It was early in the afternoon on a beautiful, blue sky, June day. Being a dutiful son, I was out, standing on the driveway, having a long, sweet phone call with my mom, and catching up on family, travels, and the latest COVID tidbits.
I watched as my daughter Andi walked briskly out of the house, down the sidewalk, and stood in front of me, obviously intent on interrupting my call. I was slightly irritated, but I’ve learned that the women in my house are not to be trifled with. I told my mom I loved her, but I had to go and would call her back later that afternoon. As soon as I hung up, I gave my daughter the stink eye to let her know that interrupting my call like that was not ideal.
She cared not a bit.
“Ellie says she saw a snake in the dining room.”
“What?”
“Ellie says she saw a snake in the dining room. She heard something break, and when she investigated what it was, she saw a snake tail go under that old China cabinet. I was taking a nap when Ellie came and woke me up.” This last fact would explain the abrupt interruption of my call, along with the generally irritated tone my daughter used to relay this story. Interrupted naps are highly frowned upon in my house.
“Ok, let’s go see what we have,” I said as we walked back toward the house's front door. Maybe there was a snake, but my mind had already sized it up as one of the small brown grass snakes that inhabit our land.
Now the thing about us is that we live in what is essentially a nature preserve. The land we get to inhabit is rolling hills with mostly old-growth hardwoods, privet, blackberry brambles, and mountain laurel with two clear-water, year-round creeks flowing through it. There are deer, wild turkey, raccoons, otters, hawks, owls, and all manner of small mammals and reptiles like box turtles, king snakes, and the occasional copperhead, a dozen different species of frogs and toads, along with the aforementioned brown grass snakes. We have even had a momma bear bring her two cubs for a picnic lunch at the back of the property.
As an aside, I hate grass (the kind you mow). So, there are also never any pesticides or herbicides put into play on our land. All the various critters have the run of the land, same as us, and there is a remarkable diversity of birds and insects.
Back to the story at hand…my daughter Andi and I walked in through the front door and into the house. The front door had been propped open all morning so we could move furniture from the living areas down to the basement. I figured the little thing slithered in through that propped-open front door if there was a snake in the dining room. Coming in through the door and into the house was an honest mistake for a snake to make. I figured I would shuffle him into a little tipped-over trash can and relocate him outside.
No big deal.
While a snake making it inside one’s home might be considered a fluke and a stroke of bad luck, I knew my good luck was holding because one giant problem had already successfully been avoided. My bride was not home. A snake in her house with her to witness it was likely to result in years of therapy, several weeks of extreme jumpiness, and a weekend of deep unhappiness.
So, it would be three of us versus this unseen reptile…me, my eldest daughter Andi and my granddaughter Ellie.
The first order of business was to verify this serpent's actual presence and location. Ellie pointed out the piece of furniture under which it went. In its movement, it had knocked over and shattered a small crystal sculpture, a gift given to us many years ago by my bride’s brother and his wife. Because it was such a small piece, I gave no thought to the snake being anything other than small. I looked around the back edges of the China cabinet and could see nothing, so I got down on my hands and knees to take a gander underneath. Sure enough, a little reptilian tale was barely visible, hanging down underneath. I’d say it was maybe 2 or 3 inches and most definitely black. Ok, I thought, we have identified and located the suspect.
Knowing that our quarry was between the piece of furniture and the wall, we decided to think this situation through and gather any tools that might fit into our plan…the plan was to capture it and relocate it outside.
After much serious debate, we devised the coax-the-snake-into-the-garbage-can-on-its-side trick. But rather than just using an empty garbage can, we also put a bunched-up blanket in there to add a level of seclusion that the snake would find comforting. (Note to self: when using a blanket on a snake, don’t use a dog blanket. Snakes don’t like dogs or their blankets. And snakes can smell quite well, thank you very much.)
So Ellie was handed my cell phone and instructed to stand on a chair, and video record whatever happened over the course of the next five minutes. “Just stay on the chair, and you will stay out of trouble,” I advised her. Andi and I set up the trash-can-snake-removal-habitat and moved all the dining table chairs back. We then created a low barrier wall of boards and boxes in a crescent shape encompassing the China cabinet. Armed with two long sticks, we intended to coax the snake along the low barrier wall and into the dog-blanket-trash-can. I also brought in a flat garden hoe in case we needed heavier weaponry. (Another note to self — snakes can climb anything they want, so a low barrier wall for snakes needs to be about 6 feet high, not 2 feet high like we had constructed.)
With Ellie rolling video, it was time to move the China cabinet away from the wall so we could get our sticks in behind it and coax that little critter to its temporary home. It was a heavy hutch, so moving it slowly and gently was not easy. I feared that that snake would run for the hills when the hutch got moving. We pulled the cabinet about 4 inches from the wall, on the side closest to me. It was dark behind there, so I retrieved a flashlight, turned it on, and shined it to where the snake was hunkered down.
When the light beam hit the reptile, I was stunned.
This was not an 8-inch grass snake, this was a fully grown black rat snake (Pantherophis obsoletus) in the 5-foot to 6-foot range. Something I learned about big snakes…they are not perfectly round. They are squared across their back, resulting in fully developed musculature (longissimus dorsi for you Latin speakers out there). I was completely flummoxed and stunned. This was not going to be a little wiggler to coax into a box, this was going to be a serpent that was more than an even match for the three of us. The look on my face informed my daughter Andi that things just took a more challenging turn. Or it could have been that I dropped a loud and unfiltered F-bomb. I apologized to Ellie, but the tension in the room was ratcheted up tenfold.
We stayed in our fighting positions but had to re-evaluate our plan's merits and, more importantly, put on our war faces.
While Ellie continued to roll video from her perch 12 inches off the floor, Andi and I slowly started to work the sticks in, around, and behind the snake. It only took a couple of gentle pokes to put that snake into fight-or-flight mode. Its body tensed, its neck flared and it’s tongue was doing the serpent tongue dance.
At this point, we are talking to each other, giving suggestions, predictions on movement, reminders of where the trash can was, and how best to get the snake in there. In actuality, the trash-can-on-its-side strategy had genuine merit. The snake moved to where we were guiding it and got right up to the lip of the trash can, where the dog blanket spilled out, offering a safe refuge away from these pokey stick people. At that point, the snake stopped abruptly, tongue dancing up to the blanket. Three or four flicks of the tongue were all that snake needed to decide a dark, cloth-filled hole that smelled completely of dog was no place to take refuge. It was time to flee.
When it put on its running shoes, pandemonium broke out. When frightened, a black rat snake can move between 8 and 10 feet per second. It slithered up and over that 2-foot-high barrier like a runner going over a track hurdle. With the wall successfully breached, it was now under the dining room table with its four legs, along with the 5 or 6 chairs, each sporting four legs. The total furniture leg count was somewhere in the two-dozen range, which made it a veritable dry mangrove swamp of vertical wood and a place impossible to work a stick into to impede a snake’s progress. At this point, it is moving full speed. The main and likely destination for it was our master-on-the-main bedroom with its folded laundry, walk-in closet, bed with stuff jammed underneath it, and an additional 5 or 6 pieces of furniture. The bedroom layout for snake removal would be an order of magnitude more difficult than the relatively spacious and uncluttered dining room. If it made it into the bedroom, there would be no peace in that house for months, regardless of the outcome.
I was down to my last choice and weapon…the hoe. As the snake bolted across the floor, headed towards where we were supposed to dream sweet dreams, I pinned its neck to the floor with the flat blade of the hoe.
Afterward, we were completely bummed that things worked out as they did. A black rat snake is a wonderful and beautiful snake and beneficial on several levels. Everything would have worked out well if we had a $40 snake tong. If you have periodic encounters with snakes, snake tongs are a good investment. As it was, I had to end its life. I hated that then, and I hate it now. No one in my family was ok with that ending. But I know this for certain, the sadness that came from ending the life of that beautiful critter was completely preferable to the long list of bad emotions that would have come from that snake getting into the bedroom.
Lessons learned:
- don’t leave doors open on spring or summer days.
- snakes can smell very well
- snakes can climb very well
- snakes are really fast in general...and even faster in your house.
- if you live in the country, get a pair of snake tongs
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