Medea in the Underworld
By
Barbara E. Moss
© -
2006, 2007. Barbara E. Moss
I should
have born in mind what the Good Book has to say regarding serpents:” upon your
belly you shall go, and dust you shall eat all the days of your life. I will
put enmity between you and the woman..." But I hadn’t. Not when my son Jeff
acquired a baby python named Medea. He was after all a knowledgeable amateur
herpetologist. And not when he got a second snake, her mate Quinn. But when
the snakes fell in love, intertwined, and produced 35 eggs my nerves were set
aquiver. Because Jeffrey transferred the eggs to an incubator of his own
devising so that they would develop under the very best conditions the mother
never saw the 22 young snakes that eventually hatched. As if grieving she
remained an irritable old girl.
One
autumn day I thought I'd get in an hour of practice on my piano before work. My
husband and Jeffrey had left for work and Steve, my younger son, was at school.
I was alone. My playing was going well, phrasing, and timing seemed just
right. Then I heard a strange muffled clunk from somewhere at the other end of
the house. Odd, its not one of the usual house noises, the heating system must
have developed some new quirk, I thought. I resumed playing but soon there were
several more odd thumps and clunks. That's definitely not the heating system!
Is someone in the house? Was it Teddy? Our local schizophrenic Vietnam veteran
who sleeps in the woods and endlessly walks our country road. Every one says
he's "OK" as long as he takes his medicine. But I had heard stories. Slowly I
stood up and turned around--no one behind me, thank God. But, again that
noise. Definitely coming now from the basement. Jeffrey had recently told me
his Burmese python was looking to mate again. Their cages were in the
basement. Perhaps her pal Quinn was making some kind of rumpus in his cage.
I crept
down the cellar steps, looking left and right, above and below--no one,
nothing. Half way down I could see around to the back of the basement where the
two large wooden cages for Medea and her mate Quinn stood, apparently
undisturbed. The quilt that helped maintain the cages’ high temperatures and
hid the 1/4” Plexiglas front doors was still in place. Relieved, I started back
up the stairs. The noises had to have come from the heating system. It was
early November and the system was just coming on for the season. Then I
noticed that my clothes rack had fallen over. Suddenly Medea was obvious--a
black and gold argyle muscle-packed cylinder six inches in diameter-- sprawled
over the old cabinet I used to store detergent and bleach. It was moving, but I
couldn‘t see the head end or tail end.
I ran up
the steps and slammed the door. What to do?
I was
alone with a 14-foot python cavorting about my junk-filled basement. I must
remain calm and think rationally. I reminded myself how much Jeffrey loved and
pampered her. He swept my glossy hardwood living room floor so she would not
get the slightest scratch when he brought her up for measuring. I didn't know
his telephone number at work. It was a new job for him. So I telephoned my
husband. Dragged from a meeting his response was, "I can't handle her. But
don't worry. She'll find a warm place and curl up and take a nap. I'm not
coming home. There's nothing I can do." There wasn't really.
Well,
if Jeff and husband were entitled to normal days I guess I should try to get
something done, too. Just try to act normally, I reasoned. I went back to the
piano. Clunks and bangs continued from downstairs, ever louder. I jumped up
and jammed a dining room chair under the cellar doorknob. But if Medea could
somehow escape from her rugged cage, no dining room chair is going to keep her
in the cellar. If I went upstairs to work, my office door on the second floor
was just as vulnerable. Panic won the day! Medea was mistress of the house! I
was sure I was her terrified rabbit, her dinner if she were so minded.
The
tinkling of breaking glass followed a tremendous crash. I could picture her
crawling through broken glass, getting severely cut up, blood all over the
place. Well, once a mom, always a mom--I suppose I was sort of thinking of
rescuing Medea--but how ever would I give first aide to that big snake?
Whatever my motive, I ran back down the cellar stairs. The cellar presented a
scene of total disaster. Medea’s back end was stretched out along the steel
shelving between the wall and my canning jars. No harm done there. Her front
half extended into space several feet. She apparently had intended to slip
behind the old china cabinet that held my antique bottle collection. It had
toppled and knocked over a stack of aquaria also belonging to Jeff. Shards of
glass, wriggling crawfish, and the electric lines to circulating pumps were all
awash. I stared. Behind me was her cage, the fuel oil tank, and in the center
beneath the stairs stood the oil burner and next, if Medea continued her circuit
around the perimeter of the room, came a chest freezer and my other son’s
shotgun shell-reloading bench. Live electric cords lying in water, oil burner
sparking away, fuel oil in the same room, gun powder--I foresaw fire, electric
shocks, even explosion--I ‘m getting out of this place!
I was
digging through my purse for the car keys when the front door opened. Steve
ambled in, home from school, three hours early. A water main had broken at
school and every one was sent home, he explained, and no, he hadn’t had lunch.
“Let’s go to Mac Donald’s,” I steered him around by the shoulder and back out
the front door. So gleeful was he for the unexpected trip to hamburger heaven
that I had him well down the road before he asked questions. He was pushing a
hamburger into his face before he had the full story.
“Let’s
video it!”
Exactly
what I knew he’d say. I could see my child clambering through our trashed
cellar, squeezed from behind and smothered by 14 feet of snake. I stalled;
bought him another Coke, but eventually we had to come home. My husband arrived
home as we pulled into the driveway.
The three
of us went down the stairs to assess the damage to our cellar and to the snake.
No snake.
If the
snake was not in the cellar, where was she? Wandering the neighborhood?
Possibly, thought my husband, she crawled through the small space at ceiling
level just below the kitchen floorboards and went into the crawl space under the
living room. The cold air there would kill her. Thus it was a grim trio that
greeted Jeffrey when he came home from work.
We all
tramped down to the cellar. Some poor crawfish were still thrashing in pools of
water. “There she is!” Jeff immediately spotted his pet under the fuel tank,
all curled up and taking a nap in the dust.
In the end there was really more mess than damage and Medea was
virtually unhurt. The snake-woman relationship was, however, considerably
strained.