Who likes snakes? Well, I guess some folks do. And some of us are just a bit….um….intimidated, shall we say?
Having grown up in an apartment building in a city neighborhood, snakes were not really part of my developmental experience. I knew I was supposed to fear them (and I did); and I believed they were slimy (not sure where that one came from).
Jump ahead to life as a parent in the ‘burbs. My human son, at age 5, wanted to go for a walk down the hill one afternoon. At the bottom of the hill was a grocery, a bank, a gas station, a deli, and some other businesses, including a pet store. We visited the deli, and my son had a whopping 17 cents in his pocket. He asked to visit “Bob’s Amazon Pets”, the pet store, on the way home. We had never been there, so we decided to give it a try. First off, we met a java macaque monkey named Tammy. She was tethered to a perch in the showroom of the pet store, and we quickly learned that Tammy was not so friendly. A bit of a surprise for my boy whose was raised with my first child, squirrel monkey Kong, and his second older primate brother Mo who was happily waiting for us to return home at the time. But we got past that and went around the corner to fall in love with the most beautiful cat I have ever seen, an ocelot. The ocelot was behind bars with a sign that read “$400” and another sign which read “Stay 4 feet back from cage”. The amount was cost-prohibitive, or I would have been very tempted. But the clincher was, when I asked why we had to stay back 4 feet, Bob replied, simply, “Because he’ll rip your arm off.” Okay, cancel the ocelot idea. (And there was the issue of how many pounds of raw steak it consumed daily, also out of our price range at that point in time when our family ate a lot of hot dogs.) We were left with 17 cents and no pet to purchase. Until Bob, generous man that he was, offered a $2.83 discount on a $3 ribbon snake. Snake!!! Yikes!!! So….we named the snake Bob (after Bob), brought him home, and set up a terrarium with a screen on the top. His residence was on top of my son’s book shelf in his room. A couple of days later, my then-husband and I were awakened by my son who urgently proclaimed, “My snake got out!” My husband levitated out of bed, dressed at warp speed, and shot out the door to go work on the house we were renovating down the road. Mom (lucky me) accompanied the kiddo to his room to find that, yes, indeed Bob had knocked the screen off the terrarium and escaped. Not too long after, my son tracked him down behind some books in the shelf and returned him to his home with a rock securing the screen. (I’m not sure how Mo would have reacted had he come into contact with Bob; but, as mentioned in previous blog posts, Mo managed to keep all the other household pets in fear of him, so….) Unfortunately, Bob was not with us for long because we could not get him to eat anything. Vegetation, bugs live and/or dead. No deal. And, because my son had made me pet Bob, I learned that he was actually dry rather than slimy and, overall, amazingly friendly.
Actually, a few years earlier, I had occasion to meet a boa that was owned by a fellow who sold us parts for my then-husband’s Harley chopper he was building. That guy, a friend of a friend, was part of an outlaw biker gang in town; and, while we didn’t hang out with him, we did visit back and forth occasionally, briefly, when parts were exchanged. I would cringe when he fed cute little mice to the snake. And later this guy gained a reputation for carrying the boa wrapped around himself inside his denim jacket, waiting for occasions when he would be frisked by the police. So I was rather glad that little Bob had been able to redeem snakedom in my eyes.
On down the line, when I worked with youth clients in a community mental health setting, I had one young man on my caseload that acquired a rock python and a boa constrictor. I recall one afternoon when I had to make a brief home visit to get some paperwork signed, I started to plop down on the couch when my client yelled, “Don’t sit there!” All I saw was a lumpy pillowcase. Which, he explained, had the python inside. Whew!
The biggest snake story (involving the biggest snake) occurred during my tenure as a child welfare worker. I had been working with a teenage mom who had a year-old child as there had been calls made to the agency about the child’s father who reportedly had some temper issues. Some incident occurred which prompted the agency to obtain a pickup order to remove the child and bring him under care. He had been living in the city, and the judge issued an order to convey. Then we were informed that the child was staying in an outlying area with a relative. So…off I went with my order to convey and an officer from the police department local to the area. We pulled into the driveway, got out, and were immediately greeted by a small woman who happened to have an 8-foot boa hanging from her neck, almost to the ground on either side. Yikes!! Large snake!! Do they bite? Mmmm…maybe just constrict? So she’d have to throw it and hope it would wrap around us to accomplish that. What really worried us at that time was a) that the order to convey was for the city, not the county, so the officer could not remove the child, and b) that the woman was yelling at the officer and me to get off her property or they would “blow our (expletive) heads off!” That one got our attention, so we obligingly left. Back to court. Order to convey for the county. Back to that address with five police cars and one unmarked city detective vehicle. (One of the officers had been frantically consulting a dictionary, due to absence of an encyclopedia, to see if boas could bite. He stood at the edge of the yard with his hand on his gun the entire time.) Apparently, neighbors had made reports to the police that there were two boas and that neighbors’ had a number of ducks and geese come up missing. Since the baby was smaller than a goose, we were all a bit worried. This time the woman greeted us and provided an address in the city where we could find the child. When we got there, he was surrendered to us with his little bags packed. (Incidentally, mom and dad were eventually able to accomplish what was needed to ensure the boy’s safe return home. I love it when things work out well!)
Soooo…snakes. Yeah….