DES MOINES REGISTER (Iowa) 03 Septe,mber 06 Snakes on a plain: How my ophidiophobia was cured
I've never really liked snakes. In the fifth grade I ran with the screeching, screaming girls who were being chased by the class bully wildly swinging a dead snake he had crushed with his Schwinn bicycle.
Later, in boot camp, I slept a troubled sleep on bivouac lest a snake take up residence with me in my camouflaged sleeping bag. Even today, at the zoo I will cautiously approach the glass that keeps me safe from the steely stare of the yellow python who lives in grudging captivity there.
A fox kit playing on a tree stump or a fat raccoon trailing her young between sweet-corn rows actually gives me a warm feeling. But snakes - like some of my relatives - tend to show up when I least expect them and they stay long enough to disrupt my routine. In short, I find them troublesome.
That is, until a recent spring afternoon. As I drove the dusty gravel road that leads from the highway to our farm, I spotted what I thought was a rather lengthy branch lying in the road, but as I approached I realized it was a snake - a very large snake.
Perhaps he had been run down, I thought, and slowed to better view the deceased and to prepare myself to remove the newly departed to the grader ditch lest he become a road pancake. (I so dislike to see road kill smashed and resmashed until it becomes a kind of nondescript and shapeless stinking mass).
I approached this Emperor of the Underworld, this Tempter of Eve, this strangler of rodents and cautiously slipped on the leather work gloves I keep on the dashboard of my pickup.
But this was no corpse, and his disdain for me - who was so rude as to interrupt his late afternoon bask - was instantly demonstrated. He sprang to life; I froze in my tracks.
He coiled; I crouched. He hissed; I shouted words of encouragement to myself. He spit, and I, not to be outdone, spit back. He tasted the air with his tongue to sense my fear; I said something in Japanese to confuse him.
I was about to retreat to the safety of my truck when I spotted the dust from another vehicle in the distance. I shushed at the snake like you might to frighten a stray dog away, but he simply pulled himself into a tighter defensive coil. I could see he was circling the wagons and I could also see the feed truck throwing dust and gravel.
Without thinking, I made a grab at him and to my disappointment I had him. But he also had me. Part of him wrapped around my wrist while his business end seemed intent on finding a hole in my glove. I made a dash through the ditch to the safety of the fence and stood there, arm outstretched, wearing the bull snake.
A short time later, after an awkward parting of the ways, I sat in my truck calming myself to the strains of a Boccherine quintet and wondered if that snake realized the significance of what I had done for him.
More important, I began to realize then, just what he had done for me.
- Don Sheridan, Afton.
Snakes on a plain: How my ophidiophobia was cured