James A. McLaughlin Quotes

So many people hate snakes. I think it's because they threaten people's worldview- they're alien, limbless, impossible, black magic: a stick come to life. But maybe we're all sticks come to life...We want to think we're exceptional, ensouled, angel fairies or God's special children. The magic of being animate matter isn't enough.

He found it puzzling that so many rural people were hostile to, even terrified of, the place where they lived. It wasn't just that hard-working country folk had no time for the precious concerns of the effete urban environmentalists, what amazed Rice was how you could spend your whole life physically immersed in a particular ecological system and yet remain blinded to it by superstition, tradition, prejudice. Out west, it was ranchers' holy war on predators and their veneration of Indo-European domestic animals they husbanded on land too dry to support them. Here in the Appalachians, you saw rugged country men who refused to walk in the woods all summer because they were scared of snakes.

The sun had reached the horizon, and the crickets slowed their chirping as the air began to cool. Sunset and sunrise, he thought, the edges of the day, were the only times you could see the sun move. It touched the top of the ridge and began to disappear. He reminded himself that it was the earth's rotation, that the sun itself only seemed to move, but what difference did that make? He felt he was watching time itself pass. The last bright quarter shrank to an eighth, a sixteenth, a point, and then nothing, the sun's dark negative lingering in his retina.

He was climbing into his truck when he saw something on the spring box, an animal perched there, absolutely still, watching him. The creature was inky blank, dark as a hole in the world.