Once again our professor reminds us that we
have not come here to see the Serpent Mound but to see the
geological formations beside it, and
because we want the ten weeks’ credit for only
five long, hot summer days, we dutifully turn our
attention back to the area, nearly five
miles in diameter, containing extremely
faulted and folded bedrock, Paleozoic
carbonates, sandstones, and shales, dutifully noting shatter
cones and the vertical fractures in the rock, all
uncommon in the normally flat-layered rocks
of Ohio, even southwest Ohio. But
it’s the Serpent Mound that draws our eyes again and
again. That nearly quarter-mile embankment of
earth built by Indians a thousand years ago,
the gigantic snake uncoiling in seven deep
curves along a bluff overlooking Brush Creek, the
oval embankment near the end of the bluff most
probably representing the open mouth of
the serpent as it strikes. It’s the largest and finest
snake effigy mound in North America and was
not built over any burials or remnants
of living areas as everyone once thought,
its massive body uncoiling, its huge earthen
mouth unhinged and open, ready to swallow down
anything foolish or blind enough to stumble
into its path. With an exasperated sigh,
the professor reminds us how the landowners
have been most cooperative in allowing us
to examine the site and will we please respect
their property and disturb it as little as
possible and please pick up that empty plastic
bag lying there in the thick ground vegetation
and will we shirkers please pay attention for once
in our lives? We obediently huddle around him, scribbling all
his words in our spiral-bound notebooks, thinking of
Moses instead, casting his rod down before the
Pharaoh so it might turn into a serpent and
devour all the serpents conjured up by the
Pharaoh’s magicians and sorcerers. In a drone,
the professor points out the exposed bedrock and
the dolomite, shattered and brecciated, but we
think about snakes digesting everything but hair
and feathers, even teeth and bones. We think about
curved fangs and glistening scales and the tremendous size
of it all. During lunch with his favorite students,
gulping down tuna salad on toasted rye, the
professor explains that researchers have been studying the
possibility that the effigy may have
been laid out in alignment with various and
sundry astronomical observations. The
professor discusses the closely spaced fractures
and the undisturbed Pleistocene glacial till, while
we shirkers tiptoe around the Serpent Mound,
whispering about Medusa, her voluptuous
body and writhing nest of serpent-hair turning
us hard as stone. About the sweet illicit taste
of forbidden fruit and afterward our crawling
on our bellies and eating dirt all the days of
our lives, gladly, so gladly, with the sweet taste of
the fruit forever on our lips and tongue. After
lunch the professor patiently explains why the
Serpent Mound disturbance cannot be explained by
either the meteorite- or comet-impact hypotheses
or by the gas-explosion theory but may be
somewhat if only incompletely understood
as the result of some ancient volcanic or
tectonic activity, but we’re thinking of
Cleopatra, with her dark hair and her milky
white breasts, bared to fangs which, when not in use, fold back
and lie flat, but which when used, spring forward and then
become erect. Serpent bodies long and cool and
hard, muscles undulating beneath taut snake skin.
Vipers’ pits seeking out the heat, the damp moist heat,
trembling to the vibrations which reach us through the
faulted and folded Paleozoic structures.
Which stir us from our underground dens and thrust us
violently up along the fault lines, our bedrock
exposed. Which leave us shattered, gasping and spent, our
snake hearts dark and deep as the earth from which we came.
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Love in the Time of Dinosaurs,
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Auggie Vernon and the Eclipse
Field Trip to the Serpent Mound
Holiday
Portrait of the Poet as a Woman
Should, Should Not
The Lies Our Parents Tell Us
The Toast
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Love in the Time of Dinosaurs © 1980-1986, 2000-2007, 2013, 2017 by Alexandria Constantinova Szeman. May not be reprinted or excerpted without written permission. Please do not support piracy of Intellectual Property.
