Souvenirs from Ganymede

The snakes had nowhere to go, so they ended up in our homes. We extracted four from our A/C unit. They crawled in and wouldn't be found till the unit malfunctioned and stank up the house, and little drama was made of the extraction. We lived with live snakes and were okay with dead ones. The live ones ran through our gardens. A man with an unkempt beard was called upon to deal with those thought poisonous: he doused them in gasoline, lit them on fire, let them burn, and swung them into a ravine. I must have watched that arc a few times. Mostly I remember the snakes found in the A/C unit—already dead, probably not at all that bright to begin with, sad, harmless.

They made their way to our ducts from 1979 to 1983. We lived in Guri, a worker's camp in Venezuela, on a low dimple adjoining what would become, when completed, one of the biggest dams in the world. Caterpillar trucks cleared the land in wide sweeps. The forests of Canaima burned, the smell sweet. We lived in paradise and were expelling the snakes.

The American and Canadian workers living in the camp took us aside and warned us about corals, which children chased because they were small snakes, hard to find, colorful, and had no desire to be caught. No one we knew was bitten by a coral snake. Corals were shy, as were scorpions, which we sometimes found when we shook our sneakers before putting them on, although we put them on many times without shaking (we often forgot) and nothing happened.

Nothing happened with the arañas monas either. They were nothing more than particularly large tarantulas. They looked otherworldly, extraterrestrial, and they scattered out of unexpected places. Closets. Boxes. Pants pockets. Barbecue pits.

One scattered out hissing, on fire, out of the coals. It jumped out of the grill and onto a table and into the ground. It moved fast and passed right by me, a little alien on fire looking for a forest and finding nothing but pre-fabs and shrubbery.

Once the tarantula left, Peruvian friends of my parents grilled anticuchos, marinated cow hearts, which I ate again only recently and which are better than you might think, especially if you don't know what they are before you eat them. The dish took me right back to Guri. These friends, Lucho and Lucia, also prepared exquisite fish seviches: chunks of raw fish marinated in lemon juice. Our Argentinean neighbors introduced me to mate and ark clams. People had flown from all parts of the world because Venezuela had struck oil and had too much money and didn't know what to do with it.

When they arrived in Guri, my father was twenty-five, a scholarship kid, an industrial engineer who turned down a Fulbright because he had just met the person who follows this dash—my mother was twenty-two, bright, a beauty who received a call from a former suitor on her honeymoon, the boy heartbroken and telling her that if she did not leave my father he would kill himself. She told him to go to hell. My mother was seventeen when she married, my father twenty.

They are extraordinarily good-looking people—toned, symmetrical, and (during their twenties, thirties, forties, and fifties) eerily ageless, young. They are in their sixties now and could pass for people in their early forties.

Their crowd in Guri was mostly young and unmarried. They spent their weekends on beaches, following long, artfully choreographed car trips.

I was the only child for a long time. When I visit my parents' friends or when they visit me, they tell me so, that I was this little thing chattering away with all the twenty-somethings. They break out photo albums (they carry them on trips and e-mail forgotten prints—what happened for them during their twenties never repeated itself, I don't think, that combination of oil-boom, disposable income, youth, free time; in sharing these photographs they are confirming an unlikely moment in the unlikeliest...