Snake in the Well

Our big family moved 500 miles without leaving Texas, from Canutillo to Richland Springs, when I was a freshman in high school in 1967. I was not a happy camper when Dad announced the move. I had friends, including Irma, my girlfriend, and I liked my life the way it was. Dad insisted on the move. Mom went reluctantly too. She was terribly upset that first night, I remember, crying and saying, “It’s the worst move we ever made!” She was standing with her feet in debris in the middle of a small living room with rotten wallpaper peeling off the walls and Sheetrock sagging from the ceiling joists. The idea Dad had was to make a living farming, but 140 acres of anything in central Texas was not enough to make a living for a family of ten children. We tried, though, by picking pears, planting peanuts, raising chickens, harvesting pecans, and hunting wild turkeys for food. Mom even roasted two armadillos for dinner one night—not my favorite meal. Dad soon returned to his former professions, teaching in the local school and preaching at the local church. It was for the best, really. He was a better teacher and preacher than he was a farmer. He made ends meet, but the farm was neglected. A hand-dug water well near the deep-rutted dirt road that ran by the front gate supplied our home and the barn with water. It was open-mouthed, rimmed with rocks, and around 40 feet deep. Hidden in the weeds that grew tall in the valley, it was out of sight and out of mind most of the time. Then the water became murky, and we all became aware again of our solitary water source. Dad asked people at Locker Baptist Church what to do about the water. Locker was a tiny community with a cemetery and a white wooden church building situated on the northeast side of an intersection between a ribbon of beaten asphalt and a thinner ribbon of rutted dirt. The tiny congregation held a meeting and decided to ask Dad to preach for them, and he did. Then they asked him to become the pastor. So we were all baptized again and became Baptists. I remember this well because I voiced the loudest protest in the family against getting dunked again. The church members were concerned about the dirty water. They asked Dad if he had treated the well with bleach. He had not, he said, and vowed to treat it as soon as he could secure a gallon of bleach. “Town” to us then was Richland Springs with a population of 300 people, a school, and a couple of stores. Dad bought the bleach there. We all waded through the weeds and went down to the well to see how things would go. We peered into the pit and saw something moving. Dad sent one of his boys back for a flashlight, and soon we discovered a snake was slithering around on the water in the well, maybe 30 feet below our feet. The water was mud-colored, and we were all disgusted that we drank it, but we were also fascinated by the snake and leaned over the well for a long time to get a good look. We had no idea how that snake got in the well. Dad did not know how to extract the snake from the well. He decided to go ahead and treat the well with the snake still in it. He screwed the top off the plastic jug and poured the whole gallon of bleach into the water below. We never saw the snake again. It makes my stomach flop just to think about what happened to it, but the water soon became so clear we could see the stones at the very bottom. The bleach did the trick. We tried not to think about the snake and drank our clean water with gratitude. Humans always need water, and getting it almost always causes problems. It’s why plumbers make so much money and rain is such a big deal in every human settlement. Water is the perfect illustration of simplicity, a clear liquid that comes down from above, flows over and under rocks, gathers in puddles and ponds, and constitutes most of every human’s body weight. We cannot exist without it. The goodness of God is like water. We cannot live without it, and if we conclude that we came into existence without the goodness of God, then existence itself is a moral perplexity. We go to this well all the time, every day. The goodness of God is a reservoir of strength and wisdom that channels its way through our daily thoughts and our most profound dissertations. It is where we begin and end in our moral reasoning, and where we go multiple times a day to quench the spiritual thirst that builds in our souls. The snake is in the well, a disturbing symbol of evil that slithers through biblical history and theology from “the serpent deceived me, and I ate” in the Garden of Eden (Genesis 3:13) to “that ancient serpent, who is the devil, or Satan” in Revelation 20:2. Why is this snake in the well? Why does evil exist in a world created and sustained by a good God? The problem of evil is the most persistent and perplexing puzzle in religious discussion. It clouds the vision like disturbed sediment clouds the water. It makes you pause before you drink and look for a clearer spot somewhere in the pond. Sometimes you move on without the water because the snake is in the well.