12/03/03’s illustrious band:

Rattle Battle

Brought to you by a conversation held in the Wild West last week.

Specifically, we were gathered around the table trading stories, as usual, and for some reason the talk turned to rattlesnakes. Oh, I remember: My aunt Jo was describing how my uncle Tom, as a kid, was almost always late for dinner, and how he would begin explaining why even before he got all the way into the house. His excuses were many and varied, some more believable than others.

One night Tom claimed that he and a friend had been playing on a baseball pitcher's mound or some other slight rise in the land, and when they decided to leave, they found their hillock surrounded by rattlesnakes. Every child of the prairie knows that you absolutely do not mess with anything that rattles and coils, so they waited in terror until the sea of scales parted long enough for them to escape.

This was an imaginative tale, and the family did not believe him until he swore it was true. Finally Grandpa and Tom's older brother, my Dad, went out to where the younger boys had been. As a precaution, they took guns along. It was a good thing, too, because they ended up shooting nearly two dozen snakes between the two of them, and scared away at least as many more.

GAAAAGH!!!

Except for a brief period of interest when I was very young, too young to comprehend evil in its purest form, I have always hated snakes. Now I know why: It's genetic. Dad hated the awful things all his life, and Mother Media is none to fond of them, either. Even a harmless garter is enough to make me levitate. Intellectually, I know that most snakes are not interested in attacking me and injecting me with venom that would make my flesh swell, blacken and eventually putrify; they just want to get away. But that doesn't matter. They have no legs, so the way they move just creeps me out.

The little buggers aren't just creepy, they're sneaky, too. The Plains states, of which my father's and my homeland is one, are full of snake stories. For instance, Dad, as a young man in a rural area, worked on local farms in the summers to earn money. One of his jobs was pitching hay bales from the field onto a trailer to be hauled to the barn. A couple times each summer, he said, some poor guy would hoist a bale and find a reptile napping beneath, angry at having its hiding place destroyed. Or, even worse, a man would lift a bale and carry it a few feet, and suddenly a snake would erupt from inside it, drop to the ground and slither away.

This, said Dad, was one of the many reasons he chose to become a pharmacist rather than a farmer.

I read a similar horror story in one of the Little House on the Prairie books. You've heard of sod houses, right? On the Great Plains, where wood was scarce, the pioneers would cut blocks of sod from the earth to build their homes -- prebaked adobe, basically.

In one of the books, the main characters arrived at their new location in the late fall and just had time to build a sod hut before the ground froze solid for the winter. Come spring, as the weather warmed the land, hibernating rattlesnakes awoke and emerged from the very walls of the house!

Sweet dreams, everybody.

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