MOULTRIE OBSERVER (Georgia) 13 February 05 Just stay calm and I'll go for help (Dwain Walden)
Because I hail from Whigham, Ga., I routinely get asked if I went to the famous Rattlesnake Roundup that’s always held on the last Saturday of January. In fact, I was asked this morning at breakfast.
And no, I didn’t make it down. I haven’t been to one in quite a while. I used to like to go just to meet up with some of the guys I grew up with. But the older I get, I guess the less I like crowds.
I was there for the very first roundup, before it became so popular. I was about 12 or 13 at the time. I vividly recall one of the representatives of the Ross Allen Reptile Institute taking some balloons that had been filled with hot air and passing them on a stick amongst a pile of rattlers. Immediately they popped the balloons. The strike was just a blur. It was faster than I could snatch the last drumstick.
Two lessons were learned from this demonstration. First, rattlesnakes sense heat and strike at it. Two, never go into the field with hot-air balloons tied to your shoes. You could get bitten or just look incredibly silly.
Through the years, I’ve learned lots of stuff about rattlesnakes.
For instance, rattlesnakes are non-partisan. They’ve been known to bite Democrats and Republicans. Also, they believe in freedom of religion. They’ve bitten Baptists and Methodists. They’ve probably bitten atheists who suddenly became believers. I dunno.
And despite what you might see in movies, rattlesnakes typically won’t chase you. Mostly they will coil or back away if they have that option.
Now I’ve heard some people say they were chased by a rattlesnake. I doubt that. Chances are, the snake and the person were both just running in the same direction.
And some people who are not around these creatures very often are prone to exaggerate them. Once a fellow called me here at the newspaper office and told me he had killed a rattlesnake that probably weighed 25 or 30 pounds. I laughed and told him that I thought he needed to calm down and the snake would get exponentially smaller. He insisted not. But later he dropped by the office and said I was right.
When I was a kid, the last thing I would hear while running barefoot out the back door headed for the creek was my mama yelling, “Y’all watch out for snakes.”
Somewhat surprisingly, none of us kids ever got bitten. It wasn’t for lack of opportunity, though. One day while my cousin and I were fixing fence, I stepped over a rattlesnake three times hauling posts from the wagon down into the branch head. On my fourth trip back I saw it, coiled up asleep under a palmetto sprig. And it didn’t scare me so much at the time. It was later that night when I tried to go to sleep that I pondered my mortality amid cold chills.
I guess if you could get past the fact that this creature carries deadly venom, and if you could discount that Garden of Eden thing, a rattlesnake — like the Crocodile Hunter always says — “is a beauty.”
Many jokes and myths have been associated with the rattlesnake all the way from Pecos Bill until now.
There’s a story that two guys were walking through the woods and when they sat down to rest on a log, one of them was bitten on the buttocks by a rattlesnake. The other fellow told him to stay calm and he would go for help.
Out on the highway, he stopped a motorist and asked him what to do. The motorist told him to cut an “x” across the fang punctures and suck out the poison.
The fellow ran back to his friend who promptly asked, “What did they say?”
The fellow, without hesitation, responded, “They said you’re gonna die.”
It was never clear to me if one was a Democrat and the other a Republican.
Legend of course. And now they don’t even recommend cutting the puncture wounds. And please don’t think that I was trying to suggest that politics and venomous creatures have any parallel.
Just stay calm and I'll go for help

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• GA Press: Just stay calm and I'll go for help - W von Papineäu, Mon Feb 14 21:00:03 2005