Time to Find a New House

Yeah, I'm thinking that this story is the stuff that nightmares are made of... Idaho is bad enough, but if it were down in Arizona, Nevada, or Texas, it'd be a lot worse, what with rattlesnakes and all.

It reminds me of the time several years ago that Reverend Dave found a snake in his bedroom. I think he jumped up and threw the covers off of his bed three or four times a night for the next few months every time he thought he felt something move.

Or one time a couple of buddies and I went camping early one summer in Montana. We were out shooting, riding ATVs, and just goofing off one day when we found a huge pit on the edge of a meadow. We thought it was a perfect place to blast away with the guns, except after a few dozen shots, a bunch of damn rattlesnakes started crawling out of all the holes along the side (we thought the holes were for mice or prairie dogs or something, not a load of frickin' rattlesnakes), mightily pissed off at us.

You never saw Mikey move so fast. It was like something I once heard from a cop--Nobody runs faster than a scared white man!

If we'd had some shotguns, it might've been different--but you have no idea how hard it is to hit a target as small as a snake with a rifle when you're jumpy and nervous. So we decided to just run, instead.

But nothing gives me the willies like a story my buddy Ed related to me recently. He had to travel to India for several weeks on business, and told me that they found a live cobra in one of the offices in the building he was working in.

Could you even imagine?

I mean, I've been living in the desert for the better part of the last 15 years, and I think I've seen three rattlesnakes the entire time. And none of them were in my office! I mean, I guess it's cool that cobras keep the rats and mice away, but wouldn't it be more prudent to spend that money on an exterminator instead of a snake wrangler?

When I was a kid in Tennessee, we saw plenty of snakes. We lived way the hell out in the woods, miles from civilization at the time, but most of the snakes we saw were after our German Shepherd, Rebel, had gotten hold of them. Wasn't much left by then. But we still saw plenty of Black Racers and the like, and even the occasional Cottonmouth while swimming in the 'big creek'. (I can't even imagine doing that today...)

But if I ever pulled on (what I thought to be) a lightswitch cord and it turned out to be a snake, I swear I'd shiat myself faster than the old codgers at a retirement home after gorging themselves on prune ice cream.

I don't mind snakes, per se, but not if they're being sneaky. I want to see them coming, or not see them at all.

Mikey