that’s topped by the graveyard
where St Patrick is said to lie
beneath a massive stone.
The first story I ever heard
about Ireland was that St Patrick
drove all the snakes off the
Island named Eire into the sea.
And I was baffled
and saddened by that tale
because I was fascinated
by snakes when I was five.
Years later I found out
that there were never any
snakes in Ireland, not
when Patrick lived anyway.
But good stories don’t
always have to be based
on facts. Unfortunately
for snakes, at least
for Christians. The fall
from Grace and so on.
When Satan tempted Eve
while coiled in the tree.
Some cultures revere snakes
as symbols of resurrection.
The serpent twined around
a staff, known as
The Rod of Aesclepius
is widely recognized
as a symbol of doctors
and medical care.
Derived from the legend
of the Greek God of Healing.
Or itself from the even older
story of when the Israelites
were in the Wilderness
and dying from venomous
snake bites, God told Moses
to make a brass pole
with a snake entwined
around it and any snake
bite victim who saw it
would be cured.
Patrick surely knew
that story from scripture
and he was not the one
who spun the yarn
about driving snakes
into the sea. The symbol
of the shamrock is the one
that appeals to me.
In any field of clover
your can find the living
representation of
the Trinity.
We came to Ireland
to hear stories, and
the stones have much
to tell, even perhaps
to tell some of our own,
I have a few about snakes
as well, they have never
been demons to me.
The first one I ever saw was
when I was five years old and
we had just moved to Brisbane
just south of San Francisco
Mr Ward lived across the street
in a converted garage surrounded
by a wildly overgrown garden.
A few charred timbers lingered
under ivy that covered the
foundation of the house
where his wife had died
when the house burned down
years before. He never rebuilt it.
Mr Ward worked the night shift
at the Hamm’s brewery on
Bryant near Seals Stadium.
The Giants were playing there
while the new park at Candlestick
was under construction. We could
see the cranes from our house on the hill.
Mr Ward would sometimes come out
to join us, tell us stories about people
who had lived up here on the hill.
Like the man who had lived in
the house that we now rented.
After a landslide next to the house
a riot of poison oak had erupted.
He cut it all down and burned it.
Stood close to the pyre so he
could tend it. Breathed too much
of the smoke, which inflamed
his lungs badly. Had to be hospitalized,
but I don’t remember if Mr Ward said
that he died. He just wanted us
to know, to not burn poison oak.
One day, as we standing out in the street,
a garter snake crawled out onto the road.
I had never seen a real live snake before.
It was beautiful, with red and black
checkered sides, cinnamon and turquoise
around its head, a pale green stripe
down center of its back. Mr Ward picked
it up so I could look at it. I turned to Mommy
and asked if I could keep it. She laughed
and said No,not this one, maybe another one.
Mr Ward put the snake down in the shrubs
at the edge of his garden and the snake quickly
disappeared. He said it guards his yard from pests.
Later on, Mommy said Mr Ward was a hermit.
Because he lived in that converted garage and
didn’t rebuild the house because he wife
had died in the fire when it burned down.
I told her that when I grew up I wanted
to be a hermit too. And have a wild garden
with snakes and work nights at Hamm’s
so I could play with my snakes in the afternoon.
We moved away from Brisbane a few months
later to a brand new subdivision in Marin County.
Mr Ward gave us a Century plant, the kind that
goes decades before it blooms. Years later it did.
And I caught my first snake there, a gopher snake,
long enough to wrap around my waist like a belt.
I said to Mom, “You promised me I could keep one.”
And so I did, the first of many.
I think whoever told that story
about St Patrick driving the snakes
into the sea was making a parallel
to the story of Jesus exorcising
a multitudeof demons out of a man
and putting them into a herd of swine
who then ran into the Sea of Galilee
and drowned. Not snakes.
