The acid green snake at the end of Dyke Marsh

From a visit to a nearby nature preserve, Dyke Marsh.

I’ve been re-reading a Roald Dahl short story lately, the main one from the book, The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More. You probably know Dahl from such classics as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda, or The Witches, but he also wrote a lot of quite creepy literature for adults, and the blurring of the line between what’s appropriate for a kid and an adult is probably a lot of what kids love about his work. I know I did. The horror when Charlie, because of his own bad decisions, loses the chocolate factory; the bald heads of the witches when they take off their wigs, their hideousness as they remove their masks — oh yes. give me more. Give me all the gristly, all the terror of life. Even as a child, I wanted to know the worst. Dahl provides that, even as he provides — for his children’s books at least — hopeful, even traditional, prescriptions for avoiding the worst: being true of heart, being honest, being good to your family, and so on.

The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar is story within a story. A bored, rich man — not a murderer perhaps but definitely not a good man — picks up a book one rainy day when he can think of absolutely nothing else to do. But the book turns out to be intriguing. It’s the handwritten testimony by an English doctor of his encounters with an Indian man. The Indian man, a yogi, has so mastered meditation that he can see without his eyes. After reading the book, the rich man decides to teach himself the same techniques as the ones he’s just read about in order to cheat the casinos at cards. What happens afterwards — one might say, the karmic implications of learning an ancient meditation technique for frivolous ends — are what makes the story.

Photo by Julius Drost on Unsplash

I was deeply attached to this story as a kid. I ignored the story’s warnings about karmic payback and instead took it as a manual. My brain held the keys to control my environment — that is what I took from this story. If I only concentrated hard enough, I could pretend away anything I didn’t like. I could live an entirely different life in my mind, and no one would ever know.

I spent all of 7th grade in England and tried to memorize each day; that way, I could replay it during 8th grade, when I moved back to the States, and essentially get two years in England out of one. If I wanted to, I could keep replaying 7th grade, day by day, in my head, so that I could live that year in perpetuity. I would never have to move back to the States, not really. People would see me there, but they would be wrong. My real life, my life of the mind, would be completely different.

It didn’t work, of course. For one thing, I couldn’t keep every individual day straight in my mind. They began blurring together almost immediately. What did I have for breakfast on the Tuesday of my third week in England? What did we do in Maths class on my 14th week? Did my friend Miranda and I go to the matinee on the 32nd weekend or the 33rd and if it was the 32nd then what the heck did we do on the 33rd? I couldn’t remember. I knew we saw each other but I couldn’t remember.

Plus, reality has a way of creeping in, whether you want it there or not. Back in the States, people kept asking things like whether I wanted cheerios or cornflakes? What homework did I need to do tonight? And how was I going to make friends now, in this place, now that Miranda was thousands of miles away?

The boats at Dyke Marsh.

Another problem was that, even when I did remember what we did on week 32, remembering my time with Miranda somehow didn’t carry the same satisfaction as doing something in the present. Even with someone I didn’t like as much. 

And isn’t being present what so many of us are talking about these days? With all the talk of work-life balance or “quiet quitting” or more simply quitting quitting? Isn’t being present what I and so many others are talking about when we talk about the experience of being in nature?

A path through the water at Dyke Marsh.

I was recently reminded that the Dadaists — those wild artists who made no sense on purpose — came together after the Spanish flu, and I kept repeating the fact this past weekend, when I had my good friend Johnny in town from New York. Dadaism suddenly makes perfect sense to me, living through our own pandemic and one that, as someone with lupus, probably touches me more than most. Why not celebrate a world that sometimes doesn’t make much sense? And if the world doesn’t make much sense, why not make art? Why not be in the present? Why not try to see what is — no matter how wild or improbable or difficult or disappointing — instead of our own desires? 

A path through the woods at Dyke Marsh.

As soon as Johnny got off the plane, we took a walk at a place called Dyke’s Marsh. Only about 20 minutes from the airport, you can walk right out into the middle of the Potomac River on a spit of land. We saw a skink, some daddy long legs (those used to terrify me when I went camping as a kid), several Canada geese and this beautiful neon green snake. I think it might be a northern rough greensnake? Feel free to correct me in the comments.

Dyke Marsh snake.

Neither Johnny nor I are yogis. We can’t concentrate and change anything about our environment — we can’t levitate, or see with our eyes closed, or pretend to be in a different year. We were just in the place we were, with each other, and a skink and a snake. Later, Johnny named the things for which he was grateful, we ate good food and drank good wine. We tried to pay attention, even as the world metamorphasized around us.