Rattler In The Fridge

Yep, that's right. there is a rattlesnake in my fridge.

When I woke up this morning and came out into the living room, Steve pointed to where Rich was sleeping and told me he'd  had a rough night. Sometime after I went to sleep, a friend had called him to say he couldn't leave his house. There was a rattlesnake in front of his door. Since he was less than 2 miles away, Rich went to the rescue. I'm still waiting for him to wake up - it being 2 PM now - to fill me in on the details.

Rich, like all my kids and the daycare kids, was raised to not fear snakes, to watch them eat in their cages, to handle them if they were comfortable doing so. (Yes, the parents were informed.) I grew up in northern Minnesota where there were no poisonous snakes. The closest known ones were rattlers up in the bluffs along the Mississippi around Red Wing. Living around lakes as I did, it was a common childhood activity to chase garter snakes and try to catch them. They were safe, fast and twisty through the grasses, and my older brother did a much better job of catching them, never letting me forget it. No, he wasn't any meaner than any other older brother, but if the subject came up, or a chase was in order, we both knew where he stood. But I did manage to catch a few.

I have a clear memory from when we lived on the resort of my dad killing a large pine snake. It was several feet long and wider than my (now) wrist, and committed the capitol offense, while hunting rats and other rodents, of being able to scare away our customers. It didn't, it just might have. Daddy took a long 4x4 and pounded the thing until it finally quit moving, then removed all evidence of its presence, scolding us into never telling the customers of its existence. As we had a few farm animals up on the hill behind the cabins, along with a corn crib, it had been doing us a favor. But that didn't matter.

I've always resented its fate.

Once my kids were growing, I acquired some old aquariums with secure and weighted lids, and caught a couple of garter snakes to keep. Eventually they were joined in other cages by a red rat snake, a corn snake, a baby bull snake, even a reticulated python. I'd get minnows for the garters, and raised mice for the others. With my supervision, everybody at least got introduced to them, and many of the kids argued over who got to hold a snake next. The watched skin sheddings and felt the shed skins. When the family relocated to Georgia back in '78, long before security at airports got paranoid, I relocated them in my carry-on luggage inside a stiff tube that was securely tied inside a pillowcase, with no chance of escaping. (I always wondered if whoever was looking at the x-rays of purses and cases was snoozing or just didn't care about several very long and mobile spines.)

So, no fear. I'd made a point over the years of reassuring both kids and parents  that nothing poisonous would ever be part of the menagerie.

Once in Georgia, I had to add another lesson to snake education 101. Georgia had at least four poisonous snakes, and our recently built neighborhood with lots of green space was likely territory for them. While never seeing water moccasins or rattlers, we did see  a baby coral snake, and once after its beheading, touch a copperhead. Each has its tale.

Our doctor's office had an entry through a terrarium, via a concrete path with railings over water and plants below and to the sides. Doors on both ends. Can't remember if they had turtles or not, though that - or fish - was a likely reason Richard spent his waiting time out there. He was under strict orders to never leave the path nor touch anything. He would have been climbing around otherwise. Within a couple minutes he returned, asking how to tell the difference between a coral snake and the king snake that mimics it. I told him the rhyme, red touches yellow, can kill a fellow, red touches black, poison does lack. I'd never needed to know it but memorized it years before because it was a simple rhyme, and the only way it did rhyme was the correct combination of how the colored bands on the snakes were laid out. Foolproof.

Rich went back to his terrarium, then returned within a minute announcing there was a coral snake in there. I went to check. Sure enough, about 6" long and half a pencil wide, there was indeed a baby coral snake. I went to tell the woman at the check in desk, and she totally blew me off. I repeated the rhyme, to show we knew whereof we spoke. She wasn't about to hear it. I told her I hoped they had some antivenom in stock, then returned to the waiting room to keep the kids in check. Needless to say, Rich was forbidden back inside its space.

The copperhead was a temporary gift from a neighbor, who happened to also have originated in the small town in Minnesota where I was from. His parents owned a restaurant where our parents took us out to eat on a couple occasions. This snake was killed in his back yard in Georgia, since Johnny had two kids of his own to protect, not to mention all the neighborhood kids who wandered through everybody's yard while playing. When I heard about it, I asked could he bring it - without the head - to my house for all the kids to see. We all needed to be informed as to what to avoid. Learning that not all snakes were to be feared, they now needed to learn which were.

So last night, armed with all that experience, Rich went off to the rescue of his friend. The result is a rattler in my fridge. Dead. On ice, in a beverage cup with the lid on. Beautiful. It's a fairly young one, greyer than I'd thought it would be, four or 5 rattles at first glance, just over a foot long and finger width in its middle, not recently fed.

I'm sure he has plans for it, or at least parts of it, but I'm waiting to hear.