A Snake Tale

I’m nearly terrified of snakes.  I don’t know why, or exactly when, this inordinate fear developed.  When I was a young lad my brothers and myself used to play with garter snakes, and would have scoffed at the idea they might be dangerous.  Yet as I experienced a number of encounters with poisonous species in my twenties and thirties I learned a healthy respect for at first, and later began to fear them.  By the time I was in my later thirties I would no longer touch a garter snake.  One of my first rather disconcerting experiences with a poisonous reptile didn’t even happen to me, yet I almost break out in a sweat as I remember it today.

I hadn’t lived in Jacksonville, Florida too long in the early 1960s.  My wife and I had met another young couple named Rodney “Rocky” Lewis, and his wife Harriet.  They had a baby born unto them during that period of time.  Shortly after the baby’s birth they took it to Valdosta, Georgia to meet both sets of grandparents for a weekend.  Only a few days prior to that they had rented a small cottage near the bank of the St. John’s River.  When they returned from Georgia, near midnight Sunday, Harriet entered the house in the darkness, and laid the baby down on their bed before turning on the light in the bedroom.  As she snapped the switch on the light she turned to the baby to begin preparing it for bed.  There, on the bed, within inches of the baby was a coiled cottonmouth water moccasin.

Although nearly passing out with fright, Harriet managed to contain herself for the few seconds it took her to gently draw the baby back from the snake and pick it up.  She ran from the house to where Rocky was removing bags from their car.  She handed the baby to Rocky, and only then did she scream and go into hysterics.  She utterly refused to ever enter that house again.  They drove to our home and spent the remainder of the night with us, rented a different home far from the river the following day, and Rocky had the job of moving their belongings.