We were all eating lunch in the office at the last school I worked at when one of our students, Rani, came running in, breathless, his huge brown eyes in full panic to tell us that some kids were killing a snake out on the yard.
We all flew out after him. We had a stream at that school and there were garter snakes in it. The children had been instructed not to take the garter snakes out but, as sometimes happens, a few couldn’t resist. The snake, dumped unceremoniously on the tarmac up from the riverbed, definitely looked dead. Even prodded with sticks, which of course he should not have been, he did not move.
My friend Carol, a fellow teacher, was furious. She lived upstream and it was important to her that the community et al, but especially the children, learned how to behave themselves in a dynamic ecosystem, at the very least how, to keep everyone who lived there, including animals, safe and unharmed.
I don’t know if you know this but garter snakes are nasty little guys when they are taken out of their home. They spew a kind of colostrum colored poop that may just be a function of their anxiety and they bite. They are not venomous and probably can’t break the skin but it still hurts.
Carol went down to the bank, lectured the kids around her, again, about being respectful of the wildlife around them. She gently got the snake into a box but felt sad about the dim prospects of resurrecting it.
An all school assembly was called to discuss the incident. All of the kids listened, some were chastened, others self righteous but we all, everyone of us, felt sad about the snake. It was only a snake but it wasn’t hurting anyone, just doing its own, necessary, useful thing in the stream when it was removed by force and likely dropped to its death.
Carol’s a good teacher, she opened the room up to discussion and questions and thoughts. None of the kids meant to kill the snake, not even the three kids, two boys and a girl, who removed it. They had a stick with a fork on the end, the snake was right there and, well, it was irresistible. To be fair, it is irresistible at that age. Snakes are so mysterious and so beautiful, so not us, its almost impossible not to want to catch and touch one at some time or other and this sunlit day was that time. Carol understood that but she still had to come back hard. At that school the environments was beautiful, redwood trees all around us, this small tributary of a creek, bushes, birds, bugs. We were privileged to infringe on their habitat, she said, and the least we could do was to try and protect it.
At that collective moment, when all of us felt the worst because we knew that we had at least squashed a bug if not something bigger when we were children, or were just about to, the smake began to stir. One of the kids first noticed it.
At first it just wiggled its head a tiny bit but then its body, its tail.
Everyone whooped in delight. We couldn’t believe it. Somehow the snake had been saved!
Carol led a long procession of all the children and almost all the adults back to the stream where we saw the snake gently emptied into the stream. It got its bearings and swam away with its wiggle-waggle within moments.
We didn’t kill the snake that day, although some of us had tried to, and we were all the better for it
By Jackie Davis Martin
On January 25, 2025
Laura– a charming story! I didn’t realize you taught in an environment that was so rich in nature. The “lesson” that the kids learned that day was invaluable: not only the respect for wildlife, etc., but also the possibility of forgiveness and even resurrection (in its secular meaning).