>>I hear stories all the time. "They have 8' milsnakes in Central America," "My Eastern is almost 7'". Or like one poster says on here, he has a 2.7 year old Eastern that's close to 6' (which is bull).>>

I heard a classic 'big" snake story the other day. I was at the golf range. There were some deer walking around beyond the range of my driver. I asked the attendant what other animals he sees. He said there were 31 wild turkeys a couple days earlier.

"What about snakes?" i ask.

"Well, last year we had a big one. I heard the people out front talking and yelling and i looked out and there was a big black snake crawling past the front door." (This is in northern kentucky, and some black rats get pretty big; he had otherwise seemed knowledgeable--the water snakes in the river weren't moccasins, he knew. So I wasn't prepared for what came next). "Yep, that snake was 11 feet 3 inches long."

I simply agreed that wow, that IS big.

"When i was a kid," he went on, "I had a big black rat snake. Lived in Indiana. It was 14 feet long. It would wrap around my waist, and it was so heavy i could barely walk when it did that."

The sad--or amusing--part of it is that he was not trying to be funny. He was sincere. And who am i to criticize: I re-visited my elementary school yesterday and the playground was SO much smaller than it was 50 years ago!

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