The Cottonmouth Coincidence

The Cottonmouth gets its name from the distinctive features inside its mouth. If agitated, this aggressive reptile will open its mouth and display its fangs. A snake with fangs? What?? You might catch a glimpse of the flesh inside the viper's cheeks before wetting your pants. They're white and resemble little balls of fluffy cotton. Not for clinical use.

There are over twenty species of venomous snakes in North America. At least one of those species resides in every state but Alaska. Because, Alaska. The Cottonmouth is one of the deadliest and only semi-aquatic among them. In fact, the Cottonmouth is the only semi-aquatic viper in the world.

The Cottonmouth boasts being a branch member of venomous pit vipers. I thought this was due to a habit of hiding in holes or digging one as a dwelling. What it alludes to is something much more terrifying. A heat-sensing organ—giggle— resides between the eyes and nostrils. It allows them to detect and determine the distance of their prey. They're one of the deadliest predators to slither into your path should you be so unfortunate. Its venom is a cytotoxin that eats away at flesh. If not caught in time, it could lead to one's early retirement. In Arkansas, they call it a Water Moccasin. I'm not sure why or how it got that name. Because of the way it swims? It looks like swimming Native American footwear? It doesn't. I've seen them swim.

My family decided to move to the well-unknown city of Danville, Arkansas when I was an eight-grader. We lived in California and the only thing I knew about the south was that my cousins had moved there. They convinced my Mom that a move there would be lucrative. We never reached any level of lucrativeness. Unless you count the rich experiences we had in that strange place.

Arkansans spoke with a thick southern drawl. They made use of vernacular that was more like a foreign language than broken English. Danville was much smaller than my hometown and the wildlife was much wilder than ours. The ants were the size of Pugs. They had armadillos that looked like Jurassic-sized roly-polies and they boasted man-sized birds. The climate was nothing like we'd ever experienced. In Northern California, we didn't have weather that changed. There were no seasons unless you counted warm, warmer, and fire-season. We'd have the occasional rainy or windy day that indicated fall or winter was afoot. In Arkansas there was no shortage of rain in the winter. They had hot as hell summers and tornadoes whenever they wanted. The whole place was trying to kill you, I thought. Who would choose to live in a place like this? Oh yeah, my cousins.

Off we went. The journey was long and hard. My Mom and Step-dad stuffed me, my step-brother, my little brother and my older brother in a small van. We made few stops along the way. I bought a six-foot-long rubber snake from a roadside souvenir shop with some of the money I’d saved. I guess I wanted to commemorate the event somehow and this was my way of doing it. Little did I know, it was foreshadowing things to come.

We lived in a trailer below the main highway down an embankment above four acres of minnow farms. My cousins raised minnows for their fishing bait business. The minnows occupied four acre-sized ponds. A road surrounded the ponds and quartered them straight down the middle. Forty acres of undeveloped forest and grassland stretched beyond that. The land belonged to my cousins. It spanned all the way to the Mighty Mississippi.

My cousins' house sat across the road behind our trailer. It was a normal sized one-story house on three or four acres. I say "behind" because our trailer was facing the ponds away from the highway. The highway played a significant role in my lengthy six-month stay there. I would see my cousin, Cynthia, who was one year younger than me, playing out in the front yard on many occasions. My P.E. coach would traverse this road a good deal. He knew where I lived. When he saw me outside, he'd yell out my name. My name is Gilbert Luna. People call me "Gil" now. The only people who refer to me by the extended version are people from my past and bill collectors.

One day, Cynthia and I were out playing when he happened by riding on the back of a motorcycle and there it was: Giiiiilbert Looooooona!!! It was loud with the applied doppelgänger effect, which made it that much better. We laughed and waved and it became a thing. Every time he passed by, there it was. It became an endearing memory. Another good takeaway.

It didn't take me long to adjust to the living situation. It no doubt sucked. As a kid, things don't bother you as much. Now, I’d have booked it out of there in a hot second. In fact, I wouldn’t have gone there in the first place. You make the best of it. Especially if you were never exposed to better.

The trailer was small and cramped. My older brother, Phil, got his own room as did my Mom and Stepfather. My younger brother and stepbrother Ken and I, slept on a mattresses in the living room.

The wildlife took some getting used to. My cousins did their best to prepare us. One day, Ken woke up with blisters running up the side of his neck. They varied in size and ran the length from his collar bone up to his cheek. He panicked, as did my Mom. We'd never seen anything like this. She rushed him to the doctor. It was nothing to worry about, the doctor told them. There's something called a blister bug, we learned, that lived up to its name. It doesn't actually bite you. The blister bug is a beetle that releases a toxin onto your skin that causes these blisters. It freaked us out regardless.

The encounters got more irritating and dangerous. There were chiggers, which were mites that lived in the moss, grass, and weeds. You know, the stuff that seems harmless anywhere else. They bit your legs or any other part of your exposed limbs if you were anywhere near them. The bite itched like hell and you would never get one, but hundreds. Your skin would end up looking like an avocado, in texture only. Your skin doesn't turn green. That would be funny though, but not surprising in that place. The foliage also possessed plenty of ticks. The worst you can get from lying on the grass in Cali was a stain on your pants or a skid mark from a hidden pile of dog poop. You might even sit on the occasional ant hill. But California ants weren't large enough to carry you off on their backs.

The spiders though. Until this day, I hate them. They gross me out more than they scare me and Arkansas is responsible. Arachnids were everywhere. The brown recluse was the worst. I had no idea what it was nor what it looked like. A bite from one would cause a necrotic ulcer. It would persist for months ending with a permanent hole in the flesh. Sounds fun.

Being kids, we challenged nature in every way. We dared it to scare us. One night, my stepdad challenged me and Ken to walk around the ponds without flashlights. He bet us what he had in his pocket, eight dollars. The seven-foot brush and overgrowth on the road wasn't cut at the time. A wall of wild hedges lined both sides of the road. It obscured the ponds from sight and it was brimming with wildlife. This “road” was only a six feet wide.

Several days earlier we encountered a four-foot black snake that came out of the hedges. It slithered out to do whatever black snakes do. Phil took a shotgun to it while we looked on. He emptied the 12-gauge. There was so much smoke accumulated during the engagement that we couldn't see each other. We were only a few feet from one another standing in a semi-circle. Phil had disappeared during the dense, white-hazed, volley. When it cleared, the snake was fine but angry. It coiled up and reeled back, swaying back and forth, hissing. We froze. I swear it snickered as it recoiled and slithered back into the brush. We managed to annoy it, that's all. Phil was a Californian and this was the first time he'd shot a gun. He needed a little more practice. From the movies I'd seen anyone should be able to hit something from two feet away with a scattergun. Guess I was wrong. After the hedges came down a few days later, we found the black snake in pieces. The tractor mower tore it to shreds.

Ken and I set off that night with gigs in hand and backs to each other. We held the gigs to each side of the brush that towered over our five-foot-something frames. The moon was full and bright. A much needed friend to oversee a night like this.

The first thing we encountered was an armadillo that skittered acrossed the path in front of us. It came out of nowhere and didn't make a sound aside from the pitter-patter of its footsteps. It dashed into the darkness for cover, gone as fast as it had appeared. Ken freaked out. He put his hand against me like a mother does to brace her child in the passenger seat when coming to a quick halt. Ken did it because he almost had a heart attack and clung to me like a child does a security blanket. He walloped me good. I let out a quick breath then fell to my knees because it was a quick shot to the huevos. When I recovered, I walked with a slouch and an ache in my stomach for a while. That awful, that ugly, that gross feeling after a ball-shot, lingers for quite a time.

We went at a slower pace trying to laugh off the armadillo-ball-crushing incident. We were quiet for a time after, but then we began to cackle like idiots at ourselves. "Sorry I hit you in the balls," Ken said. We laughed again followed by occasional fits of aftershock giggles and recaps.

As we walked further we started to get a little overconfident. It seemed nothing else was going to top our former encounter. I strode ahead of Ken without realizing it when I heard something behind me. I looked but saw nothing and when I turned back I raised my head captured by the moonlight. The bright harvest moon hovered in elegance as a witness to our stupidity. It was a short-lived consolation as I noticed something in the foreground across the path. I wasn't sure, at first, what it was. It was so close my vision had a hard time focusing on it until the silhouette of a familiar web pattern came into focus. It stretched the width of the trail at eye level. No sooner did I see it when the horror struck me. In the dead center of this massive structure was the most enormous spider I'd ever seen. The tales of the brown recluse that my cousin warned me about went through my head.

I couldn't react faster than my momentum was carrying me. I face-firsted it right into the spider now affixed between my eyes. It bounced up and down as they did when threatened. Then it stopped and stuck to my face. I was sure it was going to bite me and that I'd end up with a black hole in the middle of my forehead. There was little time to react. I freaked-the-fuck-out. I swiped at my face and danced around screaming in an ear-piercing timbre. I twirled around a few times, dropped my gig, and almost fell into the hedge before Ken caught me. Ken had no idea what had occurred. He didn't see the web before I tore it apart in a panic. I hollered, "A spider! A spider! Is it on me? Is it still on me??" He checked my face and body to see if the face-mangler was still there. He couldn't see very well in the dim light of the moon. He dusted my body as well as he could. It took some convincing to prove to me that it was no longer a passenger. Ever since, arachnids aren't allowed within twenty feet of me. I took out a restraining order.

We managed to get through the rest of the night without any more encounters. When we got back to the trailer we were pretty proud of ourselves. We had kept our promise. Lived up to our word. The celebration was short-lived when my stepdad laughed. He called us idiots for going out there and trusting him to pay up. We never got our eight dollars, but we had bragging rights and that was enough.

Arkansas was in the deep south. Picnics were out of the question and camping was unheard of unless you wore a hazmat suit. There were some good things about that place though that stuck with me. The cicadas and their night chatter. The sound of their clicking sound boxes could either drive you crazy or lull you to sleep. It was like white noise with a pitch. You had to decide how to listen to it because they were persistent like the ticking of a clock. A fast one. The fireflies, which they called "lightning bugs," would hover above the ground. They danced in mid-air with a green glow I'd only seen in the movies. Like little fairies from one of the tales I read as a kid. We caught them and put them in a jar. Kept them at our bedside like a night light nature had gifted us. The damp smell of the humid air I remember well. It invoked a kind of peaceful tranquility despite its uncomfortable drenching properties. The memory of it is so powerful that today I can still recall that fragrant mossy scent almost at will. It takes me back to that place, that time, that family. One of the only periods I remember enjoying in my childhood.

It was raining hard that day. The droplets were heavy and oversized. Much bigger than we'd ever seen. They were loud against the thin roof of our trailer. So loud, we had trouble hearing each other speak.

Cynthia came down to visit. We would usually be outside playing some game we made up or riding our bikes. Sometimes we would even hike behind the ponds. My cousin thought I was crazy for doing that.

I went back there alone on a certain sunny day. Not too far, but far enough so the trailer wasn't out of sight. The land was eroded from the occasional Mississippi overflow. There was a maze of deep ravines that coiled around forever. That's where I found my first snake. It was a baby one half the length of my forearm and thinner than a pencil. It was a Cottonmouth. So, I picked it up. It didn't coil or bite me. It was too young and didn't have its venom yet. It wrapped around my wrist as I took it by its tiny head. I brought it home and put it in a jar for "observation." I planned to let it go later, but I would never have the chance.

I showed it to my family. They thought I was a crazy person. I had school the next day and I returned home to find the snake missing. The jar and all. I asked around, but no one seemed to know what had happened to it. The only person who wasn't there to ask was Phil. He was always gone so I didn't think it could have been him. That's when I realized my rubber snake was also missing.

A few days later I found the rubber snake cut into about ten pieces. Again, I asked around, but no one seemed to know anything. I became suspicious that everyone was holding out on me. My Mom finally confessed. She said that Phil had taken the snake in the jar and killed it. I found the jar shattered on the concrete outside with the dead baby cottonmouth inside. The snake was in pieces like the toy one. I was livid and hurt. Phil and I never talked about it. I didn't find out who cut up my rubber snake until twenty years later when I asked him about it. He gave me a guilty look and nodded. He never told me why.

Cynthia and I got along well because we were very much alike. When there was a family conflict, we were usually on the same side. We had each other's backs on many occasions. We were protective of one another if threatened in any way. Today was no exception.

The rain let up a little. It was more of a drizzle now, so I decided I wanted to get out and do something. We put on our coats and hoods and started off. My cousin took some convincing. I wanted to have this adventure today. This was happening.

We went out front beneath the giant oak tree that stood in the middle of the yard. There, we stared off across the ponds to see that the Mississippi had overflowed into the ravines. It was even with the levee now. The area looked like a giant lake with trees growing out of it. It was a spectacular sight. I had to see it up close!

We opened the gate and started down the middle path that split the ponds. The hedges were gone, so we could see clear across the entire field. It was muddy, but we didn't mind. At least I didn't. The rain let up even more. It was misty now. We knew we'd get wet but thought we'd be back at the trailer before it became a bother. So off we went.

At the end of the path, the water seemed calm as it lapped the levee's edge. I felt unthreatened and overcome with intrigue. My cousin stopped twenty feet behind me and refused to go further, underwhelmed. I stepped forward with the water only inches from my feet. I looked back at Cynthia and smiled, excited to be witness to this marvel. I stared at her, waiting for a reaction. She didn't look at me. Instead she squinted at the water, or my feet, or the ground. Her sight was poor and she hadn't brought her glasses. She spoke in a tone that didn't match the immanent danger that was about to befall us, "Is that… is that a snake by your foot?"

"What?" I looked down and sure enough there was. This was my second encounter with a Cottonmouth. This one was an adult. It stopped, stretched out, traveling to who-knows-wherever a snakes goes. It was only an inch or so from the outside of my left foot. More like it was there to warn rather than terrify me. Or more, to enlighten me about how perturbed it was. As an afterthought, I wondered why the snake had chosen that route alongside the water. Swimming was its most notable way of transport.

The Cottonmouth's jaw was wide open and it hissed at me. For a moment, I thought it was yawning with boredom at the thought of my nuisance. Ho, hum. Get out of my way. Yawn. I saw the inside of its mouth. Sure enough, it was true. The interior was white and fluffy, like cotton. Its fangs, like curved bone daggers filled with a bad time. I was confident it meant to intimidate. Not attack. Or rather, I hoped. Task accomplished. I was beyond intimidated.

I must have jumped a fucking mile. As soon as I came back to Earth I hit the ground running. I passed my cousin in a panic without stopping. I didn't stop until I reached the trailer. I assumed, and hoped, Cynthia was behind me because I never looked back to check. She was behind me the entire time. Good thing because what happened next was nothing short of miraculous.

The trailer sat on a slope that angled upwards about ten or fifteen feet. We got to the walking path, reached the door, and stood on the porch another five feet up a set of stairs. When we turned around, we saw the water lap up a few feet behind us. It barreled in about six to eight feet up the slope near our feet. We realized that a short time after we left that upset viper missile, the levee had broken. Sometime during our sprint the Mississippi flash-flooded behind us. It was on our heels and we didn't know it. Somehow, we kept ahead of it to witness the tail end of the flood water's journey. It washed through anything that dwelled in the minnow ponds. It destroyed them. The water arrived with a group of sneaker waves in succession afterward. For a moment I thought it wasn't going to stop at all. It halted with a threatening oscillation. Like a tiger that couldn't reach its prey in a tree. Then, the precariousness of the situation dawned its full impact on us. We were lucky to be alive.

In the days following, we laughed about my dim-witted challenge to Mother Nature. We couldn't ignore the underlying feeling that she'd almost drowned us. Her fury is indiscriminate. But a mere chance meeting counteracted our possible fates. A brush with one of nature's children came to warn us. It was difficult, as an eighth-grader, to come to terms with the incident. I was a Christian then and had a different take on the divinity of intrusion and outcomes. I later grew into a spiritualist and drew meaning from my Native American heritage. Now, as an Atheist, I'm not quite sure what to think of it except as an extraordinary coincidence. A happy accident that I was fortunate enough to experience and live to tell about. What might have been if it wasn't for a moment of serendipitous fortuity? On any other occasion, that life-taking predator might have been a death bringer. Given a continuance by such a marvelous creature who was so unaware of its profound purpose. I can only offer thanks and hope to fulfill the gift it offered to me.