On a sunny day last August at the farm, our family took a stroll through a wildflower meadow to the Oconomowoc River that skirts the property. My daughter-in-law stepped down the rocky bank just as a snake came poking out of a hole. She screamed and lurched backwards, reaching instinctively for protection from her loyal and rocklike father-in-law behind her. But he was gone, a mirage, an arrow shot from a bow, halfway back to the farmhouse.

My husband has a paralyzing fear of snakes. Actually, that’s the wrong adjective because when he sees a snake, he is a spasm — convulsing, recoiling, and running, all at the same time.

He claims that snakes have singled him out for torment. He claims that snakes follow him. Despite his mother’s belief that he has led a charmed life, he claims his existence is a cursed one.  

He supports this theory with ample anecdotal evidence going back to an early memory of leaping on his tricycle and rapid-fire pedaling as only a four-year-old can, away from the snake he saw behind the neighbor’s back shed. He remembers repeating over and over, like an insane baby chipmunk, “I’m never going in the woods again… I’m never going in the woods again… .”

Of course he did go into the woods again.

He was a teenager full of bravado swinging off a tire over a lake when he saw a water moccasin scissoring through the murk below. He was a college kid working a landscape job when a snake slithered out of a pile of logs and up his pant leg. He was a PFC in the Army training deep in the Missouri Ozarks, which is snake country, when something slid into his tent, causing him to reach for his M-16 before another soldier pointed out that it was a rope.

There was the time kayaking with buddies on Lake Superior when the group stopped at a remote island for a break. The four paddlers fanned out across the rocks to relieve themselves and my husband was the only one with an audience — a forked-tongue ring-necked snake watching him from a piece of driftwood, and inducing him to urinate into the leg of his wetsuit.

The last incident I’ll recount took place in a motor boat on a remote Minnesota lake. A snake eased itself over the top of my husband’s bare feet. He had the usual windmill reaction, which threw the arm of the outboard motor, sending the boat veering 90 degrees into the marsh and choking the motor, leaving him stranded in the middle of nowhere with two little boys and a snake.

The kids didn’t always get his phobia. Or they did, but they thought it was funny. “Dad and snakes,” they’d say with an eye roll. “He claims they follow him.” Because he is otherwise an extremely competent person. He really shuts down with snakes. It doesn’t check out with the rest of his personality.

Exposure therapy has cured the problem perhaps. By the end of last summer, my husband was sort of adjusting to the cute little garden snakes we have in abundance around the farm’s perennial beds.

But a couple of months ago, the little boy frantically peddling his tricycle reappeared. I heard my husband hollering from the basement, and then a mad clomping up the stairs. You can guess what happens next, can’t you. These stories about phobias can be very predictable.

It’s a snake in a house. The snake with us. Us with the snake. My husband is debilitated. Which leaves me.

You must do the thing you think you cannot do.

Eleanor Roosevelt wrote that. She was seventy-six years old, and published a short book called “You Learn By Living.” Here is the rest of the passage, which applies to so many people coming face-to-face with an unknown virus. Maybe it applies to someone cursed by snakes too:

“You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, 'I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.' You must do the thing you think you cannot do.”

So, with Eleanor Roosevelt’s exhortation, or a version of it anyway, running through my head, I dashed down those basement stairs and dealt with that jerk of a snake who was terrorizing my sweet husband. You can watch the video below, which gets a little shaky for a second when my husband begins that windmill thing with his arms.

We are currently mouse-free in the farmhouse. I believe we are bat-free, too. Typing those sentences most certainly has jinxed those sentences. But nothing can detract from the fact that every time I go down the basement stairs and don’t meet a snake, it’s a good day.