Snakes....

..... I still remember the first time that I ever saw a snake....I was five years old, and I had spent an entire summer day 'helping' my Father clear brush from our little four acre plot out in the hinterlands just west of Madisonville, Tennessee....

.... the land had been a gift from my maternal Grandfather when my folks had gotten married..... he ended up giving all of his five children between 3 and 5 acres of his little farm when their Mother died, and then he had moved on to seek a new life as an aging, W.W.II veteran as best he could..... in retrospect, I guess he did pretty good for himself in life....... he'd scraped that land deep before my Grandma Geneva finally died...... and I think he just found himself a bit rudderless once she'd passed on....... so, he broke up the farm and moved a few miles east towards the mountains....

.... years later - on the day that he died - the family all gathered back in the old block house that he had built at the end of the road, and mourned together...... and, not far from that very first snake, I saw and killed my second snake with my Cousin Calvin in tow.....

.... that first snake had been an Eastern Racer, and it had wrapped itself around the stump of an old cedar tree that my Dad had been trying to remove from the edge of a field....... it must have been hunting in the brush, because by the time Dad had cleared away all the brush, all that was left was the stump........ and that poor, frightened snake was standing its ground and holding onto that stump for dear life.......

.... Dad called me over to show it me..... then he reached down, grabbed my hand, and smiled.... "we'll just move on over to the fence row, Eric," he said....... "and give that little fellow a chance to be on his way...... black snakes are good for keeping mice and rats down, Son..... there's no sense in killing it just for the want of killing..".......

..... but that second snake?.... yeah, Calvin and I killed it...... well, I killed it while Calvin watched.... it was a copperhead nearly three feet long, and I bashed it in the head with a rock while it basked in a stream behind Grandpa's old house.......... we carried it back to the house where the grieving aunts and uncles were making dinner and skinned it on the back porch...... I still have the skin, actually....... that was in March of 1986...... and I was fourteen years old..... the skin is nailed to the back of my Father's barn door, but it has definitely seen better days........ but, yet, it is there....... a reminder....

..... you know, it has always amazed me how a 6'3" 265lb man could STILL be as frightened of snakes as Calvin is..... we're only separated in birth by about two months, but he has always been scared stiff at the very sight of a snake of any shape or size......

.... I suppose that most people have a natural aversion to snakes, but they've never bothered me..... they're just another beast that is either useful or isn't..... some can be harmful, but most are just seeking to live out their lives without ever coming into contact with a human being...... hell, calling a human a snake is actually a huge disservice to all snakes everywhere.....

.... I have held three live snakes in my hands before....(not including that one dead copperhead).... and of the three that I held, only one lived to slither another day..... a poor chicken snake, a pregnant garter snake - both of which I caught roaming parent's lawn, well, I ended up killing them both...... the third was a boa constrictor of some kind that The Missus asked me to hold while we visited some herpetology center on the Isle of Skye while on vacation...... and the handler who draped it across my neck and shoulders would have been very upset if I had harmed it in any way.......

.... I bring this up, of course, only in passing since The Missus was recently roused from a relaxing afternoon in her backyard hammock by a 6-foot long eastern racer catching her attention while she was attempting to read........

..... evidently she is one of those folks like Cousin Calvin..... she ran into the house huffing and puffing - her face read from a sudden blood pressure rise..... "I've just seen a snake!..... it stopped by the hammock, and then darted off towards the woodpile!"........ I laughed and asked what it looked like..... then grabbed the shovel and set off to investigate........ I eventually found the little guy laying about fifteen feet into the woods past the wood pile.... he was calm, cool, and paying us no attention at all........ I propped the shovel against the woodpile and advised The Missus to rest easy again in her hammock........ there was no threat there at all........ just a little snake doing what it is supposed to do.......

..... besides, there isn't that much of a reason to be scared of a real snake...... most of them post little danger.... and very few are actually going to hurt us unless we are pretty stupid...... in this world, it is the two-legged snakes who post an infinitely greater danger to each and every one of us......

.... it's just a pity that we can't take the sharp end of a shovel to them as easily as we can to a mild-mannered garden snake........

.... God knows that they deserve that fate much more than their reptilian cousins......