SANTA FE NEW MEXICAN (New Mexico) 25 October 13 Tales of Tails: Snakes just shouldn’t be pets (Hersch Wilson)
Dad! Squeezy is trying to get out of his cage!”
“What? Who is Squeezy?”
It was night. I was asleep. Brynne, our daughter, was house sitting at her soccer coach’s home.
“Dad! Squeezy is the Coppolas’ boa constrictor! I keep putting books on top of the cage, but he keeps trying to get out! He wants to hunt!”
Three important things to know before we move on to what happened next:
First, our family is risk-adverse. We drive safe cars. We don’t do backflips off cement walls into pools. We love to sleep and our idea of adventure is watching Homeland followed by re-runs of Game of Thrones.
We also believe that pets should — at minimum — be mammals.
The Coppolas, Bill and Stephanie, have four sons and one daughter. A story: Once I drove over to pick up then 16-year-old Lianna for a soccer game. She met me at the garage door. She was wearing goggles and was holding a BB gun.
“I can’t go!” she giggled. “We’re having a BB gun war and we’re beating my brothers!
She slammed the door shut and I heard BB gun shots, laughter and running feet.
All of the Coppola kids do backflips off concrete walls into their pool. The boys liked exploding things. The boys liked putting action hero toys under my tires.
They are on the far other side of the risk spectrum from us.
Also, they believe that any species of animal can be a pet. At the time in question, they had four dogs, a lizard, two mysterious cats that lived in the attic, chinchillas, chickens and Squeezy.
Brynne continued, “They told me to catch a mouse to feed Squeezy, or have Mungo [the small commander dog] catch a mouse and then wrestle it away from her and feed it to Squeezy. But … Oh no! I have to go! Mungo got out and she’s after the chickens!”
I heard Brynne yell, “Mungo!!!”
Then the phone went dead.
Laurie: “You should go over and help.”
Me: “She loves this kind of stuff. Remember when she caught the baby bat in our house?”
Laurie: “Go.”
A good dad would not have needed prompting.
But here is the third crucial piece of information: I have a “thing” about snakes. I do not believe snakes should be pets. I don’t think there should be a law against it. A simple constitutional amendment would suffice.
This is born from experience. I grew up in the Minnesota River valley. Snakes were everywhere: in the garage, in the basement, in the dishwasher. Slithering around the yard. As a kid, I tolerated them until one late and hot night in August, I came home from my summer job and dove into our dark swimming pool to cool off. On my first stroke, my arm hit something. I looked up, and the biggest bull snake I’d ever seen was 6 inches from my face, arched back and hissing. I screamed. It thrashed. Our trusty German shepard, Max, went crazy. (But judiciously stayed out of the water.) “Oh Lord,” I said to myself, “please let me now walk [or preferably run] on water!”
Since moving to New Mexico in the early ’80s, I’ve had the requisite encounters with snakes. A red racer caught in the webbed fence of our vegetable garden. My daughter Sully, an Animal Planet enthusiast, had me hold said snake’s head while she delicately cut it out of the fence and saved its life. But it glared at me. I’ve leapt at least 10 feet in the air hearing and then seeing a rattlesnake between my feet one October morning.
Given all this, I think it was heroic that I drove to the Coppolas’.
I got out of my car and went into the house. Mayhem! There were chickens running around! Cats lounging on the furniture, smoking and listening to French Café music. Mungo (the small Commander Dog) had Brynne cornered in the kitchen with Squeezy wrapped around her neck. All the secondary dogs had opened the fridge and were wolfing down ice cream.
OK, none of that is true. It was what I imagined before I knocked on the door.
But Brynne opened the door, crossed her arms and looked at me.
“Did Mom send you? I got this! I have to get back to Squeezy. He’s still trying to get out.”
Mungo, excited by the possibility of Squeezy getting out, grabbed my pants leg in her mouth and tugged me towards the “snake room.”
The cage was a big terrarium with a plywood top. Brynne had piled books on top of the plywood, but I could see the snout of the boa pushing against the plywood.
I looked at Brynne, “If the snake gets out, we run!”
Brynne, completely dedicated to her coach, the Coppola family and the animals replied, “Dad! You can’t run away!”
“Woof, woof, yip, yip,” Mungo added.
The plywood corner began to lift. The boa’s head peered out of the crack.
“Damn!” I shouted.
“Let’s use the weights!” Brynne pointed at a stack of fitness equipment.
“But first, push his head back in!” Brynne yelled at me.
“You do it!” I yelled back.
“Dad!!!”
She looked at me with exasperation. “OK, OK.” Brynne gently pushed Squeezy’s head back into the terrarium.
We then grabbed the weights and put them strategically on top of the terrarium.
It worked! Squeezy tried one more time and then slowly slithered back into the corner and curled up.
Mungo, disappointed that she would not get to confront her arch-nemesis, sulked away.
Humans and mammals had conquered.
The next weekend at a soccer game, Stephanie Coppola thanked me for having Brynne house sit.
“Did she have any problems?”
“No,” I replied. “It was all fine. I didn’t hear from her all weekend.”
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