A self-portrait of what occupies my mind whilst gardening.
The iconic hooded cobra is in our genes. Children may need to be taught how to react on meeting one or to be aware of the risk of encounters, but on seeing that head rise, the hood spread and the body arch upwards nobody needs to be told of the danger it represents. Not even northern Europeans like me.
If cobras had never existed I like to think that our imaginations would have created them anyway as “the serpent that spits venom in your eyes”, like we invented fire-breathing dragons and muppets.
I have met three cobras in my garden in Thailand so far. That's less than one every two years. And yet they have a power that makes me almost worship them.
The first encounter was close but brief. Not long after moving into our new home I walked to our outside storeroom and opened the door. It was a windy day so I looked around for a stone to use as a door prop. My eye caught sight of something black in the grass less than two metres away and my brain thought, “what's that bicycle tire doing there?”. I then realised that it was a snake but as it hadn't moved my brain thought, “I wonder who killed that snake?” It then slowly started moving and my brain caught up, “Actually, that looks like a cobra, ah, yes, there's its head looking at my feet.” At this point it froze with its head about one metre from my foot. There were two things I wanted to do: photograph it and give it enough of a scare that it would move away from our home.
Trying to scare it from so close would probably provoke a defensive and dangerous reaction from the snake so I decided to try for the photograph. Unfortunately, my camera was ten metres away so I edged backwards a few paces, slowly turned and ran over to grab it. I was back in a few seconds but the cobra hadn't waited for me and I saw no sign of it anywhere so never got a picture. I then beat the ground with a heavy stick to encourage it to keep going. The snake clearly wanted nothing more than to avoid a confrontation. I was just a little surprised how close we had gotten to each other without noticing. My suspicion is that windy days with a lot of grass movement makes it quite hard for snakes to see what's going on.
The second one was a couple of years later and made me more uncomfortable. I walked around the corner of our house and there was a small cobra next to the wall. It immediately pulled its head back in a jerky motion with hood spread and I froze. The snake was trying to find a gap under the house big enough to squeeze through. I was wearing flip-flops and shorts with no broom or stick I could use to direct the snake. Whenever I moved it hooded and was agitated and anxious to not be near me. The problem was that it was facing me so in trying to find an escape route it was actually getting closer and closer to my feet. Before I could think of another plan it managed to slip through a gap under the house and disappeared. I left the gap open over night assuming the snake would leave under cover of darkness, then filled it in later. The thought it left me with was that a few seconds later and I would have stepped right beside it. It has made me acutely conscious of and alert to such potential blind spots.
The trend of the first two meetings was towards a less controlled encounter so I was nervous about what the next one might be like! My wife first saw it from the kitchen window and called me over in a tone of voice that said so much. After watching the cobra slide under a bush I went outside and probed around with a long stick. The snake slipped out but disappeared down a crack in the soil. During the dry season our clay soil becomes riddled with such cracks and filling them all in would be a never-ending task. This was only a few metres from the house so I encouraged it to leave by putting a hosepipe into the crack and turning the water on. It took about fifteen minutes for the snake's head to appear and then another ten minutes before it fully emerged. I was standing like a statue a couple of metres away, camera in hand. We were both extremely cautious. I don't actually know where it went, possibly just down the next crack. However, I was happy that the poking followed by soaking I had given it would dissuade it from hanging around. As with the previous ones I never saw it again. I did later make some effort to fill in the biggest cracks closest to the house.
I find there is great power in a cobra encounter, particularly on what you think of as your own turf. It makes me doubt if we should really be living here, although that feeling wears off after a few days. But together with the fear there comes a great thrill of the kind that is missing from the rest of my life. It is the cobras that make me truly understand how this land is not ours, it is shared.
Now whenever I get knocked sideways by twisting politics or manipulating corporate forces or neighborhood shenanigans there is this hooded cobra in my head looking straight at me. It pulls me back into balance again. The cobra keeps me grounded and I recommend it.
