The Pre-Snake Years

Like many people, I grew up with a fear of snakes. It was nothing personal against the snakes, really, it was just a simple case of not really knowing about them or understanding them.

I was lucky in knowing that not all snakes were dangerous and that some were even beneficial, but they still gave me that creepy feeling up and down my spine. This may have been fostered, in part, by my mother's take on snakes: "If it doesn't rattle, it's a copperhead." The only exceptions to that rule were black rat snakes, one of which lived in the ceiling of the house I grew up in.

It was a fairly old house and the room my sister and I slept in had a hole in the drywall ceiling that led up into the loft area beneath the rafters. This wasn't anything so grand as an attic, just a space between the ceiling and the rafters. One morning, my sister and I woke up to find the shed skin of what seemed to us to be a very large snake lying across our blankets.

This little discovery bothered me quite a lot. But both my parents assured me that the skin had fallen out of the ceiling and the snake was harmless and only ate mice and rats.

My father's opinion of snakes was a lot more forgiving. In fact, he was fairly well fascinated with them. There were several instances of him bringing home wild-caught snakes. The most notable of which was a rattlesnake he'd found near the entrance of the mine where he worked. He'd built a wire-mesh cage for it and brought it home.

That little adventure brought about the only "it or me" argument I ever heard my parents have. My dad chose wisely and I rode with him to an old cemetary near our house to release the rattler.

Maybe it's his genes showing through in my new fascination with herps.

In high school, I had a biology teacher, Mr. Byrd, who was a well-known herpophile, keeping some snakes and a pacman frog in the biology lab at the school. A well-remembered pet peeve of his was the number of people who killed perfectly harmless and very beneficial corn snakes because they couldn't tell the difference between them an the venomous copperheads common in the area.

 In 2005, my partner and I took a trip to visit friends in Vancouver, BC. That was really the beginning of my new fascination.