Personally, I never understood the appeal of chasing after snakes, or any wildlife for that matter, because I’ve seen Anaconda and I know that all snakes, including the teeny ones, are capable of swallowing an entire human body and regurgitating the half-digested remains in an abandoned warehouse somewhere in the Amazon. Chasing after a snake seemed to be an easy way of asking for trouble. Even if we didn’t catch him, he would go off and tell his snake friends that a band of children were harassing him, and before you know it, he’d be back with a mob, except this time, they’d be in my air mattress and my mouth would be open because of the tonsil thing and it’s just a whole big nightmare. I wasn’t one to take that sort of risk. The closest I’d ever been to a snake was Halloween when I was eleven years old, the year I dressed as Steve Irwin, the Crocodile Hunter, a costume that amounted to short khaki shorts, a matching V-neck button-up, and a stuffed toy snake wrapped around my arm. But even the stuffed snake made me uncomfortable, and not only because I tripped over it that night and put a snag in the skin-colored tights my mother insisted I wear beneath the khaki costume to protect me from the cold. A snake is a snake.

But when everybody is running after one, you get caught up in the adventure of it all, the Steve Irwin part of your brain takes over, and before you know it, you’re chasing and screaming and whooping.

So I chased after that disgusting thing alongside everybody else, all of us barefoot, as it weaved in and out of the tall grass and under overturned paddleboats and through a pile of firewood, all the while out of our reach, until it finally went wriggling back into the water. We were city children, after all. No match for a country snake.

But amidst the excitement, amidst the running and screaming and whooping, my foot landed in a pile of dirt somewhere along the shore and I felt a stinging pain shoot up my leg. I let out a yelp and lifted my leg to see the bottom of my foot, thinking I’d stepped on a sharp rock or maybe a bit of broken glass, but what I saw instead was a bee taking his final breath, his stinger firmly in the bottom of my heel. I’d never been stung by a bee before, and it wasn’t the best feeling in the world. But, like stepping on a used meth needle, it’s really most alarming because you don’t know what happens afterward.