Walking around my place of business yesterday, a day after a drenching rainstorm, I spotted a kid’s expensive but alas, forgotten sweatshirt on the ground adjacent to an athletic field, muddy and soaked through. Writing fiction in my head that some parent somewhere was going to ask that kid what happened to it, and maybe drive back up here to look for it (not likely in this town, where kids deliberately “lose” iPhones so their parents will spoil them with the newest model), I gingerly picked up the soaked garment to hang it on a nearby handrail. As a kid, I would have been water-boarded by my folks for leaving one of my few warm winter items out in the mud, but the memory served only to illustrate the dichotomy of my childhood experiences with this community’s affluent youth, and I shrugged it off like so many other daily reminders.
As I stepped away, regarding the waterlogged weight of the sweatshirt in my fingertips, my eye noticed the panicky writhing of what appeared to be a small black worm that had taken shelter beneath the discarded clothing, disturbed from her slumber by my minor act of altruism.
I knelt down to get a closer look, and saw the “worm” start crawling away with a serpentine motion, not the push-pull-stretch-contract motion of an annelid. A lifetime of reading National Geographic and having kept various reptiles as pets made me realize this was no worm. I picked up the small creature, and pulled from some old herpetology file in my brain to identify the little critter as a Brahminy Blindsnake, Indotyphlops bramini.
The tiny snake did not like being picked up anymore than it like being exposed from beneath its wet sweatshirt shelter, and started wiggling emphatically, then crapped on my hand– a defense mechanism called “musking” that some snakes use when they’re really pissed off or scared. In a few moments, it settled back down, and began investigating my cupped hands with its tiny tongue flicking from its equally unimpressive head.
Regarding the small creature in my hands, I noted that the front end was discernible from the rear end only by a slight difference in shape, and its general forward motion of the head… and that tiny little yellowish-tongue collecting tastes and smells.
I stood there regarding this little life form for a few moments, then walked it to the nearby hillside and set it free; it quickly slithered under the nearest leaf, disappearing from sight. I pulled out my phone and Googled it up.
Turns out the Brahminy Blindsnake is the most widely-distributed snake species on the planet. Also known as the Flower Pot Snake, these diminutive reptiles have hitched rides to every continent but Antarctica, hiding deep inside the root balls of exported plants. Scientists aren’t even sure from where they originated. Adaptable and apparently able to avoid detection, they have quietly invaded temperate forests, tropical jungles, and neighborhood parks and gardens around the world.
With dark eyespots instead of functional eyes, (they are called blindsnakes, after all) and a good sense of smell, these snakes live almost entirely underground eating ant and termite larvae, only coming to the surface after drenching rains like the earthworms they resemble.
Maybe more peculiar, they are the only known parthenogenetic snake; every one of them is female, and able to lay eggs and reproduce without the need to mate. A single snake that hitchhikes a ride to a suitable environment can establish a whole population. There’s a roundabout feminism trope in there, somewhere.
For my part, I stood there like a dope, watching it crawl away, considering I. bramini’s place in the universe as an invasive, widespread, sightless, sexless worm-like reptile that seems only to eat, sleep, poop, and auto-generate baby snakes. Its tiny primitive brain, no larger than a grain of salt, is programmed by Nature to carry out a short list of functions, tied mostly to an even tinier Jacobson’s organ on the roof of its mouth that processes tastes and smells collected by its tongue, no wider than a spider’s web.
It seems pointless, and yet somehow fascinating; ubiquitous, but hidden and wholly unknown. And here I am, the “pinnacle of evolution” on the planet, my neocortex firing connections to my limbic brain, facts and figures triggering feelings and emotions about my own place in the grand design of the Great Teenager in the Sky, who in turn, seems to be programming infinite possibilities and combinations of carbon-based life forms throughout the Universe like a petulant punk digging through Reddit for a Fortnite hack.
Two lives, widely separated by more phylogenetic branches than a NorCal raspberry briar, interacting with one another for a brief moment. Fleeting, no doubt, for a three inch reptile who managed to find solace under a discarded sweatshirt left in the rain. Yet an enduring thought for me, a reflective encounter on several levels.
The freedom that must come from having no way to process or even remember the experience of discomfort from being uncovered, picked up in my mammalian paws, photographed, and released to find a new comfortable place to rest; Hell, I’m still mildly annoyed at the guy doing 41 mph on the freeway with his left turn signal on in the carpool lane, and that was half an hour ago. Only instincts, only pre-written lines of code… not the memory of pain, the recollection of the event, the conscious and subconscious connecting of the happening to previous related experiences. Brahminy Blindsnakes don’t get “pissed off.” They don’t get “scared.” They just…. be.
Who is the higher life form, then? The creature that trashed an artificial pelt on the ground, even though his brain gives him the ability to know better? Or the creature that found a way to utilize that other animal’s trash to seek shelter from the storm?
No way of knowing for sure. But I suspect that one of those animals will be here long after the other one is gone, victims of their myopic nature, self-aggrandizing celebration of mediocrity, and an utter lack of ability to understand the finer tenets of living well by living simply.
El Gigante Picante del Monte 