I've been thinking all week about those banded water snakes out at Elkhorn. In warm weather, if you're near the water, or especially swimming in it, the place is alive with them: vicious, jewel-eyed little things, diamond-patterned enough to trick for a copperhead. I've seen them swim underwater like eels to hunt baby brook trout. They are nonvenomous, but known for their intense aggression and painful bite, though I've lain beside them without any trouble on more occasions than I can count, and I can't name a Virginia snake I'm afraid to be bitten by. They're perfect creek spirits, as mean and adaptive as those mountain seasonal flows, and in some spots, as numerous as the very stones. Like women, they give birth to live young.
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I tried hard to be positive this week, but I don't know that it ever really worked out, that I helped anything, or did anything better. Everything I tried to make kept changing, twisting, turning away out of my hands. I hate feeling helpless. Today, the mountains turned from blue, to iron, to smoke as I hiked in them. By nightfall, rain came in on the front and the air seemed to dissolve or congeal into mist.
My stars advised me this week to fixate on blue, particularly the way the color manifests in sunsets: pick out the blue parts. The Cherokee see blue as a cursed color. Deceptive, tricky, low. My eyes aren't actually blue; they're clear as quartz: only appearing blue by a weird byproduct of structure, lack of melanin, and a lack of collagen deposits. It's all dependent on light.
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