Signs, Wonders. Grapevine.

Gordian Knot: an intractable problem that requires an unconventional solution.

 

In a previous life, I visited the intriguing privately owned Naracoorte Museum and Snake Pit in South Australia.  It was a visit that changed my perception entirely about snakes and the owner of this museum is a fair-dinkum Pentecostal serpent-handler and dancer. I know this because he followed me around for about half-an-hour proselytizing.

 

And these signs shall follow them that believe: In my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues. They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover. ~ Mark 16: 17-18

Proselytizing.  That sure is one word I can never write without checking the dictionary to make sure I've spelled it right.  I doubt I pronounce it properly either.

Now I've got a curious and healthy interest in other people's faith traditions being an amateur theologian and some folks tend to think my interest gives them licence to recruit me to their brand of old time religion.  Or maybe that's just my perception and the serpent handler was just happy to have a tourist turn up who wasn't a total ignoramus.

As well as being a serpent handler and Pentecost, this chap also milks his snakes and provides a regular supply of venom to the Australian Venom Research Centre for the production of antivenom. When you consider that Australia is home to the most deadliest snakes in the world, I have a great deal of respect for the service this fundamental Christian provides to medical science.  The love he has for his snakes and reptiles was palpable.

I've seen plenty of snakes in museums from behind the safety of glass yet it was at this little museum that I experienced the awe and thrill of viewing live snakes without a barrier between them and me.

I was captivated by a beautiful red-bellied black snake balancing upright as it tried to peer over the top of it's enclosure - a corrugated iron water-tank that had been cut in half.  The ruby red underbelly of this creature was extraordinarily beautiful and I had never seen a snake in an upright posture like that before - or since.

Another corrugated iron water-tank created a pit, the bottom of which was a seething carpet of Eastern brown snakes and I never knew that there were so many shades of brown.  This species is responsible for the most amount of deaths-by-snakebite in Australia.  They're also the species that gets killed the most just for passing through places where humans happen to be.  Eastern Browns are temperamental and dangerous : I would be too after decades of having my kinfolk slaughtered for no particularly good reason.  It's not complicated really.  If you don't bother a brownie, it won't bother you.

Those are the two memories from that visit which have stayed with me.  I can't really remember anything else as vividly.  Just the serpent handler, the ruby red belly of the dancing black snake and the living carpet of Eastern browns.

Naracoorte.

From 1983-1999, I had a South Australian penpal who lived in Naracoorte for a few years. Her husband was a signwriter and they moved there with great expectations of a new life, yet the townspeople didn't let them in to the community : they were outsiders.  Folks from the big city of Adelaide and, well, they do things differently in the country.

I found that out for myself when I moved from the big smoke of Melbourne to live in a parochial town in rural Victoria.  There's a popular belief that 'country people are friendly'.  Well, yes they are.  If you're another country person that is.  They aint as friendly to city people.  The only 'country' people that are friendly, are those that were city people themselves and they're never considered 'locals' by the real locals. 

As someone once told me : you're not a local by country standards if you don't have a great-grandpappy buried in the cemetary.

In one small country-town, I happen to have a great-great-grandpappy pushing up daisies in the cemetary, yet I'm not a "local" because I wasn't born or raised in that Wimmera backwater : despite being related to 70% of the people living there who were.  For folks that are stuck in their ways, they sure know how to shift the goal-posts.  I like country people: it's the small-town mentality that gives me the yippee ki-yay go and fuck you very muchness.

The correspondence with this penpal ceased after 1999 and I figured she was hale and healthy with her husband and two daughters and life was good.  Then one day in 2002, I got a letter from her out-of-the-blue.  She had tracked down somebody she hoped was me via the internet and wrote a letter on the off-chance that the address she found belonged to the penpal she once had.

I replied in the affirmative. 

When she wrote again, bringing me up to speed with her life, I was painfully reminded of how nothing prepares you for your destiny and how weeks, months and years can elapse with you thinking that everything is warm and rosy for the other, when it fact, they have been experiencing a circle of Hell that staggers the imagination.

My former penpal told me she had been diagnosed with Temporal Lobe epilepsy that was drug-resistant and had undergone surgery to alleviate the symptoms, yet sadly fell into the small percentage of people who develop post-surgery psychosis.  One day she believed her husband was going to kill her, bundled up her two daughters and drove to the police station to report her fears.  Her husband was taken into custody and she was admitted as an involuntary patient to the psych ward of a hospital where she got the full strait-jacket treatment, ECT and medicated to the gills.

Eventually her marriage broke down and her husband was granted full custody of the children and she could only see them for supervised visits. Her husband was a good and kind man, bewildered of course, and bought her a unit to live in and made sure all her financial needs were covered.

They were teenage sweethearts.  They had been together for a long time.  They had lived in Naracoorte and in all that time when we were writing, exchanging 2-3 letters a week, she never told me about the Snake Museum.

Funny that.

The reconnection of the old penpal friendship didn't stick : neither of us were the same people that we used to be, and the people that we had become were too different.  She wanted to reestablish a dynamic that I had pulled away from providing in the first place.  I miss my friend, yet she is as mad as a cut snake and I don't handle serpents very well.  She is never far from my thoughts though.

There but for the grace of God, go I. 

With the deepest respect Comrades.

"I think we are all of us ill prepared for what is to come and I don't care what shape it takes. And whatever comes my guess is that it will have small power to sustain us. These old people I talk to, if you could of told em that there would be people on the streets of our Texas towns with green hair and bones in their noses speakin a language they couldn't even understand, well, they just flat out wouldn't of believed you. But what if you'd of told em it was their own grandchildren? Well, all that is signs and wonders but it don't tell you how it got that way. And it dont tell you nothin about how it's fixin to get neither. Part of it was I always thought I could at least someway put things right and I guess I just don't feel that way no more. I don't know what I do feel like. I feel like them old people I was talkin about."  ~ Sheriff Bell, No Country for Old Men

Doug Anthony Allstars - for a beautiful acapella rendition of "I Heard it Through the Grapevine"