Why snakes do it for me: two possible responses

“How does one ‘hobby’ venomous snakes?” a friend asked me recently. “It’s not like puzzling or macramé.”

“Would it be less surprising if I said I’d taken up macrame?” I replied.

On one level, the direct answer to her question is easy: why not? I know plenty of people who live in Florida and the South who love snakes. And I don’t mean love them in the “snake nut” sense, but respect and admire them, as we should all wildlife we get to share our home with. Some of these people are close friends. Two were my professors in the creative writing program at the University of Florida. And once you’ve removed a snake from inside a lakeside house, and two more from a swimming pool on the same property, and the initial heckles-up-on-the back-of-the-neck response has subsided—nothing where I am from moves like that!—it’s like, well okay then, this is what life here is.

The truth is I am more afraid of butterflies. I do not like how those creatures move. Then two summers ago I got attacked and bitten in the gut by an off-leash German Shepherd while walking in my neighborhood—a “beautiful” animal I’m sure many of you would say. I have not gotten over it. I will still cross the road if I see a dog with a similar silhouette heading in my direction, reciting quietly to myself: calmly calmly calmly.

The origin of this friend’s question, was my telling her about how I was going to spend this weekend at The Rattlesnake Conservancy in Jacksonville. I was there to participate in their Level 1 Venomous Snake Handling Certification course with twenty or so other individuals—a mix of biology and zoology students, homeowners, amateur herpers, and one guy in his sixties who had a free weekend so thought he would come and check it out and who was the calmest and most confident handler of all of us students.

Some things I heard said while I was at The Rattlesnake Conservancy:

On cottonmouths: “Everybody has an uncle with a story about being chased by a cottonmouth. Check out the Facebook page Moccasins Not Chasing People.”

On modular lung ventilation: “An adaptation to breathe when you’re a tube!”

On the dusky pygmy: “When they’re born, they can curl up on a nickel.”

On parthenogenesis: “If she can’t find a mate, she can clone herself to extend the life of the population. Till a male comes along for the genetic diversity.”

On females storing sperm: “The current record for the eastern diamondback is seven years.”

On incorrectly treating a venomous snake bite: “Do not apply an electrical current.”

On correctly treating a venomous snake bite: “Elevate bite at or above heart level. The solution to pollution is dilution.”

On keeping a snake on a hook between our practice containments: “It’s in air jail.”

Then during lunch break between a morning and afternoon session, while we were discussing our encounters with venomous snakes, a young, witty biologist said, “I mean, do they even know they’re venomous?” Everyone sitting around the picnic table laughed knowingly. “They see a human coming and they probably think it’s the reckoning.”

Putting aside for a moment everything snakes do to support our ecosystem, and to support us (just google “snake venom used in medicine”), look at the snakes we have here. The natives. Really look at them. They’re just weird little guys. Trying to live their lives. Terrified out of their tiny minds. Same as you and I.

And that’s the straightforward answer to my friend’s question.

*

There is another answer though, one that is more personal, and that I am still trying to figure out, let alone articulate. It has something to do with me right now. Something to do with the depth and breadth of my stuckness the last few years. With the deep disconnect I feel with myself and the people I know I love. With the stagnation of my writing life. With the failures of my personal life. With the gulf between my public and private personas.

The period of time during the pandemic that we—my husband, son, and I—were back in New Zealand, I pined for Florida and my life here like a lovesick teen. Everyone has their stories from those years. The challenging things we suffered through together, and the challenging things that were separate from Covid and that we suffered through alone. I don’t blame the pandemic for how things went for me during that time. On the outside it was a strangely good time. I had some career successes and formed some special friendships. There were other separate things though. And where I ended up was at the very bottom of the well. It was during that time I got it into my head that if I could get back to Florida, then everything would be okay. And because New Zealand is sans snakes, The Snake became symbolic of that goal. To the degree that I told my son that if we were able to move back, he could have one as a pet. So that at the end of 2022 when we received our green cards—a miracle!—and moved back, we invited a little corn snake into our lives. His name is Fahey (after John). He looks as though he has stick-on googly eyes. He’s curious and docile. You should see how he chunks down on a mouse.

I understand the basics of the reptile brain. I know Fahey does not love me. I know he probably doesn’t even recognize me. Sometimes I wonder about this—when I open his enclosure and he raises his head to greet my hand. Though he also does this when the cats sit on top of his enclosure. It’s so easy to slip into anthropomorphizing mode. But, no, I understand enough of the reptile brain to know Fahey does not love me, cannot show me affection, that I am to him no more than a large moving shape that wakes him up to bug him and feed him.

I do not feel like things are okay yet, even though it has been the longest time. And yet when I look at Fahey, when I hold him, something new fires in my brain.

I felt this same spark when this weekend I looked at The Rattlesnake Conservancy’s eastern diamondback and timber rattlesnakes, their copperhead, bull snake, the eastern indigo whose little face I glimpsed peering out of its enclosure hiding place. Something upstairs felt like it was fixing.

I need to move beyond this situation I’ve created for myself, some of these threads of my life that I do not like and do not want. I also need to get back to something of who I was a much longer time ago. Please do not insert a snake shedding its skin metaphor here—that is not what I am getting at (though that is itself a sight to behold). What I mean is that when this woman who is from New Zealand and so had never even encountered a snake for most of her life but who had nightmares about them all through her childhood and who is still afraid of moths and the sea and driving a car and disappointing her parents and getting her blood drawn and being in a situation where she has to eat a whole raw tomato, when she finally correctly double-hooked that eastern diamondback named Shortcake at The Rattlesnake Conservancy the future felt wide open and completely, wonderfully blank.

We’re all unfixed.

Three Unidentified Babies in the Pool & Two Coiled Copperheads

Gainesville, Florida

* * * * *

“There are three snakes in the pool.”

This was the first message I sent to W. The snakes were so small I was embarrassed to use the word “snakes” to describe them. They were like long earthworms, though structurally more sound, meatier. Their complexions were generally orange, and they had obvious heads and tails—in this way they weren’t earthworm-like at all. They were swimming on the surface of the water in a way that I would best describe as panicked. I could tell they didn’t want to be in there. It was late summer—they had probably been washed into the pool during the heavy rains in the night.

“What should I do???” I added.

I messaged W. because I knew she would give me practical advice. I also secretly hoped she might come over and extract the baby snakes for me.

“Get them out,” she wrote. “Or they will drown.”

The snakes were already trying to get out. They were slithering up and down the side of the pool, looking for an opening, a path to dry land. Despite witnessing this distress it hadn’t occurred to me that drowning was a possibility. I hadn’t thought to use such a word in relation to what might happen to them.

I had been standing on the edge of the pool, phone in one hand, cup of coffee in the other, just watching. This—or they will drown—jolted me into action. I placed my cup and phone on the ground, and went for the pool scoop. It took me no time at all to assist the small, orange snakes out of the water. Two immediately went under the nearest mound of leaves. The last, it was already unmoving.

While I was doing this—interacting with the snakes in this distanced, impersonal way—a strange woolly fright took hold of me. The snakes were unbelievably small and there was nothing they could do to me. There was also the long handle of a pool scoop between us. In their own tiny snake ways, they were probably terrified. And yet, as I carefully trapped them against the side of the pool, and lifted them to land, I was unable to shake off this fright. It was as if some ghostly creature had reached in and linked its fingers though the back of my ribs, its thumbs pressed to the hard of my spine, and was gently shaking me, allowing a cool, persistent gust to pass through me.

I felt as if the windows and doors of me had been flung open. I felt exposed and scared. I felt foolish, too, as I loomed over those strange, tiny slippery things. Thinking about how foolish it was to be frightened didn’t lessen the fright. Snakes, they are so freaky man. 

After the first two vanished somewhere safe to, I imagined, catch their breaths, I stood over the one who hadn’t made it. Its small body, I couldn’t even tell if it was lying on its belly or its back. Using the metal lip of the pool scoop, I rolled it into the same bush its siblings had disappeared into. Though I wasn’t sure if that was the right thing to do—if they would want to be reunited in this way. After that, I stood at the edge of the garden and watched for movements, and the chill I’d experienced just a moment before dissipated.

“I did it,” I messaged W. “They’re safe in some leaves now.”

I didn’t tell her about the one that hadn’t made it. If she reads this piece she will know, but back then I lied. I didn’t want her to be disappointed in me.

That was the summer before I got pregnant. The summer we all moved into the Bodiford House apartment together. The next summer, when I was pregnant, I was again staying at this house, J.’s house. I was already huge with the pregnancy though I still had many months to go. On the regular throughout the summer, W. left the stinking heat of Bodiford and came down to J.’s house with the pool. Together we sunbathed and floated and fed the lizards that lived in the shrubs surrounding the pool the small winged insects that got trapped on the surface of the water. The lizards would only eat the insects if they were still moving, not yet fully dead. We scooped the insects on to the concrete, and the lizards took turns scurrying down from the legs of the lounger where they were basking and watching, and gobbled them up. W. and I, we did this for hours at a time. I was happy. I thought good, big things were coming my way, and I was enjoying the lull before those things arrived. I was basking in the potential of what I didn’t yet know was going to in fact be a time of the opposite, a time of failures and difficulty.

During this happy time W. told me a story about a recent camping trip to North Carolina with her father. After hours of driving they reached their destination. Her father jumped out of the truck, began removing gear from the trunk. He came around to W.’s side of the vehicle just as she opened her door and stepped down onto the road.

In his steadiest voice he said, “Don’t look down, just get back inside.”

W. did look down. To her left and to her right, so close they were almost touching her, were two thick rings of copperhead. The snakes were coiled because they had been basking, not because they were ready to strike, but there they were. Two of them, with W. dressed in shorts and sandals, standing in the middle.

This story doesn’t end with W. and her father driving at insane speeds to the nearest emergency room. It continues with W. calmly stepping back inside the truck and closing the door. Her father driving the truck to a different spot up the road. The two of them carrying on as normal.

“Chloe,” W. said, “I got lucky.”

I could see how much it shook her up though. I imagined she had spent time playing out the other scenarios that could have followed, the bad ones, the different levels of pain, the scars that might have stuck, weighing them against the good luck of the actual outcome.

In the years since that summer, I have put myself on the side of that road in North Carolina many times. I have stood square between those two copperheads and I have tried to play out my response. W. never described the snakes for me in detail. I imagine them as paler than usual, the regular hourglass patterns on their backs a washed-out brown against almost-cream, as if they are being seen through a dust cloud. They are plump and they have the auras of an aged couple dozing on their porch in the afternoon sun. They do not give a flying fuck about me, but they will, they could.

I can’t get a grip on it though, my response. Most often, it results in one of the different outcomes that I imagine W. imagined—bad. Yet there are times when I find myself possessed by a W.-level calmness, level-headedness and I do as she did and I don’t jump or squeal or get myself bitten. The thought of that is exciting. It makes me think luck has only something to do with it. It makes me think I’m not yet all sealed up. The windows and doors of me. It makes me giddy enough to want to meet them for myself, those copperheads. It makes me want to test it out.

Intersection of Edgeware and Madras

Christchurch, New Zealand

* * *

“I feel embarrassed I didn’t get more injured,” I say.

My husband raises his eyebrows.

“I can’t even get hit by a car right.”

We both laugh nervously, but neither of us denies there might be some truth to what I have said. Before I have caught my breath I slowly climb the stairs and return to bed, which is where I have spent most of the week since the accident. I keep revisiting the facts of it. I was crossing at the lights, west to east. It was my right of way. The car came speeding around the corner and hit me on my left side. I didn’t see it coming. When I stopped moving I was six metres down the road. I suffered no breaks, no scary internal traumas. All the medical professionals I dealt with seemed surprised by this. I have willingly shared these details with anyone who has asked. Mostly this is because I can hardly believe what happened, and the facts of it are the only way to know for sure that it did.

Our three-year-old wants to know why I can’t pick him up.

“Mummy got hit by a car remember,” my husband tells him.

“Oh,” he says.

Every time this: Oh. As if it’s all new information to him, and he and his dad didn’t have this exact conversation ten minutes ago. Oh. During the time I spent at the hospital I learned from the x-ray and ultrasound technicians that I have a beautiful heart and a lovely spine. When I explained the facts of the accident to my family and friends I added this detail as a kind of coda. To make light of it. No exclamation marks though, to keep it deadpan, to make myself feel like a character in another person’s funny story.

It was a newer model car, pedestrian friendly, so the front of the car absorbed a lot of the impact. My left shoulder, arm, and hip absorbed the rest. I haven’t been sleeping well. Partly due to the pain in my left shoulder, partly due to the worries that were keeping me up before the accident, and partly because I can’t stop reliving the moment of impact. The force of it, the being shunted off my feet, the hard landing on the asphalt. I pace out the frames of it in my mind like a Muybridge serial study, except it is not some guy lying down on a bed, it is me and my body moving wrongly against a plain gray backdrop. I replay the impact to remind myself that it happened. I also replay it to try and find the moment, the smallest smudge of a moment, where I had the thought, I am going under.

I didn’t go under. If I had, this would be a different story. I saw the portal to a different outcome though. It was there. The portal wasn’t a physical to-scale thing, like a door in the space beneath the car, that would be absurd. It was small and moving quickly very far away. Like something from a B-grade sci-fi. Like the projection of the Cat’s Eye Nebula on my son’s bedroom ceiling from his space-themed torch. Like the crack of a tooth breaking. Like the flash of a seed being dropped down a grate. Like the swift razing of skin, a carpet lifted free of its tacks. Like the wink of a single strand of my son’s hair in the sun.

I didn’t nearly die, not in a medical sense. I didn’t even lose consciousness. So it doesn’t make sense that this glitch in my psyche, if that’s what you can call it, was something like a near-death experience. So what was it? And why can’t I stop revisiting the scene of it, running my hands over the painted cream walls of my mind, searching for that opening.

Yesterday morning I finally returned to the intersection where the accident happened. I crossed at the lights, east to west. When I reached the other side, I stopped and turned and pressed the return crossing button. I transported myself back to the day of the accident. When the signal turned green, I stepped out on to the road. When I reached the location of impact, the exact spot, I felt it. I looked down the road to my right and I thought, I was here and then I was over there. And yet nothing has changed.

One of our best family stories is how the day my first piano arrived I almost got flattened by a car. I was six years old. I was crossing the road behind the school bus. The car that almost killed me came to a screeching halt mere centimetres from where I stood in the middle of the street. That was the first time I didn’t go under. I have recently started teaching my son about road safety. Because of my first near-miss it is possible I am too cautious. Sometimes when his dad takes him out for a ride around the neighbourhood on his scooter, I watch him zoom through the gate, helmet on, yipping and whooping, and my heart has already crawled so far up the back of my throat I think I will be sick.

Yesterday when my son arrived home from preschool he remembered not to jump into my arms. He forcefully hugged me around my legs instead.

“Mummy got hit by a car,” he said.

“How was your day?” I said.

“Yes,” he said.

His teachers had helped him make a “get well” card for me out of a folded sheet of paper. I asked him what the drawing on the front of the card was of.

“It’s colours,” he said.

“Yes, but colours representing what? What’s the picture?”

“It’s just colours,” he said.

When the trauma doctor in the ER checked inside my ears for signs of a brain bleed, a small part of me wished she would find something. I forget that my brain is real and that it is inside of me, up there in my skull, so close, pressing against the canals of my ears. Doing it all. I was aware of it that day in the ER while I waited to be examined, the throbbing pain of it, the fear that it could be damaged. However, I also feared that as soon as my headache subsided I would forget all about it again. I would stop being concerned for its health and return to taking it for granted.

The doctor found no sign of bleeding.

“You’re going to feel terrible for a while still,” she said.

“Thank you,” I said.

When my therapist first asked when did the depression start to get bad again, I told him probably around the evening my son was born. And the anxiety? They arrived together, I said. Conjoined twins. I haven’t seen the therapist since the accident. I bet he will have a lot of questions for me. I don’t yet know how I am going to answer those questions. On the one hand, I am alive and pleased to be alive. On the other hand, I am lying flat on my back on the living room floor, eyes closed, once again playing over and over in my head the facts of it. I am searching, but for what? A sign that there’s another side? That there’s more than just this? Is it wrong to want to take a peek?

I open my eyes. It’s time to put on the rice for dinner. Across the city my husband is starting the engine of our old VW, and my son is fastening the Velcro of his purple sneakers. I was there and then I was over there, I think, I was there and then I was over there. You could go mad thinking about it. The starting point and the end point. And whatever might be waiting after the fact. And whatever else might happen in between.        

Sweetwater Branch Inn Pool

Gainesville, Florida

* * *

The optimal time for a termite swarm is when the weather is warm, humid, and still, and the day after rain. From their colony in the walls and floor of our apartment––one quarter of a nineteenth-century two-storey––this year the swarmers chose an evening in late May. After they launched themselves into the air, where they quickly paired off––picture a nervous scramble like a weightless blue light disco––they discarded their wings and fell to the earth to mate, all while thinking their mission to populate a new colony was a success. Though they hadn’t been swarming towards the moon, but rather the lone ceiling light in our study.

The original colony was large enough to provide a couple of weeks of these nightly swarmers. It isn’t true that the more termite swarms one experiences, the less horrifying they become. Every morning P. vacuumed up the mounds of wings left on the windowsills and floor in the study and study bathroom, while I stood in the doorway and made disgusted noises and pictured the house eventually crumbling beneath our feet, its foundation a Swiss cheese of termite city.

When the fumigators finally arrived, our landlord put us up in her tastefully decorated and well-maintained Victorian B&B. It looked like a version of every B&B I have ever seen on TV. There was the grand, curving staircase with framed ghostly black and white photos of the original owners. There were thin, wobbly side tables adorned with fine china figurines, clocks, commemorative plates, framed watercolors. There was floral and paisley, red velvet, black and white tiles, detailed relief work on the door frames and skirting, intricately patterned rugs, stained-glass windows. Tchaikovsky’s first piano concerto was blasting on repeat. The bed was four feet off the ground, so it had to be climbed into.

The main feature of the pool was the enormous sign mounted above the spa that listed the “pool rules.” The water was salt, though I didn’t feel extra buoyant. The mosquitoes hovering above the pool were plump. The green Astroturf surrounding the pool was a clean spongy surface to drip-dry on, a lovely green, and better than fire-ant-infested real grass. Wrapped in his towel poncho, I watched our eight-month-old stroke the plastic blades of grass with a single extended finger, utterly mesmerized.

Back in our room, I somehow got the TV stuck on CNN.

Four days later, the fumigation tent that had been erected over our house was gone. The trees and plants that were trapped on the inside of the tent were impressively dead. All that was left were bare branches, a few brown leaves, while the foliage a foot away was perfectly lush. One snake didn’t make it out––it had been poisoned mid-escape, while slithering out from under the house. There were likely more snake corpses under there, too. Though inside, our apartment wasn’t scattered with insect carcasses as I imagined it might be. I am no good with insects––for one, I have a fear of butterflies––but there was an eerie quietness surrounding our house, an emptiness that we––the humans, dogs, and cats, occupying the four apartments––couldn’t fill. I wondered, is this what it would feel like after the apocalypse for those unlucky few emerging from their bunkers?

The insects have already started to come back. I have seen a cockroach in the living room, a moth in the storage closet, one of those shiny horned clicking beetles in the hallway, and a hornet got itself stuck between one of the windows and window screens in the bedroom. On the one hand, I would rather they didn’t come back, but on the other hand, it’s good that they have. When I take the eight-month-old out in the stroller, he likes to sit as far forward as possible so he can look at everything we pass, his head turning furiously from left to right, hungry for it all. I try to guess what he’s looking at so I can narrate for him––the different trees and plants, the shapes of their leaves, the sounds they make rustling in the breeze or shook up by a squirrel, the bright, bright sky, the heat from the sun, our wobbly shadows on the sidewalk, the birds and insects zipping along our path. And when we see a butterfly I try not to panic and frantically wave my arms. “Look,” I say instead––calmly, warmly––“it’s a butterfly. It’s alive and it’s doing its thing.”

Fools Pool

MURIWAI BEACH, NEW ZEALAND

* * * * *

I Skype with my mother and father once a week on Saturday morning New Zealand time/Friday evening Florida time, in the window between the baby’s first dinner and his bath and second dinner. My mother and I discuss our weeks, which for me is a review of the following: how well the baby is sleeping, what new issues the baby is having with feeding, whether the baby has rolled over yet (he hasn’t), and what P. and I have been cooking and eating for dinner. When I update my mother on these things I realise how small my life has become, though during the week, while I’m living it, it doesn’t feel small, it feels busy and full––every minute is accounted for. I’m sure that if I had time to think about my life, and how much it has ground to a halt, I would be in trouble. For better or worse, this has always been one way I’ve managed my depression––by keeping moving. Even if that now means literally keeping moving with the baby in the stroller or the pack, doing loops of the neighbourhood, trying to get him to sleep.

My mother’s weekly update is mostly about school: whether or not she has a new batch of reports due, whether or not she has lost yet another planning document to the wily Google Docs, the health of the school’s vegetable and worm gardens, how many pairs of pirate pants she has to sew for the school production, how many weeks before the next holidays begin.

Much of this content will be repeated next week. Having been so far away from my family for so long, I have learned that this is one of the definitions of family, and I find it immensely comforting.

Now my father joins the conversation. First, he has something to say about the local bird scene: how long the tūī have been spending in the bird bath, how fat the kererū are getting, how long the fattest kererū has been hanging out in the cabbage tree, how many sparrows are on the front lawn, how many sparrows are sitting on the kitchen window sill, whether or not the mynahs are back nesting in the eaves of the tool shed, an analysis of all the birds’ various songs.

Next, the weather: “It’s a clear, still day here,” he says, as he turns away from the iPad screen to look wistfully out the window. “There’s no wind, it’s perfectly calm.”

The three of us take a moment to meditate on this––my mother and father to soak it up, while I remember what Muriwai Beach is like on this kind of morning.

Once he has got these things out the way, my father turns the rest of our conversation into a show and tell. He’s still thrilled by the novelty of Skype, so it’s important to him to make the most of being able to see each other. Unlike my mother who often struggles to keep herself in the frame, so very often I’m speaking to just her right arm, the duvet cover on the bed, or the ceiling fan, my father wants to see me and his grandson, and for me and his grandson to see everything.

Tonight he wants to show us a new porcelain teacup he has bought from TradeMe. “It’s for High Tea,” he says with an excited look in his eye. High Tea is something he does with the other old retired dudes who live nearby––they sit on the deck in the afternoon and watch the kererū in the cabbage tree, while they sip whisky from tiny teacups with their pinkies out.

The new teacup is very small and very fine. It’s a shimmery midnight blue with gold details around the rim and handle.

“That’s a nice cup,” I say, and I mean it.

“Yes,” my father says.

My mother has nothing to add.

Next my father wants to show me something he has been building. Last month it was a portable smoker, which he designed and built from cedar. This month it’s a slow drip coffeemaker that he has constructed out of wood and various vessels he found lying around the kitchen. The wood frame stands two feet tall. It looks like a very craftily designed high school science project. This is not the first time I have seen it, still, I act surprised and excited by the fact that one of the parts is an old Heinz ketchup bottle, the red plastic kind with the nozzle that screws open and shut.

“I hope you washed that out properly,” I say.

“Oh no, oh no,” my father says, “jeez.”

“Oh god, tomato-flavoured coffee,” my mother says.

While we’re all saying our bits, my father is moving the iPad screen up and down and around his construction, so I can see it from all angles. As he’s doing this I get a glimpse of what look like buns rising on the kitchen counter.

“Are those buns?” I ask.

“Yes, they’re rising,” my father says.

“Your father is making buns,” my mother says.

“What kind?” I ask.

“Just regular buns,” my mother says.

“Plain buns,” my father says.

My father doesn’t want to talk about the buns––he wants to keep discussing the quality of the coffee he’s making with his contraption. This week he started experimenting with ice instead of water, so the coffee filters through one drip at a time as the ice melts. It’s probably worth mentioning here that my parents love coffee and they already own and use every kind of coffeemaker there is: espresso, stovetop, Chemex, they even have one of those Nespresso machines, so when my mother agrees that this new kind of coffee is delicious, I believe her, despite still being hung up on the presence of the ketchup bottle.

Now I notice my father has had a haircut. “You’ve had a hair cut,” I say.

My father runs his hand through his hair, which has thinned in the last few years, but is still plentiful and lively, a cool white. “Yessss,” he says, drawing out the “yes” in such a way that I know there’s something to come.

My mother starts giggling.

“I got it cut at a new place down the road,” my father says. “The God Barber.”

“The God Barber?” I ask.

My mother is both nodding and shaking her head.

My father takes a deep breath. “The God Barber,” he says again, as if he’s reliving something painful. “They were playing music over the stereo that had a heavy beat, and that was spouting the benefits of using cocaine.”

“Really?” I say.

“I kid you not,” my father says.

“It’s a good haircut,” I say.

My father nods solemnly. My mother has left the screen to turn on the coffee grinder. If there’s one sound that I associate with mornings in the house where I grew up, it’s the loud whirr of the coffee grinder, though it has changed in tone and speed over the years as various grinders have been retired or died.

Now my mother and father have returned to discussing the local birds, as a tūī has showed up for a bath. They take turns describing how it’s puffing itself out and turning around in the bird bath, how much fun it seems to be having. I don’t need them to turn the screen for me to see the bird for myself. When I’m feeling homesick, these are the things I picture: the long morning shadows on the front lawn that point to the bird bath where the tūī is taking his morning dip, the coffee grinder whirring into action over the distant roar of the sea, my parents gazing out the kitchen window while they eat their toast, drink this coffee, and now this coffee, and exclaim, “What a handsome chap,” “He is, look at him,” “He’s having a good bath,” “Hello there, how are you today?” “Where are your mates, where’s your family?” “Are they joining you soon?”

The last time I went home, all of this was exactly as I remembered it, though this swimming pool was new to me. It’s only five minutes of easy walking from my parents’ house, but I had never visited it before. It shares a paddock with some horses. It’s twenty-five metres long and heated. It’s covered in what looks and feels like a very large greenhouse. The light inside reminds me of the small private pool where as a very young child I learned how to swim. It has a good, strong chlorine smell.

O’Connell Center Pool, University of Florida

GAINESVILLE, FLORIDA

* * *

Christmas Eve three years ago, my husband and I attended a dinner party with my brother and four other gregarious marine biologists. The dinner was at a house not far from the Virginia coast. The house was big and new and airy and smelled faintly of sawdust and paint. Fish and shellfish were served. We brought a perfect pavlova that my brother had made from scratch, and a plate of poorly decorated gingerbread cookies for the young children of two of the marine biologists. Everyone who wasn’t from New Zealand was polite about the pavlova. “The fruit on top really helps to cut through the sweet,” they said. The two young boys absolutely destroyed the gingerbread. By the time we were ready to leave I was drunk. So was my husband. My brother, who drew the designated-driver short straw, reassured us he had sobered up. I had no reason not to believe him. This is not a story about drunk driving.

The route home was along a narrow winding road beside the York River. We’d seen US Navy submarines milling about in the river earlier in the day, and maybe they were still there, their backs exposed to the frigid December air, but it was impossible to see them for the dark and the fog. I’ve had run-ins with fog before, but never like this. We couldn’t see more than a few feet in front of the car. There was nowhere to stop to wait till it lifted, and no room to attempt a three-point turn to head back, so my brother kept driving at a crawl. It was the kind of road we’d grown up with––no streetlights, only a scattering of weak road markers––but every country road has its quirks. This one had a lot of sharp turns and single-lane bridges. The bridges weren’t any easier to see than the rest of the road. At any point we could have driven into the river and none of us would have known till we’d hit the water. “You’re doing so well,” I said to my brother, over and over again, while I sat in the middle back seat, fiercely gripping both headrests, my heart pounding, thinking about whether we could survive such an accident, whether I could break a window to escape (what would I use?), how cold the water would be (it would snow that week), how dark it would be (would I know which way to swim?), whether I could remember how to do CPR. I don’t know who suggested we use a cellphone map to read the turns, because I don’t remember anyone speaking above my repeated reassurances, and maybe I wasn’t even speaking, maybe I was just repeating that line in my head, but my husband took out his phone and started doing just that. “Easy left coming up in 3, 2, 1 … sharp right coming up in 3, 2, 1”––that’s how we made it home. The world’s slowest, most afraid rally drivers.

This pool is primarily for competitive training and competition. I only swim here when it’s too cold to swim outdoors. Olympic-length, it can be divided into two pools twenty-five metres or twenty-five yards long. When it’s the shorter twenty-five yards, there’s a narrow canal of extra pool between the bulkheads, which is useful for treading water and little else. My primary interaction with it has been when trying to clamber around the starting blocks to reach a middle lane, and simply trying not to fall in (directly opposite this narrow stream of surplus water is where the student lifeguards sit). There are diving boards but they don’t have their own pool––they have to remove the middle lane ropes to clear entry space in the water. And there is stadium seating––the kind that rolls away when not in use into a wall of wood and metal slats. Although the tiles around the pool have been designed to be non-slip when wet, they are lacking in traction, so when moving around this pool deck you have to adopt a special casual, but careful, walk––almost a creep. Fortunately, I’ve had years of practise walking on this kind of surface. I can creep without even having to think about it.

Despite the many times I have swum here, I’m still not confident about how to get from outside the pool complex to the pool deck. It’s not straightforward. There are many corridors and doors and different levels. I’ve entered the complex from three different angles and have often found myself in a corridor that’s not familiar, and that doesn’t lead to the pool deck. More than once I’ve kept walking, and then found myself in the exact same place I’d been three minutes before, as if I’d just walked around an Escher drawing. Other times, after acknowledging I’m lost, I’ve turned around, gone back to where I entered the building, and started again, like a Choose Your Own Adventure.

Often I can actually see the pool––over a balcony, through a window––or I can hear it, smell it––I just can’t get to it. While circling the bowels of this building, I’ve seen unoccupied massage tables, gymnasts pirouetting on a balance beam, a long white table laid with a hundred bottles of water, men in hard-hats carrying what looked like a large vacuum cleaner, gymnasts stretching on a mat, a dark windowless room filled with flippers, a dark windowless room filled with kegs of Gatorade, a man bouncing a basketball against a corridor wall, a breakfast buffet. Trying to navigate the corridors of this complex is a different kind of blindness to what we experienced that Christmas Eve in Virginia, but I could do with a map. I wouldn’t even need someone to dictate the turns for me, just a plain old fold-out paper number would do––one that starts with “You are here” and ends with me dressed in my swimsuit on the pool deck. “Life is a journey, not a destination” does not apply to driving through horrifyingly dense fog, or trying to access an indoor swimming pool.

The Art Professor’s Pool

GAINESVILLE, FLORIDA

* * *

I have never swum in this pool, which belongs to a University of Florida art professor; I have only stood beside it at night while attending an end-of-semester party. The professor paints bright, personable abstracts––lots of fat squiggly spaghetti lines, trellis-like crosshatching, all neat-edged, yellows and oranges, lime green, watermelon green. I steered clear of most of the hors d’oeuvres at the party because I was newly pregnant and cold cuts and soft cheeses featured heavily. Instead I stuck with the honeydew and pineapple. I’m not usually one for a kidney-shaped pool, but from where I was standing, paper plate of fresh fruit chunks in one hand, plastic fork in the other, this pool and its studio backdrop happily reminded me of David Hockney’s “A Bigger Splash.” Though less California, more swampy Florida. That night I also learned that I only like to eat fruit with a fork, which is what I have tried to do every day and night since.

Comfort Hotel

WELLINGTON, NEW ZEALAND

* 

I swam in this pool when I was back in New Zealand for a month, and my father and I visited Wellington. The first thing we did after leaving the airport and checking in to our hotel was head to a nearby sushi train. Perched side by side on a pair of high wooden stools, we proceeded to eat more than sixty dollars worth of sushi. My father is a fantastic eater, and he wants everyone else to be fantastic eaters too. He smiles and makes satisfied noises while he chews––his grey-blue eyes twinkling with pleasure. He’s like one of the puffed-up rodents I’ve seen in YouTube videos, chewing with adorable focus on a nut or carrot stick, and this is true whether he’s eating an expensive meal out, or munching on a simple cheese sandwich while standing at the kitchen sink. It’s hard not to be egged on by his enthusiasm.

Later that evening, I believed that meal might be the last my father and I shared.

I’d arranged to meet friends for drinks. My father had made his own plans––he was going to visit an old friend who lived above the city. We agreed to keep in touch––maybe we would meet up later on, maybe we would see each other the next morning at the breakfast buffet, the plan was loose––but when I called to see how he was doing, his cellphone rang and rang. My father is only in his late sixties, but after three failed calls, the image that formed in my head was of him lying prostrate on the floor of his very small hotel room in our below mid-range hotel, dead from a heart attack. This picture made no sense––my father had left the hotel hours ago––but I’d started to panic. I left the bar to stand on the street, and while dialing and re-dialing, I watched the people walking past me on the sidewalk, and I was envious of them and how confident they seemed in the knowledge that their loved ones weren’t lying facedown on thin hotel carpet. One of the people to cross my path was a man near my father’s age. He was walking a dog that was a bizarre mix of some kind of working dog and one of those large round-faced dogs with curly hair. The dog’s tail was monstrous and vertical, and it bounced with metronomic precision, keeping time with its owner’s stride.

My father and mother had dogs before my brothers and I arrived. I’ve seen Super 8mm footage of my father showing one of the dogs in a competition. He’s wearing trainers, and is running around the circumference of the arena with one arm outstretched, the leash in his hand short and taut, he and the dog keeping perfect stride. I thought of this footage while I tried his cellphone again. My parents didn’t make sense to me as Dog Show people. If I hadn’t seen the proof of them in action––there were photographs, too––I wouldn’t have believed it. But then again, that was another life ago––a time when they were younger than the age I was now, a time before children, a time of pleasures I knew nothing about, a time when there was probably more to be excited about than dignified portions of sushi arriving on a little conveyor belt.

When my father finally picked up, he sounded annoyed. He was fine––he was enjoying his dinner with his friend, his phone had been on mute in his jacket pocket. I pretended I was drunk and apologised for all the missed calls. I laughed it off. I felt embarrassed about how swiftly I’d jumped to the worst conclusion, so embarrassed I couldn’t bring myself to tell him how worried I’d been, and how guilty I’d felt that this might have been it for him.

I went for a swim in the hotel pool the next morning after my father and I’d enjoyed the breakfast buffet––how his face shone as he ate his mini croissants. Swimming in this pool was like swimming in a shipping crate. It was too short to stretch out for proper lap swimming––it was more of a flap around after a few cocktails at the hotel bar kind of pool. Walls surrounded it on three sides. The windows on one wall made the space only slightly less claustrophobic. These windows continued below the water line, so while I was swimming I could look out at the street several storeys down. It was an inner-city back street––the kind where people parked their cars and left their cardboard boxes and old broken pieces of furniture for collection. I couldn’t see anyone out the window, but while underwater I tried out waving at the building across the road. It felt silly, so I only did it once.

Dwight H. Hunter “Northeast” Pool

GAINESVILLE, FLORIDA

* * * *

This public pool shares its Gainesville nook with a large grassy park, an unflashy football field with concrete seating, one volleyball sandpit with a “no loitering” sign affixed to an adjacent fence, and a fire station. First thing in the morning the lane-ropes are arranged length-wise, making the pool an Olympic fifty metres. I’ve only swum here when the lane-ropes were arranged across the pool––twenty-five yards. They were organised this way to open up the shallow end for “free swimming,” and to create space beneath the waterslide. Once, on a weekend when the shallow end of the pool was packed with kids, I swam in the lane closest to the mouth of the waterslide. The force of the water coming down the slide, and the added whoosh created by all those legs and butts hitting the water with speed, gave the lane an upstream and a downstream. When swimming towards the slide, I felt like a spawning salmon, and when swimming away from it, I just felt marvellous. I have wondered about the mathematics of this workout versus swimming in a standard, stagnant pool. Was it like running up and down a flight of stairs? Was this as close as I could get to swimming up a hill? Can you picture that? Is that like swimming up a waterfall? Like the salmon? And is anyone rooting for the salmon? Or are you all for the grizzly bear standing in the water up to her round, woolly belly, fishing for lunch for her kids, the ones goofing around on the shoreline, because all the salmon wants to do is get home so it can die in peace?

The Gage Hotel

MARATHON, TEXAS

*

This was the first time I’ve been burned by a chair.

Florida Pool, University of Florida

GAINESVILLE, FLORIDA

* * * * *

I loved driving on the open road when I first got my license. The last ten kilometres before my parents’ house, where I knew the swerve and dip of the country hills so well, I would take with speed, the windows cracked, the tape player cranked. I was such a cool, skillful driver between the highway turnoff and our driveway that it didn’t matter that I couldn’t parallel park. Early on in my pregnancy, I thought I would swim until the day I gave birth. As the pregnancy progressed, I could still swim with some skill and confidence, but small maneuvers became tricky. As my belly grew, it became harder to get a tight enough tuck to effectively tumble turn. I started to come out of my turns facing the bottom of the pool. Despite my furious kicking, with my abdominal muscles already stretched to hell, I found myself not speeding to the surface, but slowly bobbing up, less like a sea lion, more like that sea lion’s bloated corpse. Too many times I started to run out of oxygen, so I had to give up the tumble turns. Eventually, it became difficult to exit the pool too.

This was a serious swimming pool, and I was supposed to be a strong and limber individual who had no problems negotiating 4.5 feet of concrete and tile. To enter, I could heave-slide myself into the water, but it didn’t take long before I could no longer heave myself back out. I had to start using the ladder. This was the method of entry and exit reserved for older professors only––the distinguished men and women my parents’ age who, before entering the water, slathered their whole bodies with sunscreen so no matter their skin tone they glowed pale and slick like fresh oysters. I felt conspicuous using the ladder. Not because I was clearly seven months pregnant, but, I realise now, because I still thought of myself as one of the young people.

I’m not a young person. I haven’t been for a while. But it’s easy to pretend you’re someone else when you’re submerged––there are only swimmers and non-swimmers. I’ve mistaken a septuagenarian for a svelte nineteen-year-old when watching them swim freestyle. Only when they came to a stop could I see the line of their face, the hang of their neck, the many freckles still visible through all that sunscreen on those tanned bony shoulders. While plowing up and down that pool I’d been able to cling to the sliver of an image I had of myself as still youthful, healthful.

My parallel parking never improved. My solution: park very far away, or drive around the block as many times as was necessary till a larger space cleared and I could swoop in, nose first. Similarly, during those final weeks, I often kept swimming beyond what I could physically handle, up and down the lane, to avoid climbing that ladder. The ladder was embarrassing. And it presented its own challenges. It was slippery when wet, and made even slipperier by what I can only assume was surplus sunscreen left behind by its older users. I was also getting very front heavy, and hoisting myself up on that last rung I had to use all the strength in my arms and legs to avoid wobbling, then falling. I was terrified I would topple backwards into the pool. I pictured myself landing on one of the young people swimming in the outside lanes––this vision seemed worse than the possibility of falling forwards and onto my belly––and then needing to be assisted from the pool using the chair lift. I had only seen that chair lift in action once. It was loud and slow and, no matter how much they wanted to be polite, everyone in and around the pool had stared at its occupant.

I started to obsess about the chair lift. Me inside the chair lift. It got to the point where I would spend my whole swim visualising climbing the ladder, failing, and then needing to be motor-lifted from the pool. Now too heavy and exhausted to keep swimming forever, I began spending a lot of time standing in the shallower end of the pool and pretending to stretch my calves, my hamstrings, my arms, my calves again. The young lifeguards started watching me too. The day of my last swim, as I finally hoisted myself onto the first slippery rung, I saw a young woman guard move from her chair at the top of the watchtower, her gaze fixed on me, as if preparing to rush to my aid. It took absolutely everything I had to get myself standing upright on the pool deck. While I caught my breath, I steadied myself against the ladder’s metal frame and pretended to be interested in something on the other side of the pool: a row of unoccupied orange and blue loungers, a chain-link fence, a student passing on a mint-green scooter. I’d spent so much time not exiting the pool, standing and stretching beneath the Florida summer sun, I’d become dehydrated.

It took me twenty minutes to get dressed. I had to take breaks––sitting and resting on the toilet seat. Then it took me three installments to walk from the pool changing room to where my husband was waiting for me in the car less than fifty yards from the pool complex’s entrance. I slowly wobbled through each installment in an increasing, near-fainting darkness. I fell asleep––passed out––on the way home.

This is still one of the most beautiful pools I have swum in. It is fifty yards long, 4.5–12.5 feet deep, heated in the winter, and cooled in the summer with fun rotating jets of water that, when facing your lane, make you feel like you’re swimming through heavy, cold rain. The young people controlling the sound system have the radio tuned to either a Christian country station or “classic” (nineties) rock. But when your head’s underwater it’s easy to tune out the Soundgarden, or all of those songs about taking her down to the river in your pickup truck while drinking whiskey and wearing tight blue jeans.

Jill Ciment's Pool

GAINESVILLE, FLORIDA

* * * * *

“It was in that bush,” I said, pointing at a large leafy shrub by the swimming pool fence. “I saw it just before.”

“How long before?” the man from the animal control service asked.

“Before I called,” I said.

The man was dressed in forest-green slacks and a khaki buttoned-down shirt, short-sleeved, which, from a distance, made him look like a state trooper––except for the hat, which was a green trucker with a golden silhouette of a panther on its front. He was using a net to stab at the bush where I’d seen the raccoon. It was the kind of net, a bright cerulean blue and on the end of a long metal pole, I’d used to scoop leaves and other things from the pool.

“It doesn’t appear to be here now,” he said. “You think it was sick?”

“It didn’t look right,” I said tentatively.

“We’ve had a rise in distemper cases,” he said, still hacking at the bush.

“It was moving oddly,” I said. “I want to say with ‘swagger’ but that’s probably not right.”

The man didn’t look up from what he was doing. “I wouldn’t use that word.”

“No,” I said.

He gave up on that bush, and wandered towards the end of the pool and began mussing up some other bushes with his net. “There’s nothing here,” he said, swiping at a healthy agave plant––no hiding place for a raccoon.

The thought of him leaving empty-handed worried me. I didn’t believe the raccoon had just moved on––if I weren’t afraid of it, afraid of whatever disease it might give me if it attacked, I would have rummaged through those bushes myself. I didn’t want the swaggering creature to end up in the pool, and I didn’t want to have to reenlist the help of this or some other animal control service, but, more significantly, I also felt as if in my inability to produce a sick raccoon I was betraying some shortcoming in my person. Maybe I’d misjudged the situation. I didn’t know a sick raccoon from a healthy raccoon. I couldn’t get over it and let the raccoon do its thing. I wasn’t a real Floridian.

“Seeing it out during the day was what made me first wonder,” I said vaguely.

“Do you ever get up during the night?” the man asked. He was stowing his net in the back of his van, and preparing to leave sans raccoon. “If your neighbour saw you up doing things in the middle of the night, would you want them to call the authorities? To have you taken away?”

“I hadn’t thought of it like that,” I said.

“There’s no such thing as one hundred percent nocturnal or diurnal,” he said. His tone suggested I should take this piece of advice in warning.

This swimming pool is only one I’ve ever housed with, not just visited. It’s a perfect Florida backyard pool. There’s a pool guy, Miguel, who comes once a week to clean it and adjust the chlorine, so besides the sick raccoon I’ve only ever had to give it a daily scoop––mostly to remove leaves, but also pine needles, lizards (alive and dead), frogs (alive and dead), snakes (alive), Spanish moss, branches (after Hurricane Irma), dragonflies (dead), and spiders (alive, dead, and what looked like only skins?).

My husband found the raccoon the day after the man from the animal control service visited. It was in the same bush we’d thought we’d seen it crawl into when it was sick and dying. It was already starting to decompose under the Florida sun. My husband wore his coveralls, industrial-level painting mask, rubber gloves, and protective glasses when shoveling the raccoon from the bush into a trash bag. I watched out the sliding glass door, from the safety of the air-conditioned living room, and wondered, had the raccoon been dead before yesterday? Or had it been crouching there, sick and afraid, and listening to us talking about it while the animal control man stabbed his metal pole at the leaves around it, and then just above its head, and then directly where it lay?