The narrator begins with his birth in a Lee County trailer. When the 18-year-old mother fails to appear on her deck, neighbor Nance Peggot barges in to find her passed out amid pills while the baby is being born, still inside the amniotic sac. Nance sends her husband to call 911, and the boy survives despite the dire scene, already aware of the stigma attached to a child born to addiction.

He notes a local superstition that a “bag” birth means you will never drown, which feeds his fixation on water and the ocean—imagining a vast blue world that will not kill him. He frames his life as a contest between doom and rescue, wondering whether superheroes ever come to trailers like his.

Setting the scene in the mountains between Ruelynn and Right Poor, he recalls roaming the woods with Maggot (Matt Peggot) and learning the difference between harmless water snakes and feared copperheads. He observes how people prefer to believe in danger from afar while blessing his heart. The name “Copperhead” also belongs to his mother’s lover and presumed father, a snake-handling man with striking looks who died the summer before the birth, leaving the boy marked by inherited features and drawing child services’ attention.

His mother offers a rival tale: the dead father’s mother, Betsy Woodall (“Mother Copperhead”), supposedly arrived to claim a baby girl for a violent, snake-handling clan, and the father died in a bad accident at Devil’s Bathtub. The narrator doubts the story’s details but confirms his mother’s recurring stints in rehab, her fear of losing custody, and her habit of naming the father only as a “bad choice,” leaving him to grow up with questions about his origins and fate.