[ISL] "Fear of Rattlesnake Island"

[rfmcdonald]

The NYR Daily's Christopher Benfey reports about the controversy surrounding the reintroduction of snakes to a Massachusetts island.

We were sitting, my wife and I, at a summer dinner party by the pool, in honor of a mother and her college-age daughter visiting from Chicago. Just for a moment, as night was coming on, the subject of rattlesnakes—our Massachusetts Timber Rattlesnakes, Crotalus horridus, to be precise—edged out the incessant talk of Trump Trump Trump. Our visitors, full of the police troubles in Chicago, were unaware of the Great Rattlesnake Controversy, and Tara, our well-informed hostess, weighed in first.

Four towns in central Massachusetts, she explained, were deliberately flooded during the 1930s, their entire population—along with 6,000 graves, she added ghoulishly—“relocated” to create the Quabbin Reservoir, and bring water to Boston. Some quaint houses were salvaged from the general destruction and moved, wall by wall, to prosperous towns like Amherst (where we now live), but stores and other businesses, a state highway, even a railroad, were lost forever.

As two huge dams were set in place and the waters rose, eventually covering thirty-nine square miles, some of the higher elevations—like Mount Ararat after Noah’s flood—became islands in the vast expanse. One of these islands, closed to public access and located in the middle of the reservoir, is named Mount Zion, and it was here that the state of Massachusetts has proposed to introduce a small colony of Timber Rattlesnakes, beginning in 2017, to the vehement outrage of many local residents, who treasure the banks of the Quabbin for fishing and its pristine waters for boating.

Tara is a local, unlike the rest of us urban transplants, and I respected her sense of solidarity with the displaced. Their parents and grandparents were not asked if they were okay with abandoning their homes; they themselves were not asked if they wouldn’t mind having a few rattlesnakes as neighbors. But I myself would not have begun the story with the eradication of the four towns by government fiat, and the scattering of their population.