It all started Saturday evening. I hurried home from work where Ward and Wally were waiting for me to go to the local community fair. The fair has been a favorite since moving to the area years ago and we were looking forward to seeing the exhibits and livestock as well as the ribbons Ward and I had won. (More about those in another post.) As we were going out the door, Wally casually said, "Oh, do you know there's a snake there on the wall." What?! Where? As it turns out, a snake was stuck in some painter's tape that we had on the wall next to the basement steps. We were marking how far we might be able to expand the pantry from above and the tape had been there for months. We no longer saw it. But there it was with a snake wrapped in it.
I immediately asked Wally and Ward to take a picture, so we could identify it. I was weirded out by a snake in the house, but curious all the same. I cautiously peeked and saw that it was very much alive. I took one of the pictures and started Googling to find out what kind it was. The first hit was a copperhead - one of the two kinds of poisonous snakes in our area. I knew that poisonous snakes had triangular heads as opposed to the rounded ones of nonpoisonous snakes, but I wasn't sure if this head was rounded or not. I showed Ward the pictures of the copperheads and he thought that was what we had. Then I started to freak out. It was a small snake and I envisioned a whole nest of baby copperheads in the basement ceiling, remembering all the while, the venom is stronger in younger snakes. (I have since learned that this is not true.) I worried about the cats. I wondered if there was an exterminator who made house calls in the middle of the night.
Thank goodness, Ward was calmer than I was. He carefully extracted the tape-bound snake from the wall into a bucket and took it outside. He said there was no humane way to extract the snake from the tape, so the snake died.
We then left for the fair. On the way there, I was still very worried about our house possibly being full of poisonous snakes, so we sent Aunt Martha and Uncle Billy pictures to confirm or deny our identification. While Wally and Ward went inside to look at the exhibits, I waited in the car for Aunt Martha to receive the picture. After a while, we figured out that the cell phone signal was too weak at her house to download a picture. So I joined the men at the fair exhibits, but my mind was elsewhere.
Afterward, we were supposed to go to a neighborhood star party where we were going to look at the skies through a fancy telescope, but the whole snake thing had changed the mood. We went home instead. In the meantime, we sent another picture of the snake to Uncle Billy in an email with which he identified the snake as a harmless milk snake. Looks much like a copperhead but with different shaped eyes and head. That was a relief, to say the least.
We went to bed tired and down from the energy spent on the snake episode. We didn't really talk about the whole thing until the next morning when Ward mentioned that I had gotten weird about the snake. Guilty. I am generally a calm, logical person and I was neither of those the night before. In addition, Ward felt bad that he had to kill the snake even though he wanted to release it.
Now here's the crazy part of this episode. Wally had actually seen the snake a couple of hours earlier. He didn't think much about it. He just thought I was doing some kind of nature performance art. I'm not sure what that says about me that he thought a snake taped to the wall was a perfectly natural thing for him to see at our house. :)
So you can be the judge. Do you think I was crazy, weird, or normal when I found a snake in my house?
More like what does it say about him, that he would think a snake in tape was something you concocted as performance art. That's weird. I'm sorry both of you got upset over it. I would be more upset over having to kill the snake to get it off the wall, once discovered it was non poisonous. But I would not want to think about a nest of baby copperheads in the wall or ceiling. I would be have a game cam in there so fast to check.
ReplyDeleteWhen Ward killed the snake, we thought it was a copperhead, but he was still upset doing it. We have had small snakes in our old house and several in the garage. We sometimes move them or just wait for them to go on their merry way. While I don't like them, I know that snakes are an important part of the ecosystem.
DeleteThe performance art thing, on both accounts, is strange or as we like to say in my family - quirky. :)
NORMAL! Although one may argue about me being the standard for normality. Snakes in the great outdoors .... I'm cautious about. Snakes in my home--cause for alarm, and I would have been right there with you. I'm confused about the nature performance art thing ..... maybe it's best not to ask??
ReplyDeleteBack when I was in college, one of my roommates and I worked at the same camp. We moved our stuff back to our apartment from the camp, and she discovered a snake (garter snake, if memory serves me correctly) circled on the turntable of her record player (yes, this was awhile ago). She very calmly moved it to the outdoors. I was not nearly so calm. I hope to never again encounter a snake in my living quarters. Once was enough for me.
As I have gotten older, snakes bother me more. I used to be pretty good with them unless they were poisonous. Even then, while hiking, I would just go around them and move on. I'm not so calm these days.
DeleteI don't know exactly what my son was thinking, and at the time, there were enough other things going on that I didn't question him. Later, I wanted to move onto other things.
I think my comment got lost! I know I wrote a comment, but, maybe I didn't send it? Anyway, I don't think you are the type of person to tape a snake to the wall and call it art, nature performance or otherwise! I would be concerned, too, if I thought there were snakes in my house! I do hope that I will remain calm enough to deal with it, because, there isn't anyone else to deal with such things, is there? :)
ReplyDeleteSome day, I'm gonna have to ask my son exactly what he was thinking. However, for now, I'm going to put the whole thing behind me and think of more pleasant things.
DeleteHopefully you will never get a snake in you house, but if you do maybe M would come and help out.
Maybe M will; I wouldn't count on it, though! :D
DeleteCopperheads are kinda "beefy" snakes, and their heads, like rattlers, are pretty noticeably triangular. Back in the day in NoLA, I used be involved in trash clean-ups in Bayou Barataria, Jean Lafitte NHP. We usually did it in the winter, so the snakes would be less active. We were doing these cleanups of old junk strewn around the Park, and overgrown with vegetation. It was the kind of place that in the Spring, when it was getting nice and toasty, there were snakes "everywhere." So, winter was good. Anyway, you'd find the Copperheads all curled up in old broken bottles or containers, or in old refrigerators, etc. BUT, because of the "colder" weather they were pretty torpid, and you could work around them. Man, they were nasty looking. Not as nasty as a Water Moccasin, but luckily we never saw any of them. Fun in the Bayou!
ReplyDeleteBack when I was doing regular field work, I saw copperheads occasionally usually sunning themselves. Easy enough to walk around. One of my friends at field comp, got bitten on the tip of his finger by a copperhead when he picked up a rock with his hand instead of his hammer. He got pretty fast medical attention. Even with being able to isolate the tip of his finger, his whole arm was very swollen and black and blue. He had to spend several days in the hospital. I was duly impressed with the dangers of a copperhead.
DeleteThis snake was small, so I had imagined a nest of baby copperheads in the ceiling. As I mentioned, I wasn't necessarily thinking rationally that night.
Wow, your poor friend! Did you and Mr. Jerry and Ms. B ever see rattlers up on Brush Mt or the other mountains you all were working on?
Delete