Drowning in Snake Oil

By Audrey Stallsmith

I recently brought a live snake home with me from church—or what appeared to be a barely alive one. No, we aren't one of those Appalachian congregations that handles them on purpose! This one's coils had gotten stuck to a glue trap intended for mice. Since most of the other people at church are wary of serpents, I volunteered to attempt to release it. 

That doesn’t mean I’m a particularly brave person, just that my parents weren’t afraid of snakes so we kids never learned to be either. In fact, my father always remained indignant that some thoughtless female had made him kill a snake for her once, even though he had volunteered to just take it away instead.

This one was a blotched brown and some members of the congregation expressed fear that it might be a venomous copperhead. Its head didn’t look copper colored to me, and there was no sign of the rattle which the only other venomous PA snake would have. But I promised to be careful.

The snake appeared so listless that I was afraid it was going to die on me before I succeeded in releasing it. So, I postponed lunch and googled my problem. Everybody online seemed to agree that vegetable oil was the answer. Therefore, I placed the snake and trap in a dishpan and poured canola over the glue.

Since I had promised to be careful, I wore bulky leather pruning gloves and used tongs to tilt the trap in such a way that the snake wouldn’t drown in the oil. That meant I had to apply canola around its head with a Q-tip to soften the glue there. 

As I did so, I took note of the V-shaped brown mark on the top of that head, since I thought it would come in handy for identification purposes should the snake bite me. The oil did take a few moments to work but not as long as I’d anticipated.

Once the snake started to flex and uncoil, I began thinking that I might need a larger container in which to take it outside. However, it suddenly surged over the edge of the dishpan and made a dash for the edge of the table. I grabbed at it with the tongs, but it wriggled through them and dropped onto the floor.

By the time I’d hunkered down to look beneath the table, it already had disappeared. So, I went outside to see whether I could find a bucket with a lid, leaving the door open behind me in case the snake wanted to escape to the outdoors on its own.

It must have done so since I haven’t seen it since. And, no, the “v” on its head didn’t mean “viper.” After looking it up online, I discovered that it was an eastern milk snake which is nonvenomous. So, I probably could have handled it with my bare hands after all and maybe kept a better grip on it. (I also learned that a copperhead’s pate usually doesn’t have darker markings except for two side by side brown dots.)

A day or two later I found a piece of a serpent near the ramp from the front porch and felt dismayed that something might have killed “my” snake. Guinea fowl have been known to do that since the snakes in their native Africa tend to be more dangerous than ours. 

After looking at the piece closely, however, I found that it was plain brown with a lengthwise stripe, not blotched. So, then I had to conclude that my snake might have eaten a garter snake. Of course, there also is the possibility that the guy who mows my lawn ran over the latter accidentally.

All of this got me to wondering why we fear snakes simply because one once was possessed. After all, according to scripture, a herd of pigs also once was possessed and most of us don’t fear them.

I decided that it’s probably the serpents’ slithery-ness and possibly poisonous bite that is the problem, though a farm girl like me can tell you that pigs can be exceptionally slippery too when they don’t want to load and the meaner mama sows do bite! But, as we found out at a local park program once, snakes actually don’t feel slippery when they aren’t covered with canola.

However, the term “snake oil’ is used to describe anything false and deceptive and that definitely was what Satan was selling back in Eden. After all, Adam and Eve had everything they could have wanted at that time, everything but the fruit from one tree. And they somehow became convinced that fruit was worth forfeiting all the rest.

I recently read a book by a Christian man who had appeared to have it all too before backsliding over his attraction to a woman who wasn’t his wife. Though the book was written before his fall, it revealed that he had been unfaithful before he originally was converted too, so that might be what we would call his besetting sin. 

We all have them and the tempter, like a snake, is good at hiding and making his way through very small openings. So old sins can come back to life with surprising suddenness.

And the man in question seems to have fallen for the oldest lie in the book—that God was keeping something from him that he had a right to. Satan seems to employ that one pretty often. After all, it worked the first time, didn’t it?

Such slipping up often causes us to hide from the only one who can help us, as Adam did in the garden. That was brought home to me the other day when I was working in my own garden and wondered why a helicopter kept circling above me. Did the police think I was pottering with pot?

It turns out that there had been an accident on Interstate 79, which runs along the edge of our property, and one of the people involved was wanted by law enforcement elsewhere. So, rather than waiting for help from the paramedics, he had simply started running—down our road as it turned out. My brother actually saw him but assumed that he was a jogger, though he didn’t wave. Note to criminals: If you are going to be a fugitive in the country, waving helps you blend in.

A policeman told my brother they were worried that the man may have been seriously injured in the accident and might not get the treatment he needed if he was hiding out in the woods somewhere. But since the incident didn’t even make the news, I’m guessing everything was resolved peacefully.

As for the snake, I’m not worried about it still being around since that could be a good thing if it repels rodents—though I definitely don’t approve of it eating my other snakes! But the tempter that serpents symbolize will be a much bigger problem for all of us if we aren’t constantly on the lookout for him.

Or if, every time he talks us into making a wreck of things, we—like the fugitive—start running from the One who can save us simply because we feel guilty. After all, part of the snake oil the tempter tries to feed us is that our Father stops loving us after we disobey Him, which is never ever true.