Kevlar is what you need. I wear my trusty Ariats but they are no hiking boots.

At the farm when I was still practicing no-till, I’d often have to wade through knee high native grass before I scythed them down..and I’d wear Ariat work boots (men’s smallest size) because I didn’t want to step over Sheila Snake(all snakes are called Sheila at the farm and they are mostly gopher snakes but one never knows). The work boots did a number on my arches(and I have flat foot). I am fond of cowboy boots but now have switched to a Vasque hiking pair during off season, but I think my feet still suffer from years of ill fitting men’s work boots. I was limping all last year and the Vasque has healed it somewhat.

We don’t have rattlers at the farm but we are still rattler territory. There are plenty of raptors(unrelated but because it makes me happy to share, we are lucky enough to have a nesting bald eagle pair sighting these past few years..but mostly hawks are the snake patrol.)

Some guests make me happy but I have mixed feelings about others. King snakes. The second half of the covid year, there has been a rash of California king snake all over the neighborhood. They are not venomous but can withstand rattler venom and hence they are predator to rattlesnakes. It feels safe to have them around Altho it begs the question, WHY are they around suddenly. Strange year for all kinds of wildlife sighting. But I am not complaining.

Re: snake karma. When I was a school girl in India, one of my favorite places to hang was the city’s snake park. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chennai_Snake_Park followed by https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madras_Crocodile_Bank_Trust (A little out of city limits and couldn’t go there often)

Anytime I had a fight with my mom or had a bad day at school or just feeling the teenage angst, I’d sit myself at the snake park. And hang around until closing time. I loved those snakes. I went back as an adult and the whole place seemed so much smaller.

Years later, when I had inexplicable _<insert medical condition>__ , they just kept giving me corticosteroids and ER’s strategy was always to give oral steroid pills. After year 3, I flipped my finger and went to a homeopath.

That was a journey and I won’t go into that. But the trippy part was the homeopath’s selection of a series of snake remedies to test. He is a Stanford educated MD and..even though he is long retired now ..was a licensed medical doctor then. So I always had the option and freedom to ask for allopathic prescription and for the first 15 mts of the one hour, we’d go over the result of the lab diagnostics.

I was once asked by a skeptic family member if the positive results of homeopathy was due to the placebo effect. Because I did adore snakes after all. Honestly I don’t care. I always insisted on lab diagnostics and my life was never in danger. And it restored good health for me. I won’t evangelize to others but homeopathy worked for ME.

But here is the trippy part: when I was on the snake remedy, I had snake dreams almost every night. I can rationalize why people around me were sharing the exact same dream sometimes..down to the last detail. It could have beeen a coincidence that all I had to do was think of ‘snakes’ and one would appear before me(this was before I started farming) or I would see a book or there would be a documentary about it. It was nuts but it was so trippy. I would be lying if I said that I didn’t rather enjoy it.

Then I started journaling about it and as I got better on the homeopathic snake remedy, the coincidences and synchronicities disappeared. The journaling was like emptying my sub conscious mind as scribbled impressions.

I still miss that feeling of ‘closeness’ with my snake friends during that time because it was as though we shared ‘one mind’ with no boundaries. I don’t know what kind of healing it was..homeopathy or maybe it was just my mind as I allowed my old childhood friends to heal me. I do not wish to question it or rationalize it. I can’t beckon that state of mind at will now but I do have memories. And by far, they were the trippiest years of my life and I have had some others too..but this one, I can recall with fondness. Because snakes are my friends, after all.

ETA: https://www.firstpost.com/living/the-zai-whitaker-column-a-s... : low cost snake bite gumboots for India

[..] Though they were made from rubber and weighed at least twice as much as regular shoes, the target group quickly saw the advantage of using them. Most of them had seen the agony, morbidity and death, that snakebites cause; and were willing to slow down their walk to the fields, in the interest of safety. One of the most enthusiastic users was a woman farmer Lakshmi, who has become an advocate for the footwear. We knew we were on the right path, but it was important to come up with a suitable prototype: one that was affordable, durable, and fang-proof. At 15 mm and more, the Russell’s viper’s fangs are a formidable syringe and these snakes are common in our agricultural landscape.

So, this is why my heart was singing. The development and mass production of the right footwear for farmers would greatly improve the lives of these brave hearts of our agricultural sector. The prototype I was staring at looked promising. It was light, it covered half the shin, it was water resistant but not water-proof, and would thus allow drainage. And, last not least, it had a cool snake-skin pattern, and the whole effect was elegant.[..]