Snake Stories

It was early spring. Daytime temperatures warmed under the western sun, but as soon as the sun dropped behind the mountains, the thermometer plummeted below freezing. One afternoon, I headed out by myself, hiking up a ravine I’d not yet explored. The northern wall of the ravine basked in sunlight. It was steep, almost straight up, but there were many ledges and it wasn’t that high, maybe 30 feet or so. It would be an easy climb and the view from the top would provide an overview of the Virginia Range of Northern Nevada. Sure enough, it was a lot like climbing a ladder. When my feet were about three or four feet off the ground, I reached up to a ledge. Pulling my body up, I peered eye to eye with a coiled rattlesnake. I quickly dropped back down lower and moved sideways, only then to hear the ominous buzzing of another rattlesnake near my foot. I jumped. Luckily, I landed safely and quickly moved away as a number of snakes began to buzz. I could hear them for the longest time and even longer in my dreams.

The air was still cool enough that the snakes, soaking in the warmth from the sun and rock, would have been sluggish. That may have been the reason they didn’t strike, which would have been deadly as far away as I was from help. Or maybe they didn’t strike because they just wanted me to go away. If that’s the case, I was glad to oblige.

What is it about snakes that make our hearts pound? According to the Good Book, we once had a good relationship with a particular snake who, like traveling salesman in the skin game (a con artist), encouraged our first Mother to take a bite of the forbidden fruit. There after, we’re told, the snake was cursed to crawl on its belly and enmity or hostility has existed between the woman’s and the snake’s off-spring. Snakes are subtle, and are feared for they seemingly appear out of no where as that one did on that ledge. In a fraction of a second, my trip changed and from then on, the only thing I’ll remember about that ravine is the encounter with rattlesnakes.

I grew up with a mother terrified of snakes. When I was kid, and I’m sure the only reason I remember this is because of the story being told over and over, my father found a colorful snake in the yard. He put the snake into a gallon pickle jar, punched some holes in the top so that it could breath, and put it out on the porch. Though he wasn’t sure; he thought it might be a coral snake; the most deadly snakes in the United States even though they are not particularly vicious. They cannot strike like a rattlesnake and other members of the pit viper family. My mother decided to take no chances with her children around, so she emptied a can or bug spray into the jar, killing the snake. It turned out to be a king snake.

Perhaps my mother’s fear of snakes came from my grandfather. He often told stories about encounters with aggressive snakes. One of the memories I have of my this Granddaddy, who died when I was nine, is him showing a large rattlesnake he’d killed at his tobacco barn. According to my granddaddy, the snake attacked him. I was probably six or seven at the time, and my granddaddy came back to the house with this snake dangling dead over the double barrels of his Savage Stevens twelve gauge. A decade later I’d use that same gun to take down my first and only buck.

Granddad’s rattlesnake was good sized, but not nearly as big as the rattlesnake I saw along the Appalachian Trail in Virginia. I was hiking alone one afternoon, my partner way up ahead. The trail descended through switchbacks, dropping toward Rattlesnake Creek. And sure enough, when I’d gotten down into the ravine, where the trailed leveled out, I heard that heart-stopping buzz and froze. "Where is it," I thought to myself as I stood straight as a soldier. Looking around, I then saw the largest rattlesnake I’ve ever seen alive. The snake was longer than I am tall and its body as thick as my calves. The snake was stretched out, parallel to the trail, only inches from my foot. It didn’t coil, instead it just picked its tail up and shook it long set of rattles, giving me fair warning. I quickly sidestepped and circled through the woods back to the trail a far piece from the snake. There I dropped my pack, took out my camera and headed back toward the snake who decided he wasn’t going to hang around and quickly slid away.

And then there was a sidewinder that stopped by the door of the tent in Death Valley. It was night. Stepping close, he began to buzz. Sidewinders aren’t that big, but they are fascinating and several of us got lights on him and watched him throw his body back and forth as he moved out into the desert, losing him in a clump of creosote bushes. Most of my snake encounters have been like that, a little encouragement and an open path, they’ll run away leaving you alone.