I've Come For the Rattlesnakes
Ideas appear from everywhere once you're looking
I crouch.
My bicycle is tossed in the shade of the large rock formation here on the edge of the Mojave Desert.
It’s more of a squat than a crouch and my eight year old arms are wrapped around my legs and I lean into the shade. I’m trying to be still but I rock from foot to foot. My fingers are twitching a little and I have a couple of large burlap bags at my feet.
I’ve been waiting here for awhile, next to this single lane asphalt road.
“This is a stupid idea,” I say out loud to no one.
I answer myself. Not out loud but quietly inside my head.
“Shut up.”
“How come? No one can hear us out here.”
“Cause we’re waiting. We don’t talk when we wait. And stop squirming. Stop thinking about squirming.”
“How long we gonna have to wait?”
“As long as it takes."
“Always as long as it takes.”
I smile. I settle. I go still.
The sun is dropping and I begin to hear sounds of life in the desert. Squeaks of Kangaroo rats emerging from their burrows. Gila Monsters dragging their plump, knobby, red and black bodies from underneath rocks, across the sand, looking for prey for their poisonous bites.
Coyotes begin to howl. Wretched cries. Still I sit.
Now I can hear the snakes, dozens of them, hissing and flicking their tongues, sliding across the desert floor. They crawl out of the pit wedged between the boulders. Western diamondback and Sidewinder rattlers, fat on lizards, slither and slide to the road, searching for the remnants of heat on the asphalt.
If I’m are lucky I’ll find some California King snakes or Rosy Boas. These I’ll will pick up with bare hands and put them into bags.
Sell them to pet shops.
They’ll pay me up to $5 a snake.
Nice money for a kid without any.
But rattlers are the real payoff.
The rattlers are squirming and writhing on the road.
“Careful. Let them settle first,” I say.
“Sure, I know what I’m doing.”
“Mom’ll be pissed if I bring you back all perforated with rattlesnake bites.”
I use a forked tree limb I’ve brought to pin their heads down. Once its pinned, I just lean over and pick ‘em up and put it into a bag. The rattlers are fine together and I pick up five and pop them into the burlap bag.
“Look. It’s a Green Mohave. That’s good luck.”
“And dangerous. Their poison is about ten times more potent.”
“But worth a lot at the BioLab,” I say.
It’s big for a green rattler, maybe four foot long with three inches of rattle on its tail. It’s dull, green-gray diamond patterned back is perfect camouflage in the scrub-covered desert. It flicks its tongue at me and coils up, s-shaped, head raised, ready to strike.
It is shaking its rattle and telling me to back the fuck up.
Now.
It’s energy is boundless and eternal and I can feel it scorching my skin as it spits it tongue at me.
I stand still.
Slowly the snake settles. We’re just part of the desert now. I move slowly and pin the snake with my stick.
I reach down and pick it up.
It writhes and hisses and rattles in my grasp, coiling its body around my forearm, squeezing and constricting, mouth open wide, fangs dripping venom. I’m laughing and dancing holding the snake up to the sky.
“Look at this thing. Its huge.”
I put him in his own bag and tie a knot around the top.
I tie the bags together and hang them around my neck, go get my bike, and peddle to the BioLab. A friend of my father’s is waiting. They use the snake’s venom to research, test, and create anti-venom medicines. Sometimes the snakes will be traded between labs for other types of venomous snakes or reptiles or given to zoos.
I got $20 for the Green Mohave.
My father’s friend had been over to our house and as they say outside drinking Olympia beer he’d mentioned they didn’t have enough snakes for the lab.
Demand for anti-venom was up.
Well, I know where to find snakes. And a business was born.
Just a matter of overcoming my fear.
Think About It…
The more scared we are of something, of work, or a calling, the more we need to pursue it. There’s magic in the fear if we push through. Snakes were not my calling but overcoming fears would point me in the right direction.
Fear, resistance, rationalization.
Just hurdles.
Overcome.
Do It…
LeBron James broke Kareem Abdul Jabber’s life time scoring record this week. Kareem wrote about his and others reaction to the event. It’s must reading for everyone whether you are a sports fan or not.
It’s thoughtful. It’s reasoned.
Just like Kareem.
I’ll also be watching Bill Russell: Legend on Netflix.
The best way to learn about history is through the lives of our fellow humans…
Ciao.