I can't remember when it began--my fear of snakes. I remember sitting at the supper table as a kid, listening to dad's story of chopping a large bull snake in half with a sickle bar mower in the hay field. "Each length of snake was three feet long and as big around as my wrist. It kept writhing on the mown alfalfa for several rounds," he explained. Dad had no love for snakes. "The only good snake is a dead snake," he claimed. Maybe that's where I acquired my repulsion to the slithering reptile.

Somewhere in my childhood years, I recall wading through tall cattails with a fishing pole. My quest was to make it to the open water of a bayou on the Middle Loup river. I spotted some carp milling around on the surface from an adjoining hill and instantly felt boyish adrenaline flow. In a flash I was standing in thigh deep water at the edge of the reeds, expectantly watching my red and white bobber float the gentle waves. The carp were unimpressed with my offering though, and my patience finally wore out. I turned and headed back to dry ground but was suddenly confronted with a road block. The mid section of a snake much longer than I was tall, lay across my path through the cattails. I debated for a millisecond, then changed course, making a huge arc around my adversary, creating a wake that must have spooked every fish from the backwater. My life long battle with snakes had begun.

Looking back, I have come to understand that snakes sense my dread of their presence and go out of their way to be near me. If I was riding a dirt bike along the end of a cornfield then a large bull snake waits for me at a sharp bend in the road. The sunning snake then enjoys watching me jump the irrigation pipe like Evel Knievel and come to a stop out in the corn. If I'm irrigating corn with syphon tubes from a ditch, then the snake would be lying behind the berm where I made a giant step across the water. I once levitated six feet in the air in the middle of one these maneuvers and managed to get a running start before I hit the ground. I would never be able to achieve such a feat without the aid of a snake and adrenaline.

I took a job back in '85 with the Custer Public Power District. One of my assignments that summer was to help my supervisor dig dirt from ground transformers and fill it back in with crushed rock. Field mice used the transformers for their homes, building nests and eating the protective coating off the electric wiring inside. We hoped to solve the rodent problem with our rock barriers. I didn't fear the 600 volts of electricity in these transformers nearly as much as the thought of coming in direct contact with the sizeable reptiles that preyed on the local residents. One day the inevitable happened. I was busy digging away at the soft dirt when something caught my wary eye. A black forked tongue slithered out of the back corner of the transformer hole. I focused on the tiny movement and realized that the tongue was shooting from a snake head as big around as a kid's fist. I jumped to my feet and started shoveling rock into the hole as fast a badger digging a hole in the middle of a gravel road with a truck approaching. My boss was impressed with my sudden production.

A carpenter has ample opportunity to cross paths with snakes. In forty years I think I've seen them all. From digging into balls of hibernating snakes while excavating basement walls to finding snake skins in attics, I've come to the conclusion that there is no place a snake won't go.  I once witnessed the blood curdling scream of a well man as he streaked across a lawn pointing back at the well house yelling "snake!"  A few years ago I remodeled an old house in the hills near Callaway where rattlesnakes were notoriously abundant. One day I noticed something sticking out from some clothes on the porch floor. It was the unmistakable rattle of a snake's tail. I stood back and watched for movement. After a while I concluded that it wasn't alive and moved the clothing back with a stick, relieved that it was only the rattle with no snake attached.