years ago, I was walking to a bass pond at Catoctin Mountain in Maryland when, for some reason—call it that sixth sense through which God looks after fools—I froze. Beneath my raised foot lay two intertwined copperheads. They were little snakes, less than 18 inches each, and must have just finished mating because they seemed to lie there in a sort of copperhead afterglow. The next thing I knew, I had levitated and come back to earth four paces back. At which point I ran screaming out of the