OK, so I took the title from my favorite Indianna Jones movie, but I really hate snakes. Have all of my life. Not sure why but most likely started with the Bible story about an apple and the serpent.
My grandfather, Norman, tried to rid the farm of rattle snakes back in the 1880’s when he happened upon sixteen rattlers while picking grapes on the hillside in our woods. He killed them all and reported that many were in excess of four feet long.
As a kid I was certain I would be encountering rattlesnakes in my exploration of our woods, so I purchased a snake bite kit and carried it every time I went out. I envisioned extracting the poison from my leg with the little rubber suction cup in the event I accidently scared one up. I have found out since that it was as unlikely to work as I was to ever come across a poisonous snake.
When I moved down to Tennessee, I was prepared to wage war on copperheads and water moccasins. I brought a Taurus Judge 5 shot revolver filled with .410 shells. Never had an occasion to use it.
Last year my wife had netting over the plants on the back deck to keep the bird from robbing her fruit plants. It had come off over the winter and while she was mowing the John Deere snagged a piece of the fabric and wrapped it up around the blades. I took it to the shop where I removed a 16’ netting that had been spun into a nice six foot long rope by the blades. The next week I decided to clean up the remnants of netting by the garden to prevent a reoccurrence with the mower.
Until this time, I hadn’t a care in the world about snakes in Minnesota. I reached down and grabbed the loose netting in the tall grass, and wondered why it too had been spun into a long rope, but not wrapped up in the mower blades. I had the loose netting in my right hand and a firm grip on the supposed rope with my left hand. No gloves on, just bare hands. My left hand told my brain this was not a rope about the same time my eyes told my brain about the pretty diamond shaped markings all down the rope. Both hands let go at the same time.
I knew that there are no Copperheads in Minnesota. My neighbor John, up the road from us in Tennessee lost a finger on his left hand when he picked up a stick of lumber with a juvenile Copperhead under it. I understand the risks with snakes. I am very careful picking things up in Tennessee during the warm months. I have encountered garden snakes in many areas around the farm but never “accidently” picked one up bare handed.
My wife has an app on her phone to identify plants and she took a picture of this “thing.” It was a northern water snake. I have lived in Minnesota sixty-eight years and spent every year of it in the woods and streams around here and never encountered one of these. They grow to four feet long and this one was fully grown on the day it expired. It had slithered into the netting and became caught, right under the deck beside our bedroom. Hopefully it doesn’t have a family living nearby.
