REPORTER NEWS (Abilene, Texas) 08 March 08 Snake, rattle and roll - 50th annual Round-Up offers plenty of thrills (Kyle Peveto)
For children with their noses pressed against Plexiglas, the thin barrier separates wonder from nightmare.
Inside an octagonal pit, two dozen rattlesnakes coil in self-defense at the grade-school students tapping the glass, hoping for a strike.
Tristan Pepple, 7, felt safe kneeling at eye level with the rattlers Friday at the 50th annual World's Largest Rattlesnake Round-Up, Sweetwater's signature festival. Pepple and his cousin, 5-year-old Tyler Worth, both with brown hair and gaping mouths, kneeled in the dirt, amazed at the reptiles just inches away.
The boys were excused from their school in Bedford County, Pa., to make the 1,500-mile trip with their grandmother -- and were given class credit for its educational value.
Since 1959, the Sweetwater Jaycees have sponsored the event, encouraging hunters from across West Texas to gather snakes from dens as winter ends, waking the vipers from slumber. About 30,000 visitors watch each year as snakes are handled, tested, milked for venom, then killed and skinned.
Five pits of snakes -- octagons of white wood with Plexiglass windows near the ground -- are scattered across the dirt floor of Nolan County Coliseum. Between them are booths, opportunities to try samples of anything from snuff to rattlesnake earrings -- or a freeze-dried snake rising from a coil.
In the largest pit, thousands of rattlers lie atop one another. The mounds of snakes have a blended smell of human body odor and aerosol deodorant, which handlers spray to mask the scent. Sensing the heat of people, their hearts race, bodies tremble and rattles of dried skin shake -- a collective noise like grease popping in a deep fryer.
Bleachers surround the center pit, where State Rep. Susan King looked something like a lion tamer. The energetic politician wore snakeskin pants tucked into black cowboy boots made of devil ray. Her red blazer was cinched at the waist with a brown belt and prominent buckle; in her right hand she held a snake-pinning hook, which resembled a golf club with an "L" at the end.
"I'm not too afraid of them," she said, smiling, before opening the door to the pit. "But I guess I should be."
King has handled snakes before, once on the floor of the state Capitol and another at the Round-Up. For a second year, King stood in the pit to take questions -- via closed-circuit television -- from school children.
While middle school students asked about global warming and snake anatomy, the representative kept an eye on the coiled muscles and scales that lay nearby.
Black-hatted David Sager, a Jaycee with 31 years at the Round-Up, pinned a specimen to the table, grabbed it at the glands and walked the snake around the pit to show the crowd its cottony pink mouth. King petted its skin.
"Snakes are not slimy, by the way: wonderful texture, very dry," she said into the microphone. "They talk of politicians being like snakes -- but that's because you never know what might happen."
And King is no novice snake handler. When she first saw a rattler 28 years ago, she was five months pregnant with her daughter, Helen, who was with her on Friday. Startled by a snake while hiking in New Mexico, King's husband -- Dr. Austin King -- killed, gutted and cooked it. Since then, King has kept two pet snakes in their home, feeding them and cleaning cages.
Jaycees must earn the right to handle snakes, especially in the exhibition pit. Sager spent years milking snakes for venom before taking to the center octagon. He maintains a healthy fear, though.
Like nearly all the volunteers, he has never been bitten.
"You don't take your hand off the snake until you've pinned him good," he said. "You always watch his eyes."
Jaycees work every area of the festival, from the gun and knife show to the snake-frying stand, wearing either red vests or denim shirts emblazoned with a rattlesnake on the back. After more than 30 years, the oddity of snake handling has never become normal.
"It gets kind of crazy sometimes when the snakes start getting mean -- and people in the crowd just want you to get bit," Sager said. "You don't lose that fear."
The strangeness of Sweetwater's festival is hard to escape. Tom Turner, a newspaper photographer in Tyler, has returned home the last six years to document the festival with photos and video, compiling a documentary.
"It's very strange, but it's our local festival. We (humankind, not just West Central Texans, he said) have a strange fascination with the weird that will never go away," he said. "It gives me reason to go home every year."
Some leaders become defensive when explaining the festival, which has an estimated $2 million economic impact over three days the second weekend of every March.
"It's a normal thing," said Mayor Greg Wortham. "Other people have watermelon thumps and duck calls."
***
Alive with snakes, the green trash can sounds like it's filled with 32 gallons of expired egg timers.
Five western diamondbacks coil inside the can, which stands next to the snakes' former home in a crack at the bottom of a 20-foot-deep gully that slices through Nolan County ranchland.
Now miles from even dirt roads -- and hundreds of yards from a Jeep trail that appears on no map -- several guests are on a $75-a-person snake hunt, searching for rattlers within the eroded scar in the land.
Eddie Gomez, a Sweetwater snake hunter, crouches beneath a red rock overhang and flashes a mirror to reflect sunlight into a crack in the rock, where the rattlers lay in their den. The mirror's light reveals several snakes in their winter quarters. He pumps gasoline through six feet of thin copper tubing into the crevice to flood the den with fumes and force them out.
Behind Gomez, Tim Wong, a 57-year-old acupuncturist from Dallas, stands in anticipation. A slightly built man, he is wearing green snakebite-proof chaps over his bluejeans, a white safari vest and aviator sunglasses with a leather fedora cocked on his head.
Wong reaches forward with his snake grabber, a long metal arm with a triggered claw at the end, and clamps the rattler in the middle. Now awake, the snake writhes and shakes as Wong sets it on the ground, steps on its head then -- unexpectedly -- pinches it behind the head with his thumb and forefinger.
But that's a no-no.
Guests on hunts aren't allowed to touch the snakes -- or even get much closer than the four feet the grabber allows. Jaycees admonish Wong, and one red-vested guide shouts: "If you wanna take him back to your hotel room and play with him, that's your problem."
But Wong is fulfilling a longtime dream. Since hearing of the Round-Up a decade ago while living in London, he has planned to hunt and hold a rattler in his hands. As a boy in Hong Kong, Wong hunted all sorts of snakes while "nosing about in the bush" and bound their heads with rubber bands.
In Hong Kong, though, there were no rattlers.
"I always wanted to do it, just to fulfill my curiosity about rattlesnakes because I have never seen one before," he says after stuffing the reptile away. "I wanted to catch one barehanded."
While the rest of the group came with little more than coolers of beers or Cokes and an empty bucket, Wong was prepared. Over the past few weeks, he constructed a snake-hunting survival kit: a hinged-lid bin he bungee-corded to a two-wheeled luggage rack. He slid a slingshot with a pack of silver BBs into the bungee cord and had a Bowie knife secured if needed for protection. A $2 pair of barbecue tongs hang nearby -- for close-up snake handling.
Wong even printed a decal for the can, naming his rig "Snakebuster."
"Some people think that I'm mad," Wong says, his left hand perched on his hip, eyes on the rattler den. "But some people do admire my guts."
Wong hopes to keep the red-tinged rattler, which he calls beautiful, but this decision will be up to his wife, Melissa. Farther down the gully, where a large den is found, she sits on a mesquite tree and makes it quite clear: It's her or the snake.
When the path in the canyon bottom proves too rocky for Wong to roll his contraption, he is prepared. He pulls his homemade rattlesnake carrier onto his back with a strap he had fixed for hiking, so he and Melissa can walk out of the steep gully and return to their van.
***
Back inside the coliseum, rattlesnakes hang from ropes in a neat row, a few of the headless bodies still writhing from intact nerves.
Just one night removed from the sashes, high heels and evening gowns of the Miss Snake Charmer pageant, Emily Carey, 16, wields a short knife with manicured hands, sunglasses perched on her blond hair.
In the skinning pit, pageant contestants often take their turns at slitting the lengths of dead reptiles and yanking out their guts. Skin and meat will be sold to buyers, and the rattlers may eventually find their way onto a pair of earrings -- for sale 100 feet away from the skinning table.
Growing up in Sweetwater, Carey, a vibrant high school junior, says she dreamed of skinning snakes with the pageant court, who cover their clothes and sashes with white protective coveralls.
"I was excited I got to do it today. I thought it was going to be nasty and squirt blood everywhere, but it really didn't. It was slimy," says Carey, who knows that from the outside looking in, the tradition seems morbid and, oh, so strange. "Very weird. Most of these people were probably like, 'Oh, my God, why is she doing that?'"
A few feet away, King stands beside a wooden stump, and Cecil Villa, a 40-year veteran of the Jaycees and the Round-Up, stretches a rattler across the table. With both hands wrapped around a machete and holding the blade above her shoulder, King swings down, chopping below the rattler's head and spraying droplets of blood onto her light blue coveralls.
It takes a few more chops -- and some sawing -- to sever its head.
"It's harder than it looks," she says.
Snake, rattle and roll