Snake Escaper
The title is a vision. A nightmare? No, a yip! The snake is slithering at me, trying to find a way to bite through my denim pant legs, but I yip and prance. Ants-in-my-pants dance. Keep on flinching my high knees, dodging the biter. I don’t need to yeet the fangy snake. My body just figures out a way to dodge it.
Very sporadic. Very random. Very primal.
It is a flighty kind of determination, the kind that happens through quick reactions, one after another, driven by the undeniable need to survive.
The idea for this song came from a four hour walk along the levee in Troy, Ohio. A friend and I lost track of time following the path beside the Little Miami River. She was a new friend from work, at a little Italian restaurant called La Piazza. We talked about cooking, laughed about our boss, and eventually she began telling me about her childhood.
She told me one horrific thing after another, but what stayed with me wasn’t only what had happened to her. It was the way she had learned to make sense of it. She said that, as a child, she couldn’t understand why she was being abandoned and abused. She didn’t understand the world she had been born into.
Her curiosity and her innate hopefulness led her to make a story for herself. It went something like this. “I know that the world is bigger than this house. This house is on fire. I am trapped within it, but I will climb higher. I am going to breathe in the sin. I am going to stand on the charred rooftop. The rooftop may be caving in, but for the first time, I can see houses besides the one I’ve been in.”
I was stunned by this. She had taken it upon herself, as a child, to imagine a world beyond the one she had been given. She had begun defining her own future while she was still growing up inside circumstances she hadn’t chosen.
There was something luminous in the way she told me this story. I remember the look on her face, a kind of hopeful glow. As she spoke, I could see the world from her point of view. Her circumstances had forced her to question almost everything, and eventually that questioning led her toward something spiritual, something she experienced as both mysterious and completely real.
She could feel a supportive presence that wasn’t from an earthly source. We didn’t spend much time trying to name it. We just acknowledged that it was there. And that it was dependable.
When I got home, I wrote this song for her. I didn’t try to retell her story. I think I translated it into a question: what do we do with what we’ve been given?
Here is how some of the first images and lyrics landed in my sketchbook:
Lyrics to “Snake Escaper”:
“Snake Escaper, you’re my divider.
I was left as a three-year-old child.
My momma never bore me, never made me eat peas and rice.
My daddy never told me, “Only bring pages of good grades home.”
I found my parents on a foggy night,
sitting on the riverbank completely alone.
I’m all right.
I’m all right.
I’m all right if I can feel it.
Heavy Metal, you are my savior.
You were the only one to listen to my cries.
My teacher never taught me the meaning of the meaning of life.
My preacher never gave me the faith
that Jesus was talking about.
I will settle for these answers
only if I can hold more questions high,
only if I can feel it tonight.
I’m all right.
I’m all right.
I’m all right if I can feel it. (Trail off + suspend)
What I’ve been given and what I make of it,
I’ll go on living
and healing what’s breaking,
and not let it bother me
as long as I can feel the silence, the refuge,
the place where I feel it.”
The painting came later. I had to figure out what this looked like.
At first, I saw an elongated, foreshortened figure, almost hidden inside grey fog and obscurity. I wanted the turmoil to exist in the brushwork itself as broad, aggressive strokes, marks that felt less like an image of violence than the physical aftermath of it. I did some aggressive mark making sketches and then my mind wandered to the pinks and magentas that reminded me of her.
Here are some first attempts:
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I visualized us at the levee, the reflecting lights at dusk, and the feeling of looking across the river when she was telling me all about her life. I kept creating and erasing, creating and erasing until it eventually became this:
The main diagonal became the visual division between what she had been given and what she would make of it. It carries the lyric, “what I’ve been given and what I make of it”. That is the emotional tension underneath both the song and the painting.
The self-sheltering posture of the figure is not a weakness to me. It is not to show despair. It is an innate wisdom. It is the body quietly learning how to protect itself while still moving forward.
The song asks where we find refuge when the obvious answers don’t hold. Parents surely didn’t hold it. Teachers didn’t. That pushed her to ask a different question: where can I find something that will hold? What she found wasn’t a neatly packaged answer to her trauma. It was a sacred feeling, a place she could return to. Something she could experience as real and dependable without needing to completely understand or name it.
That is what I hear in her story.
That is her beauty. Not that she escaped unharmed, but that she found a way to keep moving.
.. 
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