Occupy 11-11-11

        Years ago when Caroline and I moved to Tuxedo Park, we visited an out-building (an old disused garage) on my mother’s property where we had stored some of our possessions after leaving our airy loft in Brooklyn Heights for a smaller apartment in Manhattan. Keeping things there seemed like a good idea at the time, but the space wasn’t perfectly weather-tight and the atmosphere eventually turned our possessions (a Danish teak desk my parents bought for my brother and me when we were children; some vinyl lps; old clothes and other items I should have, but hadn’t, discarded) into an interesting sort of compost.

        Tuxedo Park has a large and diverse snake population, including poisonous specimens such as copperheads and rattlers.  You need to remember this and cross tall-grass areas carefully.  Surprises lurk there and it isn't uncommon to see sizable serpents crossing (and during summer sleeping on) our roads.  

        I don’t remember whether we were looking for anything particular that day or just doing a general inventory, but Caroline glanced down at one point, then up, having turned white as a sheet, which on her is really disturbing.  At her feet was a long something I didn’t immediately recognize, but which looked like varicolored tissue paper or, perhaps, ladies’ stockings.  Clearly stunned (but confident in her conclusion -- she is like that), she posited that the object was a freshly-shed rattlesnake skin.  Schooling and the Discovery Channel persuaded me that she was correct and it was only a short leap to the inevitable question, “If that’s true, where is the rattlesnake?”

     I remember immediately running from the garage back across the meadow toward my mother’s house and also feeling a burning shock on my shoulder before we were out the door.   Later that afternoon when we went out to jog, I felt queasily light-headed and my thoughts were distorted, rapid and incoherent.  I was looking forward to running, but I couldn’t take more than a few steps because my legs felt heavy and the arm where I was bitten was flushed and very oddly swollen.  (Imagine Francis Bacon sculpting a human arm.)   My not-very-bright, but crystal-clear thought, shared with my wife, was that I was turning into the Incredible Hulk.

       Vodka and valium homeopathy didn't abate my symptoms and eventually we learned that I had suffered a spider bite, not uncommon in Orange County, New York, but something we hadn’t considered because it was a totally outside our experience.

        Today I “Occupy 11-11-11” and have decided to shed my old skin, which seems like a good idea.  

        But I’m mindful of the fact that I never actually saw the snake who turned over a new leaf by losing and leaving his skin. 

        Did he have a good day that day somewhere else or did he merely disappear, trusting no forwarding address to the spider he managed to avoid?

Note:   Illustration No. 5 is Jasper Francis Cropsey, Autumn Landscape, Sugarloaf Mountain, Orange County, New York, 1870