Those are both beauties. I’ve always thought that the milk snake was one of the prettiest. In my early teens, I had a good-sized speckled king (black with tiny yellow spots) for a while, but couldnt get it to eat anything that I could catch, so I let it go after a couple of days.
My mother wasn’t the least bit afraid of snakes and often caught grass snakes and garter snakes, and gave them to me to play with when we lived in Florida. I seem to have spent most of my childhood surrounded by snakes–many of them poisonous.
My earliest snake memory is from New Iberia, LA, just before we moved to Florida. We lived among huge oaks, surrounded by thick underbrush, next to a canal that carried surgar cane barges. Some friends of the family had been visiting, and we were all standing around in the front yard just about sundown. My brother and sister were poking around in the tall grass, looking for a piece of rope that had broken off of a swing earlier in the day, and my sister thought that she saw it. Just as she reached for it, our Cocker Spaniel, Big Boy, rushed over and grabbed it. It was about a 3-foot timber rattler. He got it right behind the head, and went prancing around the yard shaking it. Everyone tried to get him to come to them and give it up, but he stayed just out of reach. He was obviously extremely excited. I don’t recall how they managed to get it away from him, but he got a lot of praise for possibly having saved my sister’s life.
I’ve never seen an aggressive copperhead, but water moccasins are famous for socializing with folks, and I twice almost picked one up by accident when I was a 12 or 13. Once was while reaching to pick up what I thought was a bean pole from a stack next to an almost dried up rice canal. I was quite startled when it dropped off into the water. (I was planning to use the pole to extract a 3-foot-long gar from the canal.)
The other time I was chasing a swamp rabbit through knee-deep grass and couldn’t catch it, so I looked around for something to throw at it, and could see just a bit of about a 1.5" diameter moccasin under some grass stalks. It looked sort of like a chunk of rusty iron, so I thought that it might be something off of some farm machinery. When I reached for it, it started crawling. (Notice a pattern of violence directed against innocent animals here–not to mention a family tendency to pick things up without first examining them closely?)
That’s the only time I can recall being scared by a snake. One of my fondest memories is of the Kelsey-Bass oil camp in south Texas, when I was about 9 years old. The camp was huge, like a small town out in the middle of the desert, 40 miles north of Rio Grande City. We had a recreation center, a big swimming pool, a grocery store/gas station, family housing, dormitories for the single oil field workers (“the Gang”) and a one-room schoolhouse with grades 1 through 6 (I was in the 5th). Next to the swimming pool was a pair of croquet courts. (They were sand and gravel, though, not grass.) A bunch of parents were playing on one court, and their kids were playing on the other. At some point, someone’s mother looked over and noticed that all the kids were off beside a little shed that was raised up on 6"x6" boards, sticking their croquet mallets up under it. She wandered over and said, “What are y’all doing?” “Oh, we’re trying to get a rattlesnake out from under the shed.” You never saw such carrying on and dragging away of reluctant kids.
I guess the parents didn’t know how we spent our days. I had quite a string of rattles by that time. When we were out wandering around among the mesquite and cactus, we never ran from rattlesnakes, tarantulas, scorpions, or giant centipedes–we chased them down and slaughtered them. The only things we were afraid of were “Braymer” (Brahma) bulls and javelinas (peccaries). There are few critters more deadly than a small boy with a stout stick or a sharp rock. A friend of mine even flung a rock and killed a road runner.
All of my rattlers were killed with random sticks, except one that a friend and I were playing with beside a street when my mother came along in the car. When she saw what it was, she made me put it down in front of the car and ran over it. I was quite put out.
Once when I was helping my father measure some pipe that had been installed by Brown and Root at an oil field in north Texas, walking along with one of those wheels with a counter attached to it, I heard a rattlesnake right by my leg. I levitated in one direction, and it went the other way. Although I was 15 at the time, I still wasn’t being very nice to rattlers, so he didn’t survive the encounter.
When I was stationed at Ft. Lewis, WA, we used to go to Yakima Firing Center in eastern Washington for field exercises. Once while I was waiting for my boss to get out of a meeting in a little box canyon, someone directed me to a bluff up above the canyon that was literally littered with little rattlers. There must have been a couple hundred, at least, none much over 12-14 inches. The rock face was about 20-30 yards long and 10 feet high, and it was filled with vertical and horizontal cracks. It was like a rattlesnake condominium. Every little crevice was just chock full of snakes. It looked like someone had come along with a dump truck filled with snakes and distributed them around the area with a pitchfork. They were all over the ground, too, and every step I took would set a half-dozen to buzzing. I thought it was one of the coolest things I’d ever seen. Fortunately for them, I’d given up killing by that time.
That night, a couple of miles from there, during Escape and Evasion training, we ran across several of the little guys out in the fields that we were crawling through. Nobody got bitten, though. It was late at night and pretty cold by then, so I guess they were sluggish.
A few months later, I retired from the Army and moved to the California Central Coast. We don’t have much in the way of snakes here. In fact, I haven’t seen a snake outside of a zoo in about 22 years. I’m hoping for more in the Dallas area. I hadn’t realized how much I miss them until I saw Annie’s picture.
