Author: Brad Zellar

My family’s been hunting snakes down around Lake Pepin for generations. My old man’s from one of the longest lines of snake hunters in the entire country, in fact. My mother’s own family was famous in those parts for creeping in caves, and the snake hunting, I gather, was sort of a natural off-shoot of the spelunking.

There were also shoplifters –chronic shoplifters– on both sides of the family. From my experience snake hunting and shoplifting go hand in hand. That’s just a plain fact, and it would do me no good to deny it. Everyone around there knew it as well, but most of my kin were such accomplished shoplifters that they were damn hard to catch nonetheless.

That said, snake hunters, I think you’d find, are for the most part pious folk, scared to death of the Lord God. I recall once asking my old man to resolve that contradiction for me –the compulsion to shoplift coupled with the fear of the Lord– and I’ll admit to being somewhat disappointed by what I took to be his lazy answer: “Let them who is without sin cast the first stone,” he said. My father could generally and reliably be counted on to come up with something more unpredictable and off-the-wall than that.

Snake hunters are also by and large proud Americans and in favor of just about any war at all. Make no mistake about it: if called upon they’ll serve their country proudly, and many of them don’t even need to be called upon. There’s not much money in snake hunting, quite honestly, and shoplifting can only elevate a man in the world so far.

At any rate, a disproportionate number of the members of my usual snake hunting posse would have American flag patches sewed on their jean jackets or baseball caps, and some of them had tattoos reflective of their generally hostile attitudes regarding belligerent foreigners.

So, yes, I suppose some of what you’ve heard about us is true: we’re bellicose folk, and we see our dogged pursuit of snakes as symbolic of God’s war with Satan here on earth. We’re not all cut from the same mold, though. We’ve got our share of non-conformists. Some of us like to do creative and even eccentric things with our facial hair, and you might be surprised by the distinctive taste in eyewear that is characteristic of some of our more accomplished hunters, not to mention the various sartorial idiosyncrasies you’d doubtless take note of if you were ever to actually come snake hunting with us instead of just getting your stereotypical and misguided impressions from the liberal media.

I close my eyes, whistle, and send the dogs off into the brush to see if they can scare up any words. I’m not sure how long I sit here –it varies, I suppose, from night to night. When it gets quiet like this, though, and I can’t even hear the rustling or baying of the dogs, I get a little bit spooked.

Some nights –more and more often lately– they’re out there a long time, traveling great distances across the barren fields. It’s March, after all, and the winter tends to drive language underground. It’s too dark, there are too many rough patches, and I’m too tired to run with the dogs, so I just sit here quietly with my eyes closed, waiting.

I no longer expect the dogs to bring back any stories or even paragraphs, and a sentence of any length would frankly be a surprise at this point. One night, I’ve no doubt, the dogs will finally disappear for good, but for now I’m grateful for whatever random, useless words they manage to drag back and drop at my feet. A ‘why’ or two, a ‘what,’ maybe a ‘mule,’ ‘moon,’ ‘river,’ or ‘road.’ A good night might net me a handful of multi-syllabic words: ‘casket,’ ‘donkey,’ ‘steeple,’ or ‘gasoline,’ although ‘gas’ is the more likely candidate.

At the end of the night, usually when the winter sun is casting its first bruise across the eastern horizon, I’ll gather up whatever words the dogs rustle up on their rambles, stuff them in a burlap bag, and tote them back home across the fields. I’ll then empty the bag onto the kitchen table and spend a couple hours moving the words around, trying with little success to make them say something.

I don’t suppose I can reliably claim that I have just seen, at four a.m. in the third day of March in the Midwest, the first firefly of the summer. That won’t, however, stop me from staking my claim. I see what I see, and the world can believe whatever the hell it wants.

I fell asleep briefly an hour ago, in my chair, and woke with a start (as I often do) when a phrase bloomed in my brain, almost like the way that ghostly little box pops up in the corner of your computer screen to indicate you have a new email message. On this occasion the phrase was this: But I am not a fleet of tankers.

From there the words will generally start drifting across my skull in random, almost spectral strands, like mist moving along a creek in the middle of the night. I had a brief image of an Amish farmer, standing at the window of his house in a dark valley, watching fireworks blow open the sky beyond the bluffs, at which point I noticed the firefly in the backyard.

Time seems stranger to me all the time. It seems to seize up in me. I have these odd experiences, generally during the daylight hours when I so seldom can tell whether I am asleep or awake. I used to think that during these episodes I was slipping into some sort of trance-state, or having an out-of-body experience. Now, though, I just accept them as real.

I’ll notice, for instance, that the clock hands are frozen, the second hand hanging in one place along the clock face. I’ll look out the window and see the old man next door paralyzed over a rake, or stranded halfway up a ladder, one foot suspended in space.

I’m not talking about blackouts or mere repetition or some combination of aphasia and amnesia. No, I seem to literally and consciously fall out of time, out of step with the rotation of the planet, if in fact the planet rotates (my ignorance is vast). I get yanked clean out of time for ten or fifteen minutes at a stretch. I can move through the silent house, pause at the refrigerator to pour myself a glass of orange juice, and drink the orange juice while staring out the back window above the kitchen sink.

If the clock stops at, say, five minutes to ten and remains seized up for ten minutes, within an instant of the resumption of its normal function the clock, and time in general, will have corrected itself. The clock hands will immediately read five minutes after ten, the old man will be bagging the leaves in his yard, and there will be no dirty orange juice glass in the sink.

There have been occasions where during these otherwise frozen moments I have fetched the newspaper from the porch, sat down on the living room floor and read the paper from front to back, only to discover fifteen minutes later that the hands of the clock have resumed their normal operation and the paper is back on the welcome mat outside the front door. At which point, of course, I go through the whole routine all over again, and from time to time notice small (yet nonetheless disturbing) changes in what I read moments earlier.

I hesitate, sometimes, to make these admissions, but I figure at this point there’s no sense in holding anything back.

I’d like, if I could, to correct a common misconception regarding Paradise. The animal sanctuaries are actually, in fact, offshore, a couple islands just off the coast which have been set aside for cats, primates, and horses. As with humans, however, not all cats, primates, and horses are admitted to Paradise, although virtue is not the determining criteria for these animals. To enter Paradise –or rather, to be granted eternal refuge on these Paradisiacal adjuncts– a cat, horse, or monkey has to have had the sort of relationship with a human whereby it was perceived by its human companion to have been in possession of a soul. Such relationships constitute what is offically called “Empathic Baptism.”

This is admittedly a rule that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but it’s been in place since the last major ammendments and revisions to the admissions criteria were signed into the Book of Law at the end of the 19th century.

Dogs are the only animals given a blanket pass to Paradise proper –good dogs, I should say, but there have been very few remembered examples of dogs having been denied admission. I have to admit that, being a dog person, I find this arrangement more than satisfactory. There are, though, plenty of people –equal rights animal rights activists, mainly– who carp about the issue all the time, but it’s the way things are in Paradise. This is essentially a very conservative place, where proposals for even minor changes are frowned upon and met with stiff resistance from the governing council. There are also, I should say, a lot of people here who have no apparent love for animals of any kind, and this is a constituency that is constantly complaining about the absence of meat from our diets. If we had a democratic system in place here and the matter of admitting animals was put to a vote I have no doubt that the animal lovers among us would be soundly defeated.

Certainly people recognize that if you open the gates to such animals as cattle and chickens and rats and the like you’re going to have a big problem on your hands in a hurry. The mortality rate and life expectancy of most animals makes any sort of concessions or compromises on this point problematic, to say the least. We’re already packed in so tight that social interaction is all but impossible. The streets are always so crowded that I virtually never leave my dormitory any more, and I’m forced to share my bed with the six dogs who spent most of their lives with me. It’s admittedly not the most comfortable of arrangements, but I guess that’s the price you pay for attaching yourself to other living creatures, and I wouldn’t think of making a fuss.

I had a neighbor for a time –a woman from Portland– who bitched so loudly and for so long over the refusal to grant an exception for her ferret that she was eventually shipped back to Purgatory until she learned to keep her yap shut. I can’t say I was sorry to see her go.

A man needs only to be turned around once with his eyes shut in this world to be lost.

—Henry Thoreau

Man will never find the end of the trail.

—Robert Hofstadter

Probe and rummage and ruminate all we want –through, past, back, forward, beyond, up, out, now— we can’t see through any of it, won’t ever get to the bottom.

We are each of us the tiniest of lockers crammed with eternity, in a cavernous depot populated by ghosts we can no longer recognize.

We can’t be trusted.

We come from nothing and go right back to where we came from.

We are nonetheless not done being made.

Get busy.

(inspired by Loren Eiseley’s The Night Country)