The Last Word On Nothing

Several days ago I found myself in Idaho, driving west along the St. Joe River with a couple of companions, when, rounding a bend in the road, we came upon a snake. The creature was sprawled in the east-bound lane, and although she wasn’t moving, she had a certain three-dimensional je nais se quoi that suggested she was still alive. (Reptiles have the dangerous habit of sunning themselves on asphalt.) I pulled a U-turn and parked on the shoulder, hazards flashing.

The snake was a garter snake — alive, sure enough, though not for long, if she kept up her blacktop basking. She began to writhe in furious sine waves at my approach, making capture difficult, but I managed to grab her muscular midsection — a snake, I suppose, is nothing but midsection — and released her into the marshy scrub between road and river. I slipped back into the driver’s seat, mentally congratulating myself for this minor act of heroism, when I saw my buddies’ noses wrinkle. Then, to my horror, I smelled it myself. I had been musked.

We tend not to regard snakes as especially odiferous animals — certainly they’re no skunks — yet garter snake musk is one of Animalia’s most pungent emanations. To me it’s always had a certain leathery, aquatic putridity, like a dead fish wrapped in rawhide and left out on the porch for a few days. That undersells its chemical complexity, though: Garter snake musk, which is secreted through a cloacal gland to repel predators, contains at least seven volatile components, with names like 3-methylbutanoic acid, trimethylamine, and 2-piperidone. 

Curiously, female garter snakes seem to be muskier than males: When Canadian scientists held up pairs of musk samples — obtained by “palpating the base of the tail” — to human subjects, the observers identified the female swab as being “more malodorous” in eight of ten trials. Perhaps that’s because female garters, which give birth to live young, can’t readily flee when weighed down with in-utero babies, and so rely on olfactory defenses instead.  

The individual I assisted off the road — I’ve been calling her a she, though I don’t know for sure — was one rank reptile. I drove the next fifteen miles with my window open, snake-befouled hand awkwardly dangling in the breeze. At the next gas station I washed my hands with Lady McBethian fervor, which blunted the smell, but by no means eliminated it. Over the next twenty-four hours I showered twice, washed my hands obsessively, and burned through several gallons (or so it felt) of various cleaning products. Still, when I held my palm to my face and inhaled deeply, I could smell it, the chemical signature of the small life whose path I’d crossed.

At last I turned, natch, to the ultimate source of advice: Twitter. Snake musk folk remedies poured in. Had I tried vinegar? Dawn dish soap? Tomato juice? Suntan lotion? Rubbing my hands on stainless steel? I had not. The science fiction writer Jeff VanderMeer suggested a different tack: “Market it. Make it popular. Like Axe spray, except this is probably a better smell.”

VanderMeer’s tweet got me thinking: Just when had I come to think of snake musk as odious? As a kid, I’d handled every garter snake I came across, letting them twine like bracelets around my wrists; I must have picked up dozens, hundreds. Garter snakes — and bullfrogs, and red efts, and woolly bears, and the rest of the Northeast’s touchable backyard fauna — were, I’m convinced, integral to my becoming a conservationist. For me, and for thousands of other naturalists, garters are gateway critters: common, conspicuous, docile, non-venomous, delightful to hold and caress (though surely the experience is less delightful for the snakes themselves). 

How many times, then, must I have come home smelling like I’d crawled through a hibernaculum? Yet their odor never deterred me; I was immune to it, in the way that children are oblivious to skinned knees and mosquito bites. I don’t think I even realized that snakes did produce musk until my twenties. In hindsight, I guess, I’m grateful to my parents, who indulged my snake-fondling habits against, perhaps, their better judgment. And if, one day, I wind up parenting junior snake-handlers of my own, I vow likewise to encourage their wonder, stinky though its fruits may be. Better they smell like snake musk, after all, than like Axe.

Photo: Thamnophis sirtalis (Common Garter Snake), Brian Gratwicke, Wikimedia Commons.