This Sunday, as I walked from a turtling spot to my car, my six-year-old nephew Ezra got on the phone and told me about a snake he had seen on a nature walk in Connecticut. With deliberate precision he recounted that it had a dark stripe on each side, and a tan stripe down the back. It's tongue was bright red. It didn't even hiss; it just raised its head, looked at him, and slithered away. Then he explained that he was Harry Potter, at which point his three-year-old brother Simon hopped on the phone and explained that he was Ron and that my sister was Hermione, and soon the brothers were engaged in a fierce wizard duel while I tried to talk to my sister.
I told her it was a garter snake (
Thamnophis sirtalis), much like one I had found the previous weekend.
I found this snake in the Yeadon side of Mount Moriah Cemetery, a place that, if I go more than a month without visiting, the vegetation grows with such vigor that I don't recognize the place anymore, and I find myself a little intimidated by the vehemence with which nature reclaims a space once we turn our backs on it.
One of the disconcerting aspects of the overgrowth is that the various sections of the cemetery can be overtaken by distinct types of vegetation, as if the plants have staked out exclusive territories bounded by the paths, themselves claimed alternately by grass, red clover, and vetch. Some sections hide beneath a carpet of day lillies. Some are buried under a ten-foot mass of Japanese knotweed, and this one is getting overtaken by a thicket of sassafras.
This is our future, folks. Someday, maybe hundreds or thousands of years in the future when we're either extinct or all living in giant plexiglass bubbles beneath the surface of the ocean, Philadelphia will look like the Mount Moriah Cemetery.
