Worldwide, the family Crotalinae has 263 species. Texas is home to four: Rattlesnakes, Cottonmouths, Moccasins and Copperheads. I’ve seen FB posts warning of the copperhead’s outstanding camouflage abilities. I have encountered rattlers in Big Bend National Park; my brother, a recently retired Pediatrician in Corpus, tells me that feckless tourists venturing out into the dunes lining that shoreline are often in the ER with crotalid envenomation – snakebites most often caused by rattlers. Texas, beachgoers beware. Fortunately, modern medicine offers crotalid antivenin – Fab antibody fragments that can be administered intravenously to minimize the extent of tissue destruction caused by pit viper venom.
Paralysis is quite another thing. It is not a feature of crotalid envenomation; it is more often a feature of anesthesia administered in the operating room. Curare, a plant-derived, neuromuscular junction poison created by the indigenous peoples of Central and South America, was used to paralyze prey. The first world has learned much about medicine from the people of the third world whose imagination, inventiveness and discovery skills get not nearly the recognition that they deserve.
I must add that paralysis is also a feature of normal sleep physiology; it occurs while we dream, or at least, it is supposed to. The benefit of such paralysis is that it keeps us from acting out our dreams. When this normal sleep paralysis fails, as it can in the transitions between REM and non-REM sleep, we get parasomnias. I have experienced this at least once in my adult life, and I was a sleep-walker in my childhood. All of us occasionally become aware of our paralysis as we transition from REM sleep to wakefulness; I find that experience unsettling.
I’ll call my companion Bob. Bob and I were having a sandwich and a drink. We had been hiking along a Texas river, and we decided to stop at a limestone outcropping to unpack and eat our lunch there. There was a tall Cottonwood tree behind the outcropping, and it provided excellent shade from the sun. We sat there discussing the hike, the riparian ecology, talking about how we needed to check one another for ticks at the end of the hike, and enjoying our tucker (Australian for food). After a bit, I got up and looked around the back of the outcropping. There, near the base of the tree, I saw a half dozen copperheads blending into the leaflitter. I called Bob to my side.
Bob, equally intrepid and feckless, came quickly and was soon prodding the young copperheads with a stick. They struck out at him, and he froze. I did too. I knew that we needed to retreat, but we were both paralyzed. Oh, fuck!
That’s when I woke up.