Snakes Falling From the Sky
I’ve never quite been able to forget this story. I wish I could.
Abigail was visiting friends in Tennessee. There were games and mild drinking— a small gathering of friends determined to make the best of miserable hot weather. As the festivities waned, Abigail went outside with a few others to watch lightning bugs and spill the tea.
She wore a light maxi dress, her shoulders exposed to the heavy night air. The humidity had settled into the darkness, her dress so heavy with sweat she almost shivered. Someone in the party told a joke—a ring of laughter erupted. Abigail remembered closing her eyes for just a second and then…the sound of a branch breaking.
Out of nowhere, she felt it—the heaviness of what felt like a rope around her neck. She jumped in surprise, the weight of it throwing her off balance.
She screamed.
Whatever had fallen from the sky had wrapped itself around her. She moved forward toward her friends in alarm, her heart racing. She registered the look of sheer horror on their faces, their expressions illuminated by the glow of party lights.
They backed away from her. One friend shrieked and bolted back into the house. Abigail brought her hands to the thick rope and now recognized its girth as the brownish body of a coiled snake. She froze in terror. Almost reflexively, she grabbed it by its middle, so close she could hear its hiss. Just for a moment, she looked into the soulless bright, black eyes just as it angled its head towards her.
She seized it up over her head and hurled it as far away as she could into the Tennessee night.
There are few things that I can imagine more terrible than a snake randomly falling out of the sky and wrapping itself around my neck.
When I first heard the story, I thought for a moment that it might be better just to die than to have such an awful thing happen.
The last thing I need, seriously…the last thing, is a snake falling out of the sky on top of my bare skin. It wasn’t a venomous Copperhead—just a black snake, but…
still…
As awful as I think this story is, I have to remind myself that Abigail survived it. Out of the black of night, a snake fell out of a tree and landed on her, but the next day she recovered. She went to work, made herself lunch, and called her mother. She didn’t stop living her life. It is a reminder of our great survival spirit—that even some of the worst things we can imagine do not always have the power we think they do.
I have had random snake encounters of my own, especially as a teacher and I will tell you about one.
I was in the thick of teaching language arts to a group of unenthused 11th graders. We were reading The Great Gatsby and I was writing major themes and motifs on the whiteboard. I was feeling impassioned by my own knowledge of the novel. My sights were set on sparking their interest—imparting some of Fitzgerald’s brilliance on their semi-comatose teenage brains.
As I was writing, I could hear snickering and whispers from the back of the room. I whirled around and stared at the students, trying to understand the big joke. One boy I remember had his face in his hands, his body shaking, either deeply ashamed or trying to hold back laughter, perhaps a bit of both. As I scanned each face, no one would make eye contact with me. A young man in the back of the room called me toward him.
James. He was a rough kid, a D student, who wore all the edges of living a hard life. He was a withdrawn boy in my class, but I had heard stories from other teachers.
“Uncooperative, angry, defiant.”
“Mrs. Handman,” he whispered. “You need to see the back of your pants.”
I reached my hands behind me reflexively and gasped. I felt the gash in my jeans, my bare right cheek exposed where my underwear’s coverage stopped.
I had exposed my bare buttocks to my entire class. My face went hot as I ran to my desk, scrambling to find a sweatshirt to wrap around my waist.
The students weren’t laughing; they were now deathly quiet. It made it worse.
I tried to recover. “Okay. Read the rest of the chapter.”
I sat at my desk with my head in my hands trying not to sob. Already I was seeing my bare butt on every social media page across my small town. This was the internet age. Every single kid in my class had a phone. There was no way they hadn’t recorded this. I felt a new rush of humiliation surge through me.
James got up quietly and met me at my desk.
“Mrs Handman,” he said gently. “Can I go to the bathroom?”
“Yes,” I said my voice a flat whisper. I reached for the pass.
He took it from me, then paused, turned back. “Mrs. Handman. Don’t worry about it. Stuff like that happens.”
“Thanks James,” I managed.
Somehow I got through that day.
Ran home, changed my pants and went back to school to continue the job.
It’s what teachers do.
I had gone to work in the morning expecting a normal day, instead a snake fell from the sky.
As the semester continued, the air shifted. I heard from a lot of teachers about James getting in trouble, being suspended. But I never looked at him like the other teachers. I saw him differently.
He was the kind word, the gentle presence in a moment where I had been most vulnerable. I felt grateful for him.
To this day, I don’t know if that embarrassing footage is out there and I don’t think I care. In fact, I can tell the story at parties with a bit of biblical humor—I turned the other cheek so to speak.
Being uncovered and stripped of our dignity is one of the most difficult challenges of being human. In Genesis, the author tells us that after Adam and Eve sinned they became aware of their nakedness. They were “naked and ashamed” and they hid from God as to not expose it.
I understand a thing or two about being exposed and ashamed. I have learned it in every role where I have had any authority: teacher, writer, parent. I have put myself out there as the expert, and then been exposed by my glaring lack of expertise. The exposure is where we can grow, but only if we can find enough humility to embrace it.
Today I can see a bit of humor in the story of Adam and Eve. Like children, they believed they could hide their nakedness from God. He created them. He knew everything about them including what they looked like in their birthday suits. Who exactly did they think they were hiding from?
Perhaps the worst aspect of pride, is that it blinds us. We begin to believe the mask we have created for ourselves. I am the knowledgeable teacher, the gifted writer, the perfect parent, but the exposure, the nakedness teaches us that the masks aren’t real.
Who really lives beneath the mask? If we don’t unmask ourselves, we may never know.
On that day, several years ago, if I had known I would have been exposing half of my buttocks to a class of merciless teenagers, I would have quit my profession on the spot. I would never have willingly walked into that fire. But in that moment I learned more than I had the entire year about myself and about my students.
I learned to see James and I learned to see myself. Sometimes exposure is the very thing that strips away our illusions. The mask falls off and suddenly we are confronted with what is real: our fragility, our pride, our desperate desire to be admired, our need for mercy.
And strangely, it is often there—in the humiliation, in the nakedness, in the moment we are most exposed—that grace quietly enters the room.
Sometimes a snake falling from the sky is exactly what’s needed to make us the human beings we need to be.
Debby Handman is a former minister (M.Div), educator, and single mother writing from the misty crossroads of faith and survival in rural Oregon. She is the author of the acclaimed novels House on Sand and The Gambler’s Wife, and her upcoming release, House of Broken Vessels.
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I loved this piece. Every word of it. Thank you for sharing this, and for reminding us of hope and grace when the 'worst' happens.