Gary Tuchman is a reporter on the American cable news channel CNN. (More from Wikipedia)
Some years later, I saw a piece on a national news show about snake-handling churches. I was able to find the video for this story on the Internet not long ago; but now that the National Geographic Channel had a reality-TV show in a snake-handling church where someone died, and with Gary Tuchman broadcasting a story about them on CNN in 2012, I can no longer find it. Anyway, the news reporter had grown up within or at least near that religion; and he knew that, at some point, he would have to revisit his past. The story was mesmerizing to me – when the reporter took up a snake himself, he was taken by an overpowering ecstasy. At some point, the feeling left him, and he realized what he was doing and gave the snake back.
What I remember most was the music – the reporter called it a cross between gospel music and acid rock, and it is unlike anything else that I have ever heard. I spent many years without success trying to hunt up an album of snake-handling music, and I actually have a picture in my mind of an album that I came across a long time ago.
(November 2014)
