DAILY ASTORIAN (Astoria, Oregon) 13 July 06 Reptilian ruckus makes hiss-tory - Warrenton residents not charmed by snakes in the car (Sandra Swain)
Warrenton: An ordinary grocery shopping trip took a serpentine twist last week for Warrenton resident Sherry Hart and her teenage granddaughter.
“This lady was freaking out next to her car,” says Will Brinkerhoff, 17, an employee at the North Coast Fred Meyer.
And no wonder.
Two large snakes were reclining on the back seat of Hart’s 1986 two-tone blue Buick Park Avenue, where none had been before.
Recognizing the granddaughter, 17-year-old Paige Hart, as a classmate from Warrenton High School, Brinkerhoff gallantly stepped forward to assist the two damsels in distress.
He pulled up the floor mat and saw “more and more and more and more snakes,” he says, including a giant one under the passenger seat. Eventually more than 20 garter snakes were found inside the car, some pencil-thin and one the diameter of a quarter and 3 feet long.
Noticing the reptilian ruckus, several customers and another Fred Meyer employee, Taylor Hageman, 17, pitched in to help. One man dumped out his groceries and gave Hart the plastic bags they’d been packed in so she could fill them with snakes.
Soon Warrenton police officer Jim Gaebel arrived on scene and opined, according to Brinkerhoff, that one snake must have gotten into the car and had babies.
A lot of babies.
He later told Hart that in all his years in police work, this was his first snake call.
But Hart thinks someone played a prank on her.
“Who did it? We don’t know,” she says. She believes her car was chosen because a window stuck in the open position made it an easy target in the big Fred Meyer parking lot. She says her son, Jim Hart, a former Warrenton police officer, agrees and an Oregon State University extension agent later dismissed the theory that the little snakes could have been born inside her car.
“Will and Taylor should get ‘Employee of the Month’ awards,” Hart said later. But Brinkerhoff, who wrote up the entire experience on his MySpace Web log, says it’s all in a day’s work. “I just call it ‘customer service,’” he says.
Meanwhile, for Hart and her granddaughter, the experience was far from over.
They still had to drive home.
Hart says she told Paige, “You watch for snakes and I’ll drive,” and urged her to stay calm. “I drove home, parked the car, and as soon as I got out, two snakes fell out of the dashboard right where my feet were,” Hart says.
The intrepid twosome calmly put the snakes in a bucket and dumped them in a vacant lot across the street from Hart’s home in downtown Warrenton, just a block from City Hall.
But that wasn’t the end of the tale.
The next day, after a friend pulled off some paneling inside the car, they found yet another big snake. The day after that, three more snakes emerged from her car’s innards. One of them bit her as she was pulling it out of the dashboard.
“I’m not afraid of snakes. But when they just keep coming and coming, you kind of get a little paranoid,” Hart says.
A week after the fateful shopping trip, the Buick remains in the driveway.
“I haven’t driven it yet – I come out and check it periodically,” Hart says. And she has some practical advice for others: “If your window’s broken, get it fixed.”
Reptilian ruckus makes hiss-tory