A Snake in the Grass

Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.

Robert Frost

Spoiler Alert: Today we are going to talk about snakes. Again. Sigh. My husband read me a section of an article in National Geographic Magazine a couple of years ago which postulated that our human fear/revulsion of spiders and snakes may be in our genetic coding, not just a culturally taught reaction. Whatever. When I came across a snake last week, my first instinct was to use my 3,000 pound Nissan to squish it.

I was headed home from making a delivery to Son #6 whose headache demanded a very large dose of caffeine. A couple of houses past his driveway, I thought I saw something slither in the sun. I stopped and backed up. Sure enough. Right there in the middle of his brand new subdivision was a snake. A long-time seamstress, I knew the distance from the tip of my nose to the outstretched fingertips of my right hand was almost exactly 36 inches (a bit of nice information when you buy a lot of yardage). I chose, however, not to pick up the snake and confirm its length, but by my estimate, he/she/it was closer to four feet long. Not a pleasant discovery three doors down from where four of my grandchildren live.

Of course, for some perverse reason, lots of kids like snakes. When I had visited Son #1’s family in Australia, that grandson was insistent that we tour a reptile emporium which boasted the great island’s seven most poisonous snakes and five most poisonous spiders—or maybe the reverse. Not a thrill for me—plus, Australia has all kinds of other deadly critters. Even a tree frog whose slime will kill a cow if it drips on the poor bovine’s skin. Truth.

Once I had stopped my car, the snake immediately glided under it into the shadows, curling up next to one of the back tires. Dang. Now I was faced with a conundrum. Roll over the critter or figure out a way to coax it from beneath my car. A neighbor and her young son had come out to see why I had stopped, so I consulted with them. She shuddered and said, “Kill that thing!” The boy, probably about four, voted to capture it and keep it in his bedroom

I was stuck in the throes of conscience. I recalled reading a biography of the Nobel Prize winning humanitarian, Albert Schweitzer. A doctor who toured the world as a musician giving organ concerts six months every year, he used his accumulated earnings to build desperately needed hospitals in Africa the other six months. He so valued life in any of its forms, that when workers dug the foundations for his facilities, he climbed down into the trenches being prepared for the footings and lifted out every living creature—insect, worm, spider—no exceptions—before the concrete was poured.  Who was I to run over a snake in the face of such a lofty standard?

At that moment, a West Jordan City Utilities truck turned into the neighborhood. Since both my car and the three of us were blocking the street, I flagged down the driver. Her name was Liz, and she was reading water meters in the area.

“So,” I said, “any chance you have a pole or something I can use to get the snake out from under my car?”

“SNAKE!!” she said. “I HATE snakes.” She may or may not have made the sign of a cross. But she climbed down out of the cab anyway “I’ve got a shovel,” she said. Then she dug around under the equipment in the back till she unearthed a good-sized but well-used cardboard box.

“Perfect!” I replied. “If you hold the box down on the asphalt, I’ll herd the snake into it!”

“Ugh,” she said, but she was game. She emptied out the box of several fist-sized metal lumps whose purpose was not obvious to me, and we tag-teamed that snake.

He was smarter than we expected. The first time we scooped him up, he slithered out a crack in the corner of the box and headed directly away from us as fast as he could go. Liz tore off one of the box’s flaps and made a dam over the hole. Then she tilted the box away from her, hoping the angle would keep the snake from using that trick a second time.

By now I was an old hand at shoveling snake. I just stuck the shovel under the snake’s belly and lifted him into the box, both Liz and I dancing as far away from it as we could get. The snake wriggled around, flapping in annoyance, but  every time he tried to climb out, he slid back down the side of the box.

Holding the box at arm’s length, Liz  walked that critter down to the end of the street and dumped the fellow in an uncultivated ravine on the west side of the neighborhood so he could continue his job exterminating rodents in the empty field. When she got back, we celebrated our snake-wrangling skills with a high-five. I packed up her shovel. Liz loaded her parts back into the snake box, and she headed out to finish her job.

I hope I never have to wrestle a snake again, but if I do, I know where to find a city employee worth every penny of my tax dollars.