As a small child I spent many afternoons at the nursery school and daycare center where my grandmother worked. I knew her as Nanny, and the other children affectionately called her Ms. Betty. During the summer, the staff would let us roam free all day throughout the vast playground in special “bare-feet” days. This is the earliest time I can remember truly interacting with nature. We would pick up caterpillars and watch them slowly crawl up our arms, teach each other to sit perfectly still whenever a yellow jacket buzzed around us, and greet daddy-longlegs spiders hiding in dark corners on the back porch. We would tell each other stories about what lurked beneath holes created by gargantuan exposed roots. Older eyes and a taller frame have since concluded that this place was really only a small, unremarkable patch of land tucked into the middle of American suburbia. But this is where I discovered first-hand a small slice of the natural world.
Graduating from kindergarten into the first grade granted us passage through a small fence running down the middle of the playground, the line of demarcation between the “big kid side” and the “little kid side.” One day I vividly remember hearing screams and shouts next to the fence—”Ms. Betty … there’s a snaaaaaake!” My grandmother rushed into action, moving us all to the perimeter of the playground. She was not about to let anything happen to any of us. Fearlessly she grabbed a garden hoe and confronted the curled up copperhead. Seconds later—whack—the snake was bifurcated. We watched in horror as the two parts of the snake writhed and squirmed until finally becoming still. Nanny slowly and somberly moved the dead snake to the edge of the playground and buried it. She saved us from danger but also opened up our eyes to human interaction and interference with the natural world.
As I would learn later, venomous copperhead snakes are especially prevalent in my home region of Upstate South Carolina. They made a home in the area long before humans arrived. Copperheads can form habitats in small patches of land, allowing them to easily adapt to the patterns of modern human development in the area. Unfortunately our nursery habitat interfered a little too closely with the copperhead’s that day. Our takeover of vast swaths of the natural environment causes us to be startled whenever we encounter the wild, threatening side of nature.
This simple story of our encounter with a snake is an especially nuanced account of human interaction with nature. Few animals strike the same kind of terror in humans as snakes, and our reactions to them are often primal fight-or-flight feelings. Some scientists theorize that frequent deadly interactions between snakes and our primate ancestors is partly responsible for the evolution of the human brain. Our ancestors were at one time on more equal footing with snakes, both alternating between predator and prey. In the Anthropocene Epoch, humans are making an enormously outsized impact on the natural world, shaping the trajectory for every other species. Encounters such as these force us to remember that this is a shared habitat.