Fishing for TreasureAdventures in Junk

Now, Bill has never been afraid of snakes. Fam­ily lore has it that as a boy he went on mis­sions to clean water moc­casins out of the swim­ming hole. He would lay out fish­hooks and lines on the bank to cap­ture them, and then string the tro­phies together to impress the other kids.

I only heard of him bring­ing a snake into the house once. It was a cop­per­head in a jar. He’d decided to keep it in his room. Luck­ily, his Dad found it before his Mom did. If it had been the other way around he’d have likely fin­ished his child­hood in mil­i­tary school.

You see, Bill’s Mom doesn’t like snakes. His Dad does. As a mat­ter of fact, he goes on mis­sions to res­cue all the corn­snakes and rat­snakes from unen­light­ened per­sons and gives them asy­lum in his barn so they can eat the rats. But as she points out, how do the snakes know they’re sup­posed to stay in the barn? Which is a good question.

Once the fam­ily was dri­ving out of state when they spot­ted a great big snake on the road. Bill’s Dad hopped out the car and deter­mined it was alive and non­poi­so­nous. “We can put it in the car and carry it back to the barn!” he said in great delight. He just about lost more than he would have gained there. His wife told him tightly, “You had bet­ter hope that snake can cook and clean, because if it gets in this car I’m get­ting out.”

Bill is extremely duti­ful when he finds a snake. “We need to take this to Daddy to put in the barn!” I don’t know how they can walk in there, the floor must be seething. When he was younger he used to catch rat­tlesnakes to sell to the snake han­dling church up on the moun­tain. But either the rat­tlers got faster or he got slower, because he doesn’t seem to encounter them anymore.

Our dog, Gus, is inter­ested in snakes too, but a bit more cau­tious about it. We’re always alerted to their pres­ence by a deep, delib­er­ate “Wuff! WUFF!” com­ing from the yard. He fol­lows them around, bark­ing the snake bark, until we come out and see what kind it is. Then the snake takes advan­tage of his dis­trac­tion to escape.

So one day Gus sounded the alarm and Bill went out to check on it. There was Gus loom­ing over some­thing on the ground. Bill – very inju­di­ciously, I think – said cheer­fully, “What have you got there, boy?” Gus showed him.

He seized the snake by the tail and gave it a prac­ticed flip high into the air. Time oblig­ingly slowed down so Bill could watch the snake fly­ing up, up, up, hit­ting apogee, and com­ing down, down, down, right at his head. As he said later, “I don’t move very fast these days, but I got out of the way!”  The snake hit the ground and departed posthaste in search of a her­peto­log­i­cal shrink.

As I said, Bill has never been afraid of snakes. But for a cou­ple of days there he would some­times fall unchar­ac­ter­is­ti­cally silent. When I’d ask what was wrong, he would answer, ”Noth­ing. I’m just think­ing about that snake.”