Elapid Tourism
February 2013
In this extract from his recently published Belomor, Nicolas Rothwell describes his encounters with the unusual community of snake enthusiasts, from Sydney and Adelaide to the Australian deserts, to Kakadu and the Gulf Country, and finally to the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico.
Snakes—their species and their habits, their symbolic resonances and associations—have a hold on a good number of the high-relief figures one meets on life’s winding course, and the goal and logic of that journey seem at once more mysterious and decidedly more serpentine with each fresh twist and corrective turn. I see my friend John Dawe, the tall, sardonic park ranger who guided, for many years, the wetland management systems in place across Kakadu. His bearing was much like that of a file snake at rest amid camouflaging branches: watchful, inward, yet benign, full of a primordial innocence. Abrupt enthusiasms would sweep him up repeatedly: he developed a fierce obsession for the late-model Jeep Wrangler, and subjected the vehicle in all its variants to extreme field tests in the jungles and paperbark swamps that stretch from the Mary River wetlands back to Humpty Doo. He threw himself into the task of breeding pig-nosed turtles in captivity; he built a freshwater lake system on his property so large its outline could be clearly seen on satellite photographs—but none of these passing crazes could rival his love of snakes, which was already full-fledged during his childhood in the sparse backblocks of Naracoorte.
Reptiles, in that country, had to be searched for: they were precious rarities. Dawe escaped to regions of richer supply, and became a keeper—first at zoos, in Adelaide and in Melbourne, then at the Australian Reptile Park in Gosford—but despite this decade-long pattern of persistent snake handling, his charges never turned on him: the strange state of harmony that existed between the Pueblo dancers and their totemic rattlesnakes mantled him also; he tended and ministered to vipers, mambas and cobras; on one occasion a bushmaster wrapped its fangs around his index finger, paused, gazed up and withdrew tenderly, without injecting any of its venom into the puncture wounds left on his skin.
Such experiences, much discussed, ensured his fame in the serpent world, and it was only a matter of time before my enquiring colleague Kelvin Cantrill appeared to pay homage and seek instruction at Dawe’s property on Darwin’s rural edge. What were the possibilities of locating obscure pythons in the savannah country of the North? The consultation began: their friendship blossomed, in the odd, glassy way that snake ties grow—they strengthen into a kind of brotherhood of shared affections, much like the feelings that Tolstoy pictures binding Karenin and Vronsky beside Anna’s sickbed: a species of love that vanquishes all rivalry and sense of self.
Cantrill was a traveller in quest of pure emotions of this kind: he had pursued them; it was his life’s task to describe them. He was a fluent writer: his prose ran richly to metaphor, metaphor piled on metaphor, until it became hard to keep track of the thread of his initial intentions—and the theme of the work as well as its structure was often serpentine, so that a simple-seeming essay on volcanoes, or a treatment of the evolution of stringed instruments, would offer the unsuspecting reader an excursus that touched on various aspects of snake behaviour and taxonomy before returning to the main flow of the narrative. This focus was near constant, in person as much as in written word.
‘Elapid Tourism,’ Cantrill might well exclaim in greeting, when we met up in some remote roadhouse in the Gulf Country, or made a rendezvous on the straight, oppressive highways of the Barkly Tableland: ‘That’s the future for the Northern Territory— a tourism based wholly on the lure of venomous snakes.’
‘But aren’t they hard to see and find?’ ‘Of course—that’s the whole point!’ And then it would be the moment for him to sketch again his beatific vision of the Australian tropics and the monsoonal country, flush with international visitors on reptile safari convoys, travelling deep into the snake-rich rangelands round the Simpson and Great Sandy deserts. Year in, year out, they would come: ‘And every visitor would have a special snake passport, with all the details of the most elusive species, and those places where you would have a reasonable chance of spotting them.’
‘And you could even have dedicated pages,’ I would say, lifted up by his excitement: ‘Something like the visa pages on a standard passport, divided up, and each rare snake would imprint its fang marks on the right page in the passport as identifying proof of the encounter.’
‘Absolutely. What a wonderful idea! And that level of contact would lead inevitably to a rise in incidents of snakebite, and antivenene sales, so it would improve our understanding of toxicology and increase our expertise in emergency medicine as well: a perfect economic circle!’
Such was Cantrill. His happiest hours were spent at his dark home in Seaforth, on Sydney’s North Shore, peering into his elaborate terrarium, and whispering loving words to his indifferent-seeming diamond pythons, whose elegance he would seek constantly to recapture in word portraits—portraits that became baroque, self-sustaining cathedrals of wild imagery and speculative thought. Their tone and style were somehow familiar to me, and for some months I puzzled over this, as I made my way through the lengthy emails Cantrill liked to send off in the small hours of the night, each file containing whole cascades of these majestic compositions, works of beauty and allusive splendour so elaborate they resembled nothing so much as the growth of corals on some tranquil, sun-dappled reef.
And then I remembered: I had come across just such patterns of snake rhetoric before, long before, when I worked in the Americas, and became caught up with the rattlesnake researches of José Díaz Bolio, the celebrated historian and poet of the Yucatán Peninsula. We corresponded for several months, and his letters, handwritten, in the most courtly style, gained in intensity and flourish with each exchange. It seemed essential, in the end, to pay a visit. I took the flight down to Mérida, and began a series of trips to the Mayan snake-cult sites of the inland, and immersed myself in Díaz Bolio’s vast outpouring of books and pamphlets: they contained his interpretations of the art and symbolism of the temple complexes, his calendric studies, his ideas about the snake as the axis of the region’s enduring traditions—and these works, printed on flimsy paper, available only in the back rooms of obscure provincial bookshops, seemed like hidden, fragmentary texts of revelation. In fact they were mere apéritifs. Díaz Bolio was still working on the definitive statement of his philosophy when at last we came face to face.
It was late in the afternoon of a stifling summer day. At the appointed hour, I rang the bell at the gate of his palazzo. Díaz Bolio received me in a lovely tree-shaded garden. He was wearing a linen suit of fine cut. He shook hands. For a few seconds, he endeavoured to preserve a formality of manner—then the front broke.
‘To the study,’ he cried: ‘At once!’ It was a large room, warm, sun-drenched, with antique maps and deep-shadowed photographs of temple friezes displayed above the bookcases: sheafs of manuscripts and notes were piled on adjoining desks. Behind them, wide-eyed, staring rattlesnakes of various sizes and colorations floated, coiled up in large preserving jars. He described each one: its characteristics, anatomical and mythological. We delved into the latest theories to come to Díaz Bolio’s thoughts. Was it not clear that the cosmos itself, as it was being progressively disclosed by modern astrophysics, had a snakelike quality? Had the gods of creation not revealed this cryptic structure in the first hallucinatory visions that were vouchsafed to the rulers of the Mayan realm?
‘It is crotalic thinking,’ exclaimed Díaz Bolio, stroking a small statue of a serpent deity perched on a table by his side. ‘Crotalic?’ ‘From the classificatory name of the Mesoamerican rattlesnake,’ he said, looking a touch offended. ‘Crotalus. But of course you, as an enquirer yourself, will see these connections immediately. I have begun to set them out.
Here.’ He handed me a thick typescript: upon the cover there was a stylised tracery of snake scales and feather plumes: Mi Descubrimiento del Culto Crotalico, announced the title. ‘My last work,’ he said: ‘My synthesis: I draw my thoughts together; and in so doing, I draw myself.’
I began reading from the first chapter: he listened. Even by Díaz Bolio’s own standards, the prose was labyrinthine; it was lush in sound; it took delight in its rhythmic unfurling of clause and paragraph. ‘It’s almost as if the beauty of the structure is what holds the key,’ I said. ‘You mean the meaning is there is no meaning? It’s only the convolutions? How much I fear those ideas. Throughout my life they have tempted me. But all the ideas in the world are our work: nothing more. We are vain interpreters. The thing remains. The longer I live, the more I succeed in thinking like a serpent, and the more I realise that the enemy of truth is man.’
Belomor is published by Text Publishing ($29.99)
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