Before I turned six I lived on the Pennsylvania/New York border; my family in Olean, my grandparents near Bradford. Pop’s house, which he said when last I saw him, had seen six generations with Shaving 2’s visit at the age of eight months. Everything seemed smaller than what I remembered except the field running up the hill from his back yard to the tree line. A sloping affair of knee high grass where the after dinner entertainment was watching the deer step out of the forest. (Once he said he had seen bear)
Pop worked his “leases”. Pennsylvania oil pumping stations where horse-shaped pumps delivered the greenish crude out of the ground into big open – wooden I seem to remember –Jacuzzi-like barrels. It smelled good but he said it would give me a headache.
Because of his work, Pop had a long shed; long enough to accommodate runs of pipe that go along with pumping oil. The shed was not far from the house and at the bottom of the field that ran the valley’s length. And along with the tools and shed of an oil man came scattered sheet metal roofing and a rock pile. And along with the sheet metal roofing and the rock pile came garter snakes galore!
Rock pile captures tended to be one snake per flipped rock. Not every rock, of course, but there were a lot of rocks. Sheet metal roofing turn-overs could often uncover more than one garter snake and I’d grab as many as I could. I don’t remember keeping them and didn’t know to use a pillow case at the time. There was one sweep were I carried a bucket and returned with five in about five minutes. I remember because somebody, Aunt Bid I think, said “Look at this, the gosh darn kid has already got five of them”. I also remember cutting one’s head off and cutting him open to discover what they ate. It was a worm but afterwards I felt the knowledge not worth the price. When I learned how to read I looked such matters up in books.
Garter snakes are not big biters but they are big poopers. Not a particularly pleasant aroma but you get used to it, as the price of doing this business, and it becomes the smell of success. Not unlike how your hands smell after a successful fishing trip.
Because garter snakes do not bite what happened one evening made an impression. I flipped the tin and there was a not-garter snake that reared back and bit me as soon as I reached for him. I dropped the tin and headed back into the house for dinner.
A decision faced me as I knew three things: a) it was not a garter snake, b) it bit me and c) some not-garter snakes were trouble. I figured I ought to tell somebody but also figured that some things could change that might include my being forbidden to catch snakes. Dying was also on my mind; decisions, decisions. I decided to just eat dinner and see how events unfolded.
In hindsight I am so sure it was a milk snake that I can almost see it now. From a practical stand point the real danger was zero (ah books) as the only indigenous venomous snakes were timber rattlesnakes – which Pop assured me he knew where to find but would not show me.
The question is; what should I have done? Probably I should have mentioned the bite but then again I lived didn’t I! And when you’re headed down that sawed-off path “sometimes you just have to say, what the spawn”. I never told anybody until now. Hope I don’t get in trouble.
ML
3/2/07
