More Snakes!

 

When Tina told me about her recent snake encounters (see the last post), I told her my latest:  I was walking alongside a nearby road where I had just come from pulling a root cutting from a rose growing in the cutbank. It was growing next to an abandoned farm so I really didn’t think anybody would care. Never the less, I felt like a thief, so I was walking away quickly, trying to look nonchalant, when I felt something soft under my heel. I turned and saw that I had stepped on a fat 2-foot long snake. I didn’t scream, but I admit I squeaked a few times. I felt sorry for the snake, which wriggled off the roadway very slowly, like it was loathe to give up its warm, sunny place—or maybe it had a heck of a back ache. As for the rose cutting, they say that if you steal a start, it’s sure to grow.

Frank Horn, my husband Jerry's father, replied to Tina’s letter as follows:

Enjoyed reading that snake item -- as to bull snakes, we had one for a pet for a while in Spokane.

In Utah and Nevada, I worked at a lot of remote old CAA (predecessor to FAA) wooden buildings that had been built in the '30's or earlier. If they had signs of a lot of resident rodents, which could chew up the wiring, finding a bull snake to move to the building basement was one way of dealing with the rodents.

When I would encounter a bull snake, along a back road, I'd see if I could capture it and move it to one of these buildings. Jerry probably remembers Lucin, Utah, as one of these kinds of places. It had its own generators and quarters, as well as an emergency airfield lighted at night. Until 24/7 coverage had been shut down, there had been six or seven folks staffed there. Really remote!!

We've seen few snakes here around Sun City -- most rattlesnakes I'd ever encountered were in Montana and around Spokane.