We lived on Lake Tuscaloosa during most of my teen years. Our house was a beautiful home on a corner lot with a boat ramp into a slew that led into the main body of the lake near Tierce Patton Farm Road. I got to explore the wild here, and I was truly lost in the wild of it all. Despite being in an upper scale neighborhood, the unmolested forests surrounded us.
Mom and dad just sort of accepted that I was either off in the forest, working in the shop, or building something in my bedroom in the basement. The forest was my favorite of the three. I would sometimes take off with minimal supplies – I called it pocket camping because I only took what would fit in my pockets. Sometimes I’d come back late at night. Sometimes I’d be gone for a few days. Everything from squirrel to rabbit to raccoon was fair game, but fish and berries were too.
Most of the game I caught was with snares and traps made in the field, but I also had a far-too-nice .22 caliber rifle that I got from my grandfather and used with sub-sonic rounds that were much too quiet to bother anything but the small game I hunted with it. But most of my woods outings didn’t include such extravagance; instead I would just make do with what I had and usually still ate just fine. At 13 and 14, skinny as a rail and shooting up in height, I didn’t need much anyway.
There in New Mexico I also frequently caught horned toads, garter snakes, and other creatures. That was always fine until a horned toad (I don’t know why, but I always called them horney toads) escaped my terrarium and found its way to my mom’s bed. I’d swear one of my brothers did that just to get me in trouble.
The only small game I didn’t actively pursue was snakes. Central Alabama has six different venomous snakes, and seemingly far fewer “friendly” snakes. Not that one being venomous had always stopped me from messing g with them. Back in the abandoned silver mines in New Mexico, my brother and I and our friend Aaron and Eric, had come across a few rattlesnakes. Theresa most memorable one as retreating into a narrow crack in the wall of a when we all went at it with whatever tools we had. We managed to grab it by the tail and pull it out of the crevice, and then behead it with a shovel. As I remember it, that legless demon was about seven feet long and as big around as my arm at the time. I can’t explain why, but we cut it up and cooked the meat over a small fire. We also each had a few bites of raw snake meat. It was not desirable in any way. Even the cooked meat left a lot to be desired.
Still, reptiles just didn’t bother me much. Even much later in life we had a few pet snakes that my sons loved playing with. One African ball python was rescued from a friend, and we named her Elbows – naturally since she didn’t have any. another rescue python was named Knuckles. A much more aggressive albino California King Snake was a rescue I named Mahonri Moriancomr. IYKYK.
But in my teen and solo years in Alabama, I just avoided snakes. I saw them often enough, but always avoided them. At one point we were out on our boat and found a shallow sand bar to swim on, until dozens of moccasins appeared in the water all around us. We all climbed into the boat in what must have been record time.
The water was absolutely a hot spot for them. And we lived on the water – on a slew no less. That slew was sort of our own private world – connected to Lake Tuscaloosa and the Black Warrior River, but like a long private drive. The slew was probably 400-500 feet long and had a bit of a dog leg bend to it so you couldn’t see the open lake from our boat ramp.
Not long after we moved into this house we took on the monumental effort of dredging the slew. Dad and us boys stacked sandbags across the mouth of the slew – about 40 feet across, and then ran a gas pump for about a week and a half to drain the slew. Once all but dry, dad hired Gurganus and Sons Excavating to go down in the sludge and drake it down to the bedrock. I can’t explain why, but I loved these projects! We got to play in the dirt like with matchbox cars, but on a much larger scale!
Once we removed the sandbag wall and refilled the slew, it was our little paradise. But even paradise had its storms. And for whatever reason, storms would send pieces of people’s boat docks, boats, or whatever else down the slew where my brothers and I assembled what we called the “garbage barge.” It didn’t look like garbage, but it was made of scrap floats and boards and such, so we gave it an appropriate name.
We even had a full cinder block tied to a 20 foot rope as an anchor. We would take the SS Garbage Barge into the lake, drop anchor, then swim down and see how long we could walk along the bottom carrying the cinder block before we had to come back up for air. Chris could also do it furry and for longer time that me, but I was always trying to catch his time.
One one calm summer afternoon I was on the Garbage Barge alone. I had two cane poles and a cup of worms, and I didn’t even care if I caught anything. We had to use larger hooks to avoid wasting all our time on the tiny bream that would devour our bait. I was lost in the peace of just enjoying the lazy drift that I didn’t notice the raft had drifted under a low hanging tree.
When a branch tickled my ear, I batted it away nonchalantly. I realized I was now under a tree but didn’t care. Then the branch tickled my ear again before it rested on my shoulder. But not licking a branch typically would. It occurred to me to be still. A cottonmouth had been resting in the tree branch, and my shoulder provided a perfect ladder down. I felt it slither from my left shoulder, behind my neck and my mullet – it was a great mullet – and down my right shoulder. Its tail tickled my barren back.
I was frozen.
It was only about four or five feet long, but it was healthy. It managed to slither down to my hands, still holding a cane pole. I ever so slowly lifted my hands and moved them in the same direction, keeping the snake’s mouth facing away from me. I lowered my hands and the cane pole until both were practically submerged in the water. The stow away snake slithered into the water and off my hands. The cane pile went in the water just as slowly.
It wasn’t until after the snake and the cane pole left my hands that I felt the rush of what was happening. I let out a BLEHEHEHEHE! kind of blood curdling yell once it wasn’t safe to do so. I looked around to see that there were no more unwanted guests, picked up the paddle, and guided the garage barge back to the dock.
I had experienced enough of nature for the day, and that was saying a lot for me. I also decided I didn’t want to ever again have an uninvited snake around my neck.