Anaconda

August 6, 2009

I know its cliché, but seriously, be careful what you wish for. I was talking to my real family the other day while they were on vacation, just leaving Custer State Park, I think, and I was lamenting the fact that I never see wildlife around here, except for some pigeons, sparrows, and frogs. I miss seeing squirrels and deer and such. Well, I jinxed myself, because yesterday I saw a five-foot snake. IN THE HOUSE.

I have never been one to be terribly afraid of snakes. I can remember catching little ones and stuffing them into my bug barn when I was little, but this one terrified me. Probably because it was about as thick as my arm.

I was sitting out on the front steps of my house, reading, when some movement just inside my front door caught my eye, and I had to take a double take before I believed what I saw. I wish I would have thought ahead and sat still and let it go ahead out the door, but no, I had to jump up and scare it back into the house. I was glad that I managed to hop over it and close the door that separates the entryway from the rest of the main floor of the house.

It started to slither through a little crack into a Harry Potter-style cupboard under the stairs, and I had the genius idea to just grab it by the tail and drag it outside, but I got scared when it started making angry hisses, and I let go. I immediately started hauling stuff out of the cupboard to grab the snake before it found another crack to slide through, but then I remembered an urban legend that someone told me a few days ago about a taxi going up to Bishkek from Osh. It is about a 10 hour drive, and at some point, they stopped to get some food. Every passenger drank a lot of kymys and then fell asleep for the last leg of the drive. The driver got to Bishkek and tried to wake everyone up, but they were all dead. A poisonous snake had fallen into the sack of kymys as it was fermenting (they hang the sack from the smoke hole of the yurt) and died there, poisoning the drink.

Now, I didn't think much of the story at the time. It sounds like a myth to me, and I can't stand kymys anyway, no matter how many times people tell me it is good for my health. But as I was rooting through the winter boots and whatever else was stuffed in the cupboard, I wondered for the first time if the snake might be poisonous. Even if the story was false, it mentioned a poisonous snake that came in through the roof of the yurt, and this snake probably came from the roof of the house, since at the top of the stairs in the entryway there is an attic open to the roof. If I had been in Midwestern America, I would have figured, “well, it doesn't have a rattle on its tail, so it is probably ok,” but who knows what poisonous snakes look like in Central Asia? I'm not the Crocodile Hunter. So I got my host sister, and she was scared just at the mention of a snake, so she ran down the road and came back with a nice teenage boy with a sweater to tie around his neck (perfect! A Soc to go with my Greasers. Sorry, I don't think I have explained that. Read on, I'll get to it) with the very masculine name of Jodi (or at least that is what it sounds like when I try to say it).

Anyway, Jodi took over and grabbed the hoe I had been chasing after the snake with, and I ran away. He rummaged for a while, then came out with a coiled up extension cord, “is this what American snakes look like?” he teased.

“No, it is there! I saw it go inside!” I insisted, but I could tell he didn't believe me.

After a few minutes of more rummaging, he said something I didn't recognize, but could probably be translated to something like “Holy Shit!”

I forgot my squeamishness for a minute to go in and gloat in my infantile Kyrgyz, “hahaha, now you see. Isn't it big? I said it was big. I grabbed it, before, it runs and I caught it but then I am scared, so I don't catch it and it runs. What you do now?”

Jodi motioned for me to shut up and watch the snake, which had coiled itself up in the farthest, tightest corner of the storage space. He came back with a long stick and proceeded to poke and prod the animal, which started again to make the loud angry hisses and scared me back out the door. I guess I had expected Jodi to coax the huge snake back out the door into the garden, so I arranged myself to let the snake pass by me, but then I heard some commotion, and some banging around, and Jodi called out to me that it was dead, and I should come see it.

Well, it was indeed dead. I don't know how he did it, but Jodi had managed to behead the snake quite neatly with the hoe. He then grabbed the body and flung it outside on the steps, where a crowd of boys began to form, and we all waited for it to stop slithering around. Ick. Jodi asked me if I wanted to eat it, and I told him no thank you he could eat it himself, and he said he would, but I know he just threw the snake away. It was so big that when he took it away, he had to hold the tail up over his head so that the headless end wouldn't drag on the ground. Ugh, I can't believe it was in the house. Here I have been spending all my time worrying about tiny scorpions that I've heard hide in your shoes and stuff, and there is a snake as tall as me just hanging out in the house. I am just glad that I don't sleep on the floor like my host siblings do. Not that a five-foot snake would have any problem getting into my bed if it wanted to.

Ok, so enough of that. Now to explain the other story.

So, I think Kyrgyz names are kind of tricky. There are still quite a few people I see everyday whose names I can never remember, and I figure that asking any more than three times just makes me look like an idiot. Most of these people have made-up names that I only say in my head, that at least help me remember what family they belong to, or whatever else. Most of them are uninteresting, such as The Neighbor Who Drives a Lada, or Nargiza's Sister Who Has The Baby With Shoes That Go Squeak-Squeak. One boy who is about 8 or 9 wears these ridiculous round sunglasses that have earned him the name John Lennon in my head. He is kind of the ringleader for a gang of four little boys, so of course they will always be The Beatles. There is a group of three older boys (jigits in Kyrgyz) that hang out at the end of our street around the time it gets dark, just trying to look cool. I have also seen them pick some fights down by the river (jigits picking fights is an annoyingly common occurrence). These I named the Greasers, after the book “The Outsiders.”

Later:
Yay, my door is finally fixed! Like I had been trying to tell Apa, the job was much more complicated than just replacing the broken door knob. The guy had to take a hand plane to the inside corner on the hinge side and shave off a lot of wood so that the door fit the frame. I am so glad that it has been taken care of, especially after the snake incident, because who knows what other critters could sneak in through my open door?

But that is not even the best part of today. I told Apa I was thinking of buying an armchair for my room, and there was one in the Uzgen bazaar that I had my eye on and was totally affordable, but I needed Apa's help in arranging how to get it home. She told me not to buy one because she had a chair she could give me for my room, I just had to wait for the next time my host brother was home so he could bring it down from the attic for me. For some reason, I assumed that it was a chair to match the couch and other chair that sit around unused in the big dining room next to my room. I wasn't too excited about this because it isn't a very comfortable set, but I figured it I could put some cushions on it or something. Anyway, I was way wrong. The “chair” is a seat from a car. How ghetto is that? I am pretty excited about it. It is an excellent addition to all of the wonderful mismatched-ness of my room. I can't decide whether I want to leave it as is, or get some obnoxious fabric to drape over it.

Oh, and I just got back from swimming in the river, and another snake was spotted there by some boys. I asked some people if the snakes around here bite, and the general consensus was that they might, but there really aren't that many snakes around, so don't worry about it. What the heck! Not that many snakes? There's one right there, and there was a freaking anaconda in my house only yesterday! Sure, there aren't many snakes around here compared to the reptile house in a zoo, but come on. But I guess it is a comfort to know that the monster that paid a visit yesterday was a freak occurrence. Maybe we should have kept it in a giant bug barn to show it off instead of killing it.