dollar for a toasted quesadilla smothered with green chile, wrapped in foil and nestled in a flimsy cardboard bowl. Bottled water was not offered, so I opted for a lukewarm strawberry soda. I stopped to put the bottle between my feet so I could grab my quesadilla with both hands. In front of me paraded a father walking a pony that carried his tiny daughter, whose dark curls tumbled from a red headband with an enormous purple bow. The father passed the lead rope to his young son, who took his turn piloting the pony. Three ranchers leaned on the edge of the wooden stage, comfortable in each other’s company. Each man wore clean new jeans, a crisp white shirt with snaps, and neon orange or lemon yellow or lime green snakeskin boots with matching snakeskin belt and hatband. Their summer Stetsons tilted toward each other as they shared stories about the weather, the land, its people.
I envied their apparent easy sense of belonging to this place. After a year of living here, I was growing to love the mountains and the communities that called these mountains home. Neighbors depended on neighbors, but mostly they depended on themselves. Because the closest grocery store was a hundred-mile round trip away, I had learned to appreciate defrosted food. With only one restaurant and no auto repair shops or department stores—and with online purchases routed through the post office, who handed them off to FedEx, whose delivery schedule was erratic at best—I was shedding my consumerism like an old skin. But with the closest hospital a helicopter ride away and stories of snakebites and other accidents and maladies a common topic of conversation, feelings of vulnerability amassed with doubts about my capacity to remain here, no matter how much I loved these mountains.
I watched a few races and cheered all entries—winners and losers. Between races, a man in khaki work clothes groomed the finish line with a garden rake. Out here on the border, with no photo finishes or instant replays, the only way to call the winner of a close race was from the memories of the witnesses, the impressions in the dirt, the ghosts of what remained.
Ephemeral. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote that ephemeral things are in danger of disappearing. “It is very rarely that a mountain changes its position…. The thing that matters to us is the mountain. It does not change.”
As I waited for the next race, I was reminded of a book I have read many times. A little prince lands in a desert, surprised at its emptiness. The first living thing he meets is a snake. When the little prince complains that it is lonely in the desert, the snake replies, “It is also lonely among men.”
The little prince’s snake claimed to solve all riddles. The snake ultimately agreed to return the little prince to his home far away, but only when the little prince was certain he was ready. The little prince had already learned a secret from a fox, who said that what is essential is invisible to the eye. When the little prince realized he was forgetting how to love his planet and the living things on it, he knew the time had come to ask the snake to send him home. The little prince realized that even his mountains could change, and some things—including himself—could disappear.
Drought. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, average temperatures in Arizona and New Mexico have been rising and drought conditions have been growing more severe since 2000. As a result of changing conditions, scientists expect an accelerated rate of species extinction, especially of already-vulnerable species.
A warm wind raised coils of dust from my footsteps as I walked toward a lone shade tree at the end of the track. From the perspective of the finish line, watching horses and riders compete to be seconds faster than their rivals, I felt time standing still under a cloudless sky and a bootheel sun. The future of this annual event never felt threatened—I assumed it would continue as long as there were quarter horses and local riders with a competitive streak. Traditions are long-lived, I thought—they die hard. I didn’t realize they could be extirpated like a species facing the challenges of isolation.
After a year of living here, I was growing to love the mountains and the communities that called these mountains home. Neighbors depended on neighbors, but mostly they depended on themselves.
Antelope Wells. A border crossing so remote that the state authority hadn’t kept traffic statistics in years. But by 2013, a $12 million port of entry would replace the orange cones that I had navigated eight years earlier. The old wire fence would be replaced with a metal vehicle barrier inconducive to friendly competitions. The little girl with the dark curls and her brother would become part of a rapidly changing borderland. Their remembrances of pony rides and fiestas along the border would be replaced with new memories created in an age of infrared technology and walls made of steel bollards. A tradition of cross-cultural exchange and cross-border celebrations will have disappeared.
Shadows lengthening across the finish line signaled it was time to go home. There was no official program, so I had no idea how many more races, if any, remained, but I wanted to leave in time to catch the twilight. There was a small chance the two live Western diamondbacks might still be in the spot where I had passed them.
As I drove north from the border, the low western sun reflected a rose light across the valley. The more fiercely I examined the landscape, the more different kinds of borders emerged—between mountain and meadow, scrub and dirt, stranger and neighbor, old and new, present and future.
Then I saw a familiar silhouette—like a walking stick a hiker might have dropped, only significantly different—in the middle of the road. I stopped the car and lowered my window; the sun warmed my arm. The loamy scent of creosote filled the car. No one was behind me—hadn’t been for miles—and no one had come from the opposite direction for at least 20 minutes. I kept the motor running and my foot on the brake. The snake stretched its full length across the center stripe of the two-lane blacktop. Almost four feet long, it was a black-tailed rattlesnake, a species I had only seen in field guides.
I had never been alone before in the middle of the Badlands with a live rattlesnake, especially not close enough to watch it flick its tongue. A snake uses its tongue to gather chemicals from the air and ground, and then transfers those chemicals to an organ in the roof of its mouth where it processes the information. This snake was following a string of new data as it reached across the asphalt, tranquil enough to give me a good look. Its scales sketched a diamond pattern down its back and a dark mask crossed its face. Its blackish tail with a brown rattle at the tip was unlike the striped tail of a Mohave or a Western diamondback. Safely inside my vehicle with thousands of pounds of machine between us, I looked into the snake’s unblinking eyes. I thought again of Silko’s belief that friendship with snakes is possible.
The black-tail was in no hurry to go anywhere. Older and wiser snakes move away from danger without striking out; younger snakes are more dangerous because they’re unpredictable. Some herpetologists believe rattlesnakes rattle their tails not to warn off anything that comes too close, but that they shake from fear, the way most humans do in similar situations. Neither of us felt threatened, although a snake warmed by the sun can quickly recoil and strike if it wants to. The length of its rattle spoke of several years in this valley, but it was clearly unwise to the dangers of the road.
Hibernaculum. Winter home for snakes. Rattlesnakes are solitary animals that nevertheless spend the winter in communal dens, sometimes in large groups, and return each autumn to the same hibernaculum. A young rattlesnake stays with its mother until its first molt at one or two weeks, when it develops its first rattle and can defend itself. The young snake then leaves the den in the spring to forage and in fall follows adult scent trails back to the hibernaculum.
In the quiet of the empty highway, I listened for whatever message the day’s snakes were trying to send to me. If the snakes were warning me to prepare for change, I had more questions than answers. How can we solve the riddle of learning to respect our home, the planet, and the living things on it while watching its destruction at our own hands? Is it possible to shed our habits, like skins that no longer fit, of ignoring the essential things we can’t see? If extreme events bring about huge changes, what changes will humans be forced to make as temperatures soar, sea levels rise, and climate extremes become commonplace? And if we don’t change until we’re truly frightened, how much more convincing do we need?
A Swainson’s hawk was hunting low above the road. The hawk was considering the black-tailed rattlesnake for a meal and would have nabbed it if I hadn’t been so close. Flocks of Swainson’s hawks fly south through the New Mexico bootheel during migration season. Large groups of Swainson’s hawks sometimes gathered in newly mowed alfalfa fields where Sulphur Canyon Road met State Line Road, where pocket mice and ground squirrels were easy prey. I watched this hawk slowly gain altitude, catching a thermal. So effortless, so at home.
Slate-gray rain clouds swelled on the horizon. When I looked back at the pavement, the snake was gone. I eased my foot off the brake.
Read Renata Golden’s Letter to America in Terrain.org.
Header photo of Mohave rattlesnake by Steve Byland, courtesy Shutterstock. Photo of Renata Golden by Adrianne Mathiowetz.