On Quitting

A story about sobriety and snakes.

Granted many things in life are capricious, the endeavors of man especially, but it is good to know for certain that never again will I wake up hungover. This is what I was thinking moments before I noticed a timber rattlesnake curling itself into a striking position among the leaves at my feet. According to heresy, they provide a warning rattle, but I actually heard this one move before it availed me of its presence deliberately.

I was on Tongue mountain, a nine mile peninsula that punches into Lake George. It’s big country. Hiking it is like walking up and down the kerfs of a crosscut saw. Last spring, when it was still too cold for rattlesnakes, I did a lot of my ultra running training there, never gaining huge peaks but logging massive elevation gains. For trail running, like all our trails here in the Adirondacks, it sucks. The Rocky mountains may be known for their grandeur, but I’ve never traveled easier country than the mountains of Montana and Wyoming. By comparison, these big north country woods are diabolical.

This is okay since for every year that passes, I age three, which means when I was on the trail, staring down a fat rattler, that I was feeling the miles of the previous days that I’d logged on roads and in the Green Mountains over in Vermont. In short, I was walking up the Tongue, in this case from accumulated fatigue but also because it was hot. Snake weather.

This region is a cursed frozen mother the bulk of the year with skies so consistently gray that I cannot help but question the judgement of my ancestors who decided, against all available evidence, to sink their spades into the thin rocky soils and give things a go.

Even now in 2025, it’s a tough place to carve out a living. Most people born to it leave it, but to be honest few people are born to it as there are few people here, probably even fewer than when I was shot out of the womb in the early eighties. I’m a claustrophobe with a thick disdain for dense sprawl, a prepositional phrase I write here with a sense of relish, seeing in my mind’s eye all the suckers idling now in traffic across Midwestern cities surrounded by innumerable miles of Monsanto zombie corn.

If one were to transpose these fields of monolithic death into radio waves, they would end up in some worm hole scrolling LinkedIn where the bros promise wagons of cabbage after purchasing their “courses.” I’m tempted to take a few myself, reap the booty, and as a matter of gratitude send their makers a care package precisely the size of a shipping container, full of leather gloves and heavy hand tools.

In other words, despite the challenges of life in these mountains, I’d rather be here than in many other places. The Tongue itself comprises too much land to explore in one lifetime, which is one reason I decided to get out there again in spite of the snake weather. Possibly it was still early in the season that so far had produced little but cold rains. However, about snakes I know little. As soon as I set out walking I was on high alert. Leaves from the previous autumn were latticed over the trail, the perfect camouflage for a brown phase timber rattlesnake.

I thought I’d see one before stepping on it, however. How hard could it be to see a snake on the ground? Turns out, hard. As it slithered in the leaves, I looked down to connect noise to answer. There it was, a few feet long and thick as my forearm, curling itself like a ringlet of hair. It craned its flat head toward me until sensing my body heat.

Then it “stared” at me. I froze in a sort of panic. Could there be another one behind me? I looked at the leaf litter. There were green plants sticking up through the rotting leaves like so many hairs on a beast. I saw no other snakes, but then again I had almost stepped on this tank and would never have noticed him without hearing him make friction against the ground.

“Jesus!” I shouted to myself.

“Jesus!”

I mean what else was I going to say?

Still I could not move. It took me a full minute to gauge whether or not this bad boy was within striking distance. Definitely I had a minute if he was considering aggression. The brain may be a poor judge of threats, cooking up all manner of boogiemen, but somehow mine knew this particular snake was slightly too far to make contact. Like I said, though, about snakes I know little. Maybe he could have sunk a fang in me, but I figured it for a stretch.

“You are an ugly beautiful creature,” I said.

It was the eyes that were ugly and the body that was beautiful, plus the rarity. Around here, timber rattlesnakes are seldom sighted. Fine by me. I didn’t want ever again to see one so close to my stomping grounds. What terrified me wasn’t the snake. It was the fact that for all intents and purposes he may as well have been invisible. So much for seeing one before it was too late.

Had I passed right by other snakes? It was possible. I was exhausted from a long weekend of poor sleep and big running efforts. Also, in the woods I am prone to a variety of trances, from sex to food to insatiable wanderlust. The only time I pay absolute attention is during a hunt in grizzly country, where mistakes come with consequences such as disfigurement and death. In the Adirondacks, I tend to relax while out. It was my habit, but now I was among rattlesnakes. This guy was enormous. If he envenomated me, how would I get myself to the nearest hospital with antivenin long before it was too late?

I watched him. He watched me. Minutes passed. I remained frozen. If he was beyond range, it wasn’t that far beyond range. In this case I did not want to be wrong. What to do?

I took up my water bottle and squirted him. That’s what I did. Maybe he was thirsty. The water connected. He uncurled and elongated himself over a rotting log, all the potential danger melting out of the moment in a heartbeat. I took out my phone and snapped a picture. The idea of stepping on one of these critters scared me sick, but I sure did appreciate this chance to observe a timber rattlesnake, my first ever sighting after decades of wandering these very woods. Eventually, it was time to go.

On the way back to my car, I walked like a buck deer during hunting season, stopping every couple of steps to scan the horizon, in this case the ground, for threats. There were no more snakes, at least that I noticed. Once I made it to the parking lot and climbed into my whip, I laughed out loud thinking to myself how much worse a hangover from snake venom must be compared to a hangover from hooch. Gawd willing, about a venom hangover I’ll never know. As for the hooch, I quit a long time back. Life is too short to make oneself ill, even mildly. There are too many mountains to climb, too many books to read, too many fifty pound sacks of coffee to ingest.

Finally the long Adirondack winter had faded and the wet spring had broken too. It was hot as I descended the curves of the mountain in my Starship Subaru, a veteran of many battles that feeds on money the way hogs feed on avocados. With the windows down I ogled the passing scenery: birches like white toothy smiles in the green mountains, rocky cliffs jutting out like chins, and off to my right the wide mysterious waters of a lake so compelling in its appearance that I swear it is bewitched. The sun hit the water and broke into pieces and for a moment I could not believe in malevolence. Driving through all this felt sacrilegious, like I was missing all the details, which I was, but at least I knew what I was missing.

At the bottom of the mountain, the road straightened enough that I could stick my head out of the window and shout, like some deranged preacher of the big north woods:

Get thee out of here serpent! Get thee out of here!