Sunday, 8 November 2009

learning to trust a snake

I was at a beautiful seaside village with lovely buildings and trees overlooking the bay (Bournemouth/Pool Harbour). There was a climbing rope strung between the trees facing the bay. Although, it wasn't rope, it was thick garden hose which reminded me of a snake and of a game I used to play with myself as a kid, where I'd imagine the hose was a snake and get scared and have to run away from it. I decided to follow this climbing path through the trees and was making amazingly good progress swinging from one tree to the next until I got to a tree out the front of my hotel and the hose became thinner and broke. I decided to climb out on a limb of the tree to try to make it to the next tree but the limb became too thin and broke. When the tree branch hit the ground, an angry snake jumped out of it and straight towards me seeming to just miss intentionally. I was terrified and ran away.

That night when I came home, I somehow became aware that the branch that fell down was actually a snake nest. The aggressive snake that jumped at me was trying to protect a whole nest full of it's babies along with it's stash of half dead mice and rats. The hotel owner showed me by poking it and making lots of little black snakes slither out.

When I got to my room, there was an enormous purple snake waiting for me. He argued that I should allow hims to stay in my room since he'd keep it free of mice, rats and other snakes. This seemed somewhat attractive since there was a lot of snakes outside. How could I trust him not to bite me? The next morning, I decided I couldn't trust him so I put him in a box in the fridge. When I came home that night he was very sleepy so I put the box on the heater to warm him up. While he was mad about it, he still wanted to strike a deal. I just couldn't trust him so I threw him in the big bin outside. Of course he had returned when I got home from work the next night. He had been out all day, taking photo's of my friends and family and was now telling me that if I didn't let him stay he'd kill them. I didn't know how he had been stalking them or how he'd been using a camera but it was scary so I let him stay.