Snake in a glue trap

I should say up front that the snake in question was a literal snake that was in fact stuck in a glue trap for several days and that, though I did not set the trap, I freed the snake (a garter snake), and it made its way, apparently unharmed, through the leaf litter toward a better den on a warm afternoon the week of Thanksgiving.

A friend, L., had set the trap, for spiders not for snakes, in the stone cellar of a house she had bought in late summer after breaking her engagement in Boulder and moving back. It was an old house, built in 1900, on a quiet street, and it had been renovated about 20 years before into two units, one downstairs, one up.

Earlier that spring, she had come to stay with a mutual friend for a few weeks and look at real estate.

She resurfaced in September, while Bob and I were making our way up the Oregon Coast, in an email blind-copied to her long list of friends and acquaintances, saying she had an upstairs apartment ready and asking us let her know if someone we knew might need space. I wrote right back asking for it. It was in my old neighborhood, which I’d wished I’d never left, and though our place in the country was wild with native grasses and oak-hickory forest and idyllic moonrises, it had never felt like home and I actually felt trapped there—inextricably stuck—cut off from my established community and my routines. L. held it for me until I got back.

*
The apartment was charming and inexpensive, and Bob and I agreed that as a pied-à-terre it served as the perfect stopgap while we figured out how to transition to a permanent solution.

I was determined to buy as little as possible, furnishing the place with extras from my own basement, my sister’s, my mom’s. At the secondhand shop a few blocks away I bought two matching loveseats and a small set of shelves, creating again my default combination of pretend Zen and Grandma’s house.

L. and I were happy introverted sisters in our up-and-down apartments. I rarely spent the night but often was there during the day working or writing or having lunch or a nap or shower, and we would hear one another and text. One warm November afternoon she asked if I could come outside. I stepped onto my deck, and she stood in the yard looking up and crying a little.

“There’s a snake down there,” she said. “In a glue trap. It’s been there for days, and I’m going for it. Will you come with me?”

Inside the screened porch, we opened the heavy cellar door and went down the narrow concrete steps to a clean, dry space, the floor covered in gravel and the wiring all new. L. turned on the light and there the snake was, upside down in the trap. Its head and about three inches of backbone were free. As L. reached down, a plastic bag around her hand, the moved its head, neither weakly nor vigorously.

“Oh, no! No …” L. lifted her bare left hand to her forehead.

“Let’s get it upstairs into the sun and have a look,” I said.

On our knees by the fire pit, we saw that the glue had dried out and the snake appeared to be in fair shape. I asked for a trowel, which L. produced. Back beside me, she wrung her hands over the trapped creature as I held the edge of the paper trap and worked the trowel as carefully as I could between the snake and the sticky board, believing that I would break bones and it was hopeless.

“Oh, sweetie …,” L. cried. “Oh, honey—my god, you’re doing it!”

I worked from the tail end because I didn’t want the snake writhing and snapping at my wrist as I tried to loosen the rest of it. In about 10 minutes, most of it was free, and L. reached down and nudged the delicate tip of the moving tail away from the glue. I got the neck end free, and L. poured a bucket of water over the snake and it righted itself. For a few seconds it lay coiled in its tiny pool and licked the air, then it wound its way over the lawn, apparently intact, and disappeared.

Then I remembered that snakes can go a long time without food or water.

We stared over the grass then looked at each other, and our shoulders relaxed. Possibility reigned. Options were open.

*

That was nearly a year ago. I still have the apartment, where I am writing this now on a mild October day with the sun falling though the curtains. In that year, I have felt a loosening here, close to my old places.

 I do not know when the move will be, but I am beginning to feel unstuck, and I have a place I can slip away to, where I rediscover old haunts and new ways of seeing.