356/365 Twilgiht Zone - Golden Earring

Yeah there's a storm on the loose sirens in my head
I'm wrapped up in silence all circuits are dead
I cannot decode
my whole life spins into a frenzy

So we went canoing again. Bevin, Colleen, and I. Memorial Day 2006. We went down the steep rock hill to the eddy where the canoes are locked up. Scoffed at the life preservers--we were all excellent swimmers--and grabbed our paddles, put the boat in the water. Colleen didn't want to leave the eddy, having learned that the current can get to be too much out on the river. So we lazily dipped and turned around the eddy, under beautiful trees that arched over and met in the middle. We talked about the river, about summer, about dinner. Whatever.

Then Bevin stood up. She was sitting in the middle, on a vinyl pad on the floor of the canoe--Colleen was in front on a platform, I was in back on the same.

Bevin, Sit Down! I yelled. Bevin's fear of spiders or something must have kicked in, damn it.

There's a snake in the boat! She explained.

And there was. It was small, but it was dark and menacing. I had gone to enough state park ranger talks to know it was unlikely to be the dread cottonmouth/water moccasin. Most likely a diamond back water snake. Black snake. Something else. Anything else. I thought quickly, though. We were in the middle of the eddy, Colleen was melting into a puddle of panicked goo, and Bevin was standing in our canoe.

We will have to kill it, I decided.

Oh, Colleen replied.

Do you have a better idea?

Bevin then took her paddle and tried to scoop with it. The snake fought back. Unhappy snake in our canoe is not an improvement. I told Colleen to keep paddling! Keep paddling!

But I don't have enough strength! We're going to hit the bank!

We hit a log in the middle of the water, kind of came to a standstill for a minute. Bevin scooped, and my paddle caught the snake when in wriggled off. Then hers caught it, and then mine, and we launched it out into the water. It swam towards the canoe. Brought its head out of the water, menacing.

Then it swam away, head out of the water.

We got to the bank. Locked up the canoe. Walked up the hill. Got to the cabin, and I looked up cottonmouth.

The first words in the entry for cottonmouth are:

Do not disturb! Do not attempt to handle!

And then: Unlike other water snakes, it swims with head well out of water.

We sank into chairs in the living room and calculated. If it had bit one of us, or if Bevin hadn't taken a kayaking class (when? when did this happen?), we'd been in the water. And then dragging each other to the shore. Up the hill? Then to the van? To a hospital in Rolla? How long?

We would have been dead.