Hair Snakes and Other Myths of My Youth

I grew up in an unusual area; a residential neighborhood nestled in an agricultural region carved out of the desert. We had a pleasant mile walk to school that in places took us along an irrigation ditch. Yards were watered by being flooded from these canals a couple of times a week. In fact, my first career choice was to be an “Irrigator,” the guy that walked along the canal and let water into the yards by opening a sluice gate. Far better to be surrounded by water than to fight fires in the desert heat! I remember this whenever I work on the irrigation sprinklers in my yard.
The canals were a treasure trove of interesting and exciting things for a small pack of boys waking to or from school. In the winter, the canals would freeze giving us access to large pieces of ice to throw or shatter in the dust. The ice had grass and small stones or mud imbedded in it which made it even more interesting. The canals brought water from the mountains and they collected a lot of debris, plant material and animal carcasses along the way. Along our walk, there were some areas that formed quiet places where the water was constant and slow moving – not big enough to be ponds, but enough to form small communities that we would now call micro-ecosystems. So we had frogs in the spring time and could watch the frogs mounted, laying eggs, tadpoles hatching, legs sprouting and tiny frogs returning to the grass and weeds. Certainly there were thousands of mosquitoes that matured from these same quiet waters and made it uncomfortable to be outdoors in the cool evenings of summer.
Lots of myths emerge from watching nature and the insights of 8 year olds. The one that I recall with the greatest clarity is “How to make a Hair Snake.” Hair snakes are black, 4 to 6 inches long, the size of a thick hair with a slightly enlarged area on one end for a head. I don’t know where else they live, but there were a lot of them in our canal. They didn’t make good pets, and were at most a curiosity. Someone, I can’t recall who told us that if you wanted to make a hair snake, all you had to do was place a horse hair in water and wait. In time it would come to life and become a hair snake! I recall being very dubious about this story, it didn’t seem to make sense to my young brain. Still, I couldn’t disprove the theory.
Jump ahead eight years to a high school biology class. We were learning the distinct characteristics of living matter. One of the characteristics is that it cannot be created from inanimate material. The example given in class has about the belief that people in the middle ages had that rats were spontaneously created from piles of rags! But not for me, I recalled the story of the generation of hair snakes, and my early suspicions were supported.
There were numerous other myths that come from observing natural events and needing to arrive a possible explanation for how things work. It seems that a lot of these inventions have disappeared from my memory, probably many were erased when I learned real explanations from science courses and reading. Many of the myths were related to sex. Our observations were limited to occasional sighting of dogs mating and roosters atop hens. We didn’t have the advantage that farm kids had of exposure to a wide variety of mating processes.
Follow up: After writing this I decided to check out hair snakes on the internet. What I found is that they are really hair worms, a type of nematode. They are not dangerous to humans, in fact the article didn’t even list any method for controlling them. They do not have large heads, and are dangerous only to insects like grasshoppers.