Highway 18 was mid-afternoon hot – perhaps hotter than the snake had anticipated. He slithered in a
He slithered in a hurry, and seemed to bounce slightly, as if minimizing the time his belly had to be on the pavement.
He was black and slender, with a skinny head, which basically gave him a Get Across The Road Free card. If he’d had a pit viper’s triangle head, I would have run him over and then stopped for a victory dance, but he wasn’t so I didn’t.
I straddled him with the tires, and when I looked in the rearview mirror he had his head stretched out like a racehorse and was heading for the grass with a renewed commitment to urgency.
I am guessing – hoping – that our boy here was a king snake and that at this very moment he is enjoying a mouse or a field rat for breakfast. And I hope he continues to have a mouse a day for a very long time.
I have not always had such a generous live and let live attitude toward our scaly friends.
When the earth was young and I was a kid, the appearance of a snake – any snake – created as much hue and commotion as a liberal on Fox News.
A grass snake the size of a pencil was feared and loathed like a king cobra, and there was little recognition that certain snakes might actually eat pests or otherwise be helpful.
My uncle Olen, who achieved renown in the family for his ability to pop the heads off chicken snakes, once told the story about a family picnic at which one of my cousins had a six-inch toy snake and left it on the picnic blanket when he ran off to play.
When the snake finally caught Grandma Blansett’s eye, she quietly and slowly began pulling dishes and food away from the toy snake until she had enough room to heel stomp it and grind its little rubber head into the blanket.
Although she never said it, I think we can accept that Grandma’s position on grass snakes was this: “Ok. So it’s green. How can you know for absolute certain that rattlesnakes don’t go through a brief green phase when they’re young?”
Back in the ‘70s, I worked with a much older man who used to be a noodler. As he explained it, noodling was a matter of survival back then. They needed things to eat and they couldn’t afford to buy fishing tackle, so they fished with their hands.
One day, he said, a friend was groping around for catfish in the muddy water of Sandy Creek near Ada and came up with a large snake, and by large, he meant “as big around as a baseball bat.”
The friend immediately divested himself of the snake by throwing it over his shoulder, which was bad for another friend who was standing right behind him. The snake wrapped around the second friend’s neck like a muffler until they were eye to eye.
The friend took off down the creek, shrieking and water-walking and trying to unwrap the snake. The unfortunate friend and the equally unfortunate snake eventually parted ways, but “neither one of them was quite right afterward.”
I give thanks continually that I was not that person, and I am pretty sure you do, too, now that you know the story.
So, bottom line: These days I am almost certain that rattlesnakes never turn green, and equally certain that the snake in the creek didn’t ask to be yanked from the water and thrown, and the snake on the highway was just trying to get across the road before his belly scorched.
We’re all just trying to get by, so if they can’t hurt me, I’m going to give them a pass.