SNAKES:  HOW I SECOMED TO A PRIMEAVEAL FEAR AND WHY I SUFFER FROM CHRONIC CONSTIPATION.

BY

HAROLD ANDERSON

Snakes:  The very hissing sound of that word onomatopoeic word drives fear into the hearts of many.  I was not one of them – until recently.

Like all old foresters worth their salt, I have a repertoire of snake stories:  I have heard the dry rattle that turn strong men’s knees and bowels both to water; I have shared many a log with a cotton-mouth until he, camouflaged and unseen, plopped into the water; on several occasions that I know of, I was only a step or two from disaster, and probably was on many occasions of which I am blissfully unaward.  I have always been respectful of snakes, not doing stupid things like handling them, but I was never really afraid of them – until recently.

For some reason, people will pay perfectly good money to be scared out of their wits, and the money-moguls have learned to cash in by selling tickets to roller coasters – and scary movies, like “Snakes on a Plane.”  Now, the very THOUGHT of being on a plane at 30,000 feet with a slithering hoard of deadly vipers on the loose scares the you-know-what out of some people, but not me – until recently.  Now actually BEING on said plane would produce a different reaction.

 Actually, I came quite close one time. I had just finished my two weeks of summer training with the Navy Reserve. The first leg of my flight home from St. Thomas, US Virgin Islands, was via commuter plane to Miami.  The little puddle-jumper did not rate a jet-way, so we landed and attendants rolled a flight of stairs up to the plane.  I was sitting up front, and was the first one out. As I stepped onto the stairs, I heard a commotion near the rear of the plane, and heard words that someone’s mother never taught him.  I looked around and saw baggage-handlers scurrying backwards and shouting something like:  “Holy s—t! Wot dem mother-f---ers is!” as some rather short, fat, slimy sausage-looking creatures writhed on the tarmac, and others continued to slither from the cargo door.

The flight attendant told me to get back onto the plane.  I did, and she closed the door and announced that our “deplaning” would be delayed.  After a few minutes, the query came over the P.A.:  “Is anyone onboard responsible for a shipment of eels?”  No one responded, so they got the creatures rounded up.  I don’t know what happened to them, but later I heard that a shipment of eels bound for the Aquarium of the Americas in New Orleans never arrived.

Even so, the thought of the wriggling beast didn’t bother me, and I continued my benign relationship with them – until recently.

In my past life, I was (among other things) the safety officer for the 13-county East Central District of the Mississippi Forestry Commission. I had seen the same old coiled-up rubber snake on truck seats so many times that I ignored it, and the jokesters grew tired of the prank.

My retirement job is director of Mississippi Project Learning Tree, an affiliate of the national program directed by the American Forest Foundation. We conduct six-hour workshops for educators in which we teach them to use books of environmental-based lesson plans they can incorporate into their existing curriculum. The Mississippi Forestry Commission is one of our sponsors.  Our memorandum of understanding with them requires that they supply me with an office.  My office is an abandoned radio-repair shop in the back of a WWII Quonset Hut. In addition to the office space, I have a storage room which juts out into the main space of the hut.  Directly across a small hallway, a bathroom also juts out. 

My storage room was full, so I had stacked cases of books in the open area of the hut against the outside wall of my storage room.  Last June, during hot, dry weather, I had to pack for a workshop, so I went to get some books from my stack.  I moved the junk someone had but on top of them, and on top of the boxes, right against the wall, was stretched out a six-foot long king snake.  “Oh no, I thought, a new generation of jokesters in the repair shop have drudged up the old ‘rubber-snake jag.’  I reached for it – and it moved! Now, I was not afraid of the snake, but I really don’t like to handle them. Even an innocuous king snake might bite when handled.  I got one of the mechanics.  He, wearing welders gloves, removed the snake and carried it into the woods.  We all got a laugh out of it.

Fast forward a couple of weeks.  The weather was hotter and drier.  I had a passel of workshops that month.  A workshop requires a lot of stuff, and It must be packed in apple-pie order so I can quickly get what I need as I progress with a presentation.  I was working diligently, getting supplies organized, when I felt a need to respond to the call of nature, so I did.  When I tried to flush the toilet, the handle would hardly move, as if something had it jammed.  “Now, what could have that lever jammed?”, I thought, so I removed the lid to see – and encountered a huge coil of snake on top of the lever.  I quickly dropped the lid and requested the snake-extraction services of my mechanic friend. He returned the snake to the woods. 

There was a bit of discussion as to how the snake got into the toilet tank.  I thought he had somehow gotten into the sewage system, then into the bowl and finally the tank through the pipes and outlets that fed flush water from the tank. Now that is a lovely thought:  That snake might have been in the toilet bowl as I sat there, in complete ignorant bliss, reading my Readers Digest . Lord have mercy!  He could have raised up and bit me on the backside or (the very thought sends shivers up my spine) somewhere worse!  On closer inspection, we found that the top back of the toilet tank has two half-moon cut-outs – places where one can easily stick his hands to more easily grasp the lid to lift it. Whew, what a relief! We extracted him one more time before I went on a two-week-long vacation.

When I returned to work, my mechanic friend met me at the gate with this good news:  “Your snake came back.  Our John in the shop was out of order, so we decided to use yours.  It wouldn’t flush and, sure enough, the same chicken snake was in the tank.”

Oh, joy, thought.  “Did you get him out?”

“Yeah, we killed him this time.”

“Good, Maybe that solved the problem.”

Then he let the other shoe drop with this bombshell: “That wasn’t the only one.  There was another one on the floor but he crawled through a knot hole into your office before we could catch him, then we could not find him.”

I have not used the toilet since, and suffer from chronic constipation.

My workspace was being invaded by snakes! I had to do something to keep them out.  I went to the Co-op and bought some “Snake-Away.” The instructions said to spread it on the floor by doors and other places were snakes could enter because it burned their bellies and they would not cross it.  It was a long-lasting remedy.  The chemical would penetrate wood and even the pores of concrete so it would remain effective for months, ever after there was no sign of the powder.  I spread it under the front door, all around the outside walls, under the bathroom door and my office door.  Then it hit me:  If it keeps outside snakes from coming in, it would keep inside snakes from getting out. I had at least one snake trapped in my office.  Wonderful. The notice of the long-lasting effect was no longer comforting.

I  swept the powder up and thoroughly mopped the floor, twirling the mop every so often, just like the Navy had taught me.  But would it counteract the long-lasting effect?  Good question.  No answer – yet.

Now friends, you have to visualize my office to properly understand this story.  I have shelves, desks and tables everywhere there is not a door.  I have stuff – lots of stuff.  At my workshops I give out the books and lots of hand-outs.  We give trinkets, door prizes and, at the conclusion, fill a table with Smokey Bear coloring and comic books, etc., but especially with posters, for teachers to take.  The U.S. Forest Service publishes 16 different very nice 24 x 30 inch nature posters.  Teachers love them.  I give away two or three of these, along with posters, etc. timber companies give me.  These come shipped in flat (1” thick) boxes, 200 per box.  I have scores of these and company and other agency-supplied posters stacked on shelves, along with office supplies, yellowed flip-chart tablets, and all sorts of indispensable things, including notes from training sessions I attended as far back as 1982.  I haven’t looked at them since, but who knows when I will need that information?  Under the shelves are boxes of Smokey Bear rulers – 1000 to the box -- DVD’s, my college text books and other essential stuff. Three five-gallon buckets of wood-cookies are stored under my desk.  I don’t have room to stretch my legs.

Wood cookies?  Oh, let me explain.  A wood cookie It is basically a necklace of knitting yarn threaded through a smoothly sanded cross section of a tree limb. They serve as a name tag and an illustration of growth rings and the internal parts of a tree.  Teachers love them.  I have teachers who come up to me at my booth at teacher conferences and tell me they still have the wood cookie they got at a workshop 10 years ago.  It doesn’t take a lot to please teachers.  They like anything that’s  free.

I make wood cookies by the thousands, and have worn out two bandsaws in the process.

My office is a hoarder’s dream – and just full of hiding places for snakes.

All summer long, I carefully looked before I picked up anything.  All was well – no sign of snakes.  I guess they left and returned to the woods to hibernate or do whatever snakes do to pass the winter

As I write this, we are in the midst of a cold spell. My office gets very cold at night. It’s toasty now, thanks to two electric heaters.  It is very nice, sitting here among my treasured possessions, typing away with the wood cookies between my legs, secure in the knowledge that the snakes are long gone, slumbering away the cold winter in their dens.

Yep, all’s right with the … WHAT’S THAT CRAWLING UP MY LEG!!!!!!