Herping Ain’t Easy

For, Jason.

When he left the house, he really wasn’t hoping on finding anything. Not anything substantial, at least. Nothing, of course that he could post on the reptile forums that he visited several times a day. It was still too cold for anything smart to be out. Reptiles are cold-blooded animals and their hibernation extends on beyond Winter and into the early months of Spring and then out onto the late months of Fall.
Again though, today he really wasn’t looking for anything special. He just needed to be out of the house. He herped all year long, simply because he enjoyed the act of it. Walking through the brush just off the freeway, flipping boards and poking sticks into bushes, it all felt right. He enjoyed the way the brush would tremble and ring as though filled with tiny bells as he passed through the open space. The way field mice would scurry out underfoot and whole families of sparrows would blast off into the air when he passed by. Sometimes, something would catch his trained eye and it really was nothing that he could explain. Many times before he had tried to teach others how to watch for the snakes but like anything that requires mastery, there was something more to it than seeking out any singular, isolated detail. The search was more like a complicated algorithm than any list of specific things to be watched for.
“You have to sense it,” he would hopelessly try to explain. “Don’t look for them. You have to look for where they should be,” he challenged. It was a sort of Zen approach to snake hunting and therefore, not at all surprisingly, the acquaintances that he tried to introduce to his hobby would quickly grow frustrated after mistaking their hundredth or so stick for a rattler and a piece of dirty sandstone for a coral snake. And they would stare in awe at him, when he would inexplicably step into a patch of sage and reappear with a rosy boa hanging from his fingers and dangling down to his feet.
“How did you…,” they would ask.
But it was useless. He saw the serpents intuitively, the way a seasoned ref calls a traveling violation or a collector knows that a set of plates is worth more than the $1.25 price tag at a yard sale. And so, most often he went alone and to him, that was just as well. Or so he told himself.
On this day, though, it certainly was the truth. The night previous, his wife had announced that, “more than likely, I am leaving you,” after rising from the small dining room table that they always ate at and washing her plate at the sink. And although, the frankness of the statement and the confidence in her voice were somewhat of a shock, the message in no way surprised him. They had been having trouble for many months, possibly even a year, he thought to himself and now two years into their marriage it was clear that the cloud of magic that they had dated under was let loose and stretched thin across the ground growth like an albino Ribbon Viper.
His wife was on the comfortably shy side of thirty and worked at the state hospital as an emergency room nurse. She had shoulder length blonde hair and a small frame that was accentuated by the thin, cotton scrubs that hung off her razor blade shoulders and outlined her perky breasts so that they floated on her chest like a child’s water balloons.
They had met at a local pub that their friends frequented. He was attracted to the way her eyes moved around the room as if quietly triaging the patrons. She was drawn to the Western Diamond Rattlesnake tattoo that scrolled up his arm and disappeared into his short sleeve. He had gotten it less than a week earlier and it was still wrapped over with a clear tape that made it look all the more menacing.
His friends had called her over to from where she sat with her coworkers to, “take a look at his are,” and ensure that it was healing properly and her friends dared her to take them up on it. She saw it as a kind of challenge. She was never really the type to flirt or to put her self in the position that women her age call, “out there.”
Arriving at the young man’s purposed scar, she brushed her finger over the bold lines of the snake and mockingly diagnosed it.
“That’s going to leave a mark,” she said, pleased with herself for being so clever. So on the spot. The men around the table bought her another drink and pulled a chair for her up next to him. He was quiet but she was interested and in no time they were in a deep discussion about local eateries and the overall slutiness of one of her friends. After the others left, they stayed. She talked about college and how much she enjoyed the emergency room.
“It’s the pace,” she explained. “It never gets boring.”
He told her about his day job teaching history to privileged high schoolers in South Orange County. “I hate it,” he emphasized. “It’s the pace. Its always boring.” Before they left, they exchanged phone numbers and made a date for the weekend.
That night she imagined him as a misunderstood bad boy with a college degree. As a Pastor’s daughter, all of her life she had wanted to be with someone who frightened her and suddenly, here he was, all serpent to her Eve. Consequently, he really expected nothing of her. He thought that she was beautiful and nice and she made him feel warm like he was laid out on a black top road on a sunny day.
That Saturday, he took her to T.G.I. Fridays. He sipped at his beer while she finished off two then three Long Island Iced teas and did a shot of Jameson with the bartender. By the time they left, she was unable to give him directions back to her apartment so he took her home and she slept on his bed while he roamed around the kitchen before passing out on the couch. The next morning when she awoke, he was in the shower and when he stepped out wrapped only in a towel she anxiously, asked him, “Did we…, you know?”
Back then, he was unable to tell the subtle difference between a young woman’s enthusiasm and agitation, so he smiled weakly, turned his eyes towards the floor and lifted his eyebrows up into the ceiling. She took this as a definite yes and she spent the next few nights writhing silently in her bed, her fingers deep between her legs and her mind imagining him maniacally thrusting over her passed out frame.
But all of that was years ago and now, they had seen more of their twenties, together, rather than apart. And as he hiked around the semi-arid plains of Southern California he could barely remember a time when he did not feel as though he had somehow disappointed her. It was a feeling that wasn’t connected to anything tangible. It was just… this knowing. Like the feeling one has of not being trusted when introduced to someone new. He wasn’t ever, at all sure just what she expected but when he rose from their bed each morning or as they unlocked the door coming home after a night out or most of all when he rolled off of her and rested on his back after they were done fucking, a strong sense of disappointment wafted up, well into the rafters of their two bedroom apartment.
All of this remained on his mind as he halfheartedly herped through the Orange County backcountry. That morning, he had told her he would be out until early evening and she said she was going out with friends and so he knew that he would not be missed until the next morning, at the very least. Over the last few weeks she had stayed out all night more than once. Her shift ran late, she explained or she had crashed at a coworker’s and once she had told him she had gotten into a deep conversation with her father and had talked through the night. Each time, he accepted it without question and this only seemed to make her more and more disappointed.
Last night, after telling him that she was, “most likely leaving,” she had unleashed a tirade on his passion for reptiles and brought back up the tattoo that now had faded and the skin on the snake appeared to be molting as his arms lost the sinewy tightness of its youth.
“You know,” she finished up. “ I only went out with you, hell, I only married you because of that fucking tattoo.”
Although it should have, this didn’t shock him at all. He remembered, in the early days how she stared at it while rubbing little circles into it with her thumb and often insisted that he apply the special tattoo cream each night and morning so that the vibrant colors would not fade.
“You see, I thought it was because you loved the idea of a snake,” she viciously attacked him. “Coiled up and ready to strike,” she said, through her teeth.
“I had no idea that you actually loved snakes,” and she laughed, cruelly and out loud. “Can you imagine that,” she asked, laughing again, her eyes starting to water.
“I married the only person in the world who has a snake tattoo because he actually fucking loves snakes!”
He waited until she was finished and hovering around him and walking circles through the living room and brushing at her eyes with the back of her sleeves.
“Why else would anyone get a snake tattoo,” he asked quiet and calm.
She went into their bedroom and slammed the door.
Unlike most days, today, he kept walking. He was determined to traverse further than he ever had and maybe when he got home he would have something to say on the bulletin boards. Something about the landscape beyond the usual hunting grounds or better yet, casually mention the area he ended at and wait for the thread to pepper him with questions about how far off the beaten path he had been. More than likely though, he thought to himself, the forum would at best completely ignore his post or worse scold him for traveling into protected grounds or private property. The members of the boards were brutal and it had taken him months to even be noticed and when he was it was for reporting on the “boards,” he was sure that he had discovered. That night, he had proudly reported to the community that he had stumbled upon an area that was littered with snakes beneath boards that seemed placed there for that very purpose. Much to his shock and the community’s ire, he was quickly informed that the boards were placed there for that very purpose and he spent the next several weeks fending off nasty e-mails and derogatory threads about the “newb”. Like the snakes they prized, the online herpetology community, he quickly discovered, was actually quite venomous.
He walked for hours, well until the sun was beginning to prepare its descent into the nearby but unseen ocean. At some point he made the decision to stay out in the wilderness all night. It was illegal, be sure but he knew that none of the rangers would be coming this far out and he had his backpack and a few energy bars and even if they did discover him, he could feign ignorance and claim to have just gotten lost. The moon was full and so the light would really never leave and best of all the weather was warm for being still so early in the Spring. When he came to a tiny stream, he decided that he would spend the night beside it and fall asleep to the sound of the water, lazily traversing the valley floor.
That night, while he lay beneath the stars, she was upstairs as she had been on many nights during the previous weeks, vigorously fucking the downstairs neighbor. They had met when she was coming home after a particularly stressful shift. He had asked her to carry a basket of strawberries up to his place because his hands were full with other various types of produce. She immediately noticed his tattooed arms and coyly agreed. When they arrived at the apartment, he complained of the heat and immediately pulled off his shirt. He lit up a cigarette that miraculously appeared between his fingers and asked her if she was a doctor.
“No,” she replied chuckling, “just a lowly nurse.” “But I can fix you up if you get in a bind,” she added suggestively.
“That’s hot,” he had replied.
She was immediately turned on at the sight of the boy’s tattooed chest that was covered with zombies, Bela Lugosi’s “Dracula”, what appeared to be Snow White’s castle being overran by werewolves and a Spaceship that she was sure had been off from a still from, “Plan 9 from Outer Space.”
“Big fan of Ed Wood,” she asked cautiously.
“Who’s that,” he replied, causally ashing his cigarette onto the carpet in the middle of his living room and turning up the music on his 1970’s era hi-fi. Thirty minutes later, his dick was halfway down her throat while he air-guitared the solo to, Metallica’s “Enter Sandman.”
The next day the cuckolded, hobbyist herper awoke to a sun that seemed to be melting the skin off his face. He had the feeling of a hangover and his nose and head were so full of dust and dirt that he could barely breathe.
He dragged himself blindly over to the trickle of water in the stream and begin to splash it onto his face. He was embarrassed by his overestimating his bodies response to the great outdoors and he knew that he would have to immediately head home and clean up or within twenty four hours, he was sure to be sick. Although he loved the great outdoors, nature always just had a way of chewing him up and spitting him out.
As he pathetically knelt over the water, he began to sob into his hands. “Fuck life,” he thought. He cried for a few more minutes and then it happened. He heard the water come to life and he saw something cut through the small stream, parting its shallow waters. Immediately, he sensed a long tubular shape out of the corner of his eye. The crickets stopped while his brain resonated the angles of a delta shaped head and he could literally feel a flash of brown pulse through his body. He pushed off of the rocks he was kneeling on and rolled back onto his ass. He had been startled plenty of times by a noise or a shape but something about this, was altogether different. Something about the way that the flash had lingered, much longer than he had ever noticed.
See the thing, he loved about herping, was that you really never knew what you were going to get. He guessed it was the same reason his wife loved her job. You never knew anything about anything, right up until the moment that you actually held it in your hands. The beasts were so fast in proportion to their size that any momentary contact passed in the blink of an eye and left no lingering trace in the brain. But this flash was different. Whatever this was, it had retained a color, a pattern, a length in his mind and these things combined, immediately told him that he had just been brushed by something big. Not something big in that it was rare or unique. Not something that would wow the boards because of its scarcity. It wasn’t like a sharp-tailed or a two-headed gopher. No. This was something big, in that it was huge. Maybe, monstrous even. Whatever it was, he knew that the thing that had just rifled by was fucking enormous.
His brain immediately ran through the usual suspects: Corns, Gophers, Corals, Kings, Rattlers, Leaf-nosed, Shovel-nosed, Boas, Nightsnakes but immediately, he realized that nothing indigenous that he could think of would fit into the category of size that he had just encountered. Not anything at all and his mind even went as far to make a quick, perfunctory run through the larger mammals that populated the area. Moles, rabbits, raccoons, possums, coyotes, deer, even mountain lions but none of these would have had the length and this thing had been underwater and so that too, immediately reduced the possibilities of species that he was locally familiar with to absolute zero.
In all of this, however, he had studied enough and read enough herp books and spent enough time at local reptile houses and on the aforementioned bulletin boards, that by the time all of these realizations lodged in his brain, within another instant he knew what he had just encountered and for the first time since he had started these herping trips as a teenager, he was instantly beyond terrified.
Still though, his analytic approach wouldn’t allow him to just erase the situation from his mind and so he ran through the checklist again, slowly this time. Recalling the size, shape, color and speed he recognized that all of them were right with what he was imagining but it’s location was more than wrong. Wrong in like several continents away wrong. Urban legend wrong and in the few moments that his mind tumbled and tripped over these facts, the movement in the water stopped and like it or not now, he knew, right then and there that he was within a ten-foot radius of a Burmese Python.
Before rising to his feet, he repeated a quick inventory of what he knew about the animal lurking in the immediate vicinity and since it was aware of his presence and clearly not retreating, he could only now assume was, in fact, hunting him.
Largest snake in the world… Check.
Growing up to 18 feet and weighing as much as 500 pounds…Check.
Fortunately, relatively slow at roughly one mile an hour on land…Check, but,
Capable of easily extending 2/3 of their body length in a single strike…Check
Thankfully, not venomous… Check, but,
Still deadly in that they constrict their prey, which could imaginably be much worse than being poisoned… Check.
(In fact, coincidentally, in elementary school, any time the subject of the worst way to die would come up at the lunch tables, he would always stump his peers by waiting until everyone had stated the obvious and announce, strangulation by a Burmese Python… Check.)
With this in mind, he rose to his feet and without moving, he darted his eyes in a circle around the patch of land at his feet. The snake, now completely visible in the thinned out brush was easily fourteen feet long and didn’t seem to be even paying attention to him. He reasoned that outside of its natural habitat, meals had probably been somewhat tough to come by and while the snake had most likely been inclined to hibernate, it must have had to come out early to find food. Suddenly, the terror that had seized him just moments earlier fell away and now, all he could think about was how he was going to get this beast home and about what all of the assholes on the boards would say about this.
The young man knew that when he made a move the snake would be forced to retreat but with it confined to a rectilinear motion, that is, since it could only move by lifting the scales off its belly, it could only move away from him in a straight line. It would take all the strength he had and certainly more courage then he could imagine but if he could get its tail up over his head, he could pretty much immobilize it. It was a trick that had always worked like a charm with everything that he often encountered. Which was, even he recognized, to be fair, roughly 80% smaller than this fucking monster. There was, of course a much less heroic scenario. If it did manage to turn on him and say get his legs wrapped up or even worse, his arms, and take him to the pebble strewn floor, then death would come in roughly two to three seconds. Often it was not the flow of blood that the snakes nearly impossible pressure stopped but sometimes, the actual beating of the heart itself. For whatever reason though, this outcome was not what disturbed him the most. The absolute worse case scenario was if the snake did manage to get the better of him, someone his size and weight would require almost all of the snakes energy to consume and digest, immobilizing it for three or four days. By nightfall, the word would be out that he was missing and undoubtedly a search conducted and even from the air the snake would be easily seen and when they caught it, killed it, drove it to the nearest University and some asshole PhD, cut into it, there he would be. Laid out for all to see. There would be a phone call, a visit from his wife to identify the body and he could see her now, disappointingly looking over the half digested remains of her once decent husband. For the second time, in as many days, defeated by the thing he loved the most.
And the forums. That would even be worse. They would have a field day with him. The jokes would go on for years.
Meanwhile, less than twenty miles away, his wife was nowhere even close to thinking about him. She was on her fourth orgasm of the morning, her ass in the air and her head in the pillow and her muffled cries of, “pull my hair, smack my ass,” made the neighbors shut their windows and shake their heads. The truth of the matter was that she didn’t mind her husband’s passion for snakes nearly as much as she minded his gentleness with the handling of them and subsequently, the delicateness with which he touched her. Once, when a rock had inadvertently tipped over and crushed a snake that he and a fellow herper, had been trying to squeeze out of its lair, he had come home teary eyed and wrote a two page long apology to everyone on the forum. Needless to say, after that, she was never able to orgasm with him again.
In the blink of an eye, he made his move and leapt for the tail of the python. It darted forward and he fell onto his knees and then his face, and with arms outstretched, he made a final grab. The middle of his fingers caught it just beneath its backside and he clamped down. For a moment he just lay there in complete shock. He had the snake, literally in his hands. His awe lasted only a split second and instantly he felt the muscles in its back swing around and the scales on its middle dig into the dirt to launch a strike. Without thinking he whiplashed the tail of the beast onto the ground and he expected its head to smash into the ground in an awesome recoil. Unfortunately, until right then, he had never fully grasped the sheer muscular mass of a fully-grown female Burmese Python and the snake caught itself, head-up in midair. The motion did however, give him just the time he needed to leap to his feet and in the next instant he had the back half of the snake off the ground and watched with terror as the snake violently albeit, uselessly, swung its massive head from side to side.
Immediately, he realized, this battle was now going to run non-stop for the next six hours. And again, that was the best-case scenario. His backpack, the water, everything that was not in his physical grasp would have to be abandoned. “One backwards step at a time,” he thought. “One foot behind the other.”
And with the snake’s thrashing strength, which he also knew would hold for much longer than his, it would be one step backwards and two steps forwards.
With that he closed his eyes and took the first step back towards the car, back towards the city, back towards the forum and back towards her.
An hour later he could no longer keep his hands over his head and he pulled them down in front of him. The snake now, had significantly more of its body on the ground and therefore could strike much further and turn on him and unless he stayed focus it could easily wrap its body around his legs. He was still out past his normal hunting grounds, so he had no real idea how far away he was from the car. He was however aware that this fight was going to take much longer than he expected.
He ached to stop, just for a moment and rest but like any experienced hiker he knew that his first pause, would officially start a cycle of pauses and from then on, his rests would come more and more often, until eventually, he was only moving a matter of feet before taking a break.
He checked his watch. It was a little after nine in the morning. He would have the sun for at least another ten hours and he was slowly accepting the fact that he was going to need every, single one of them. Up until then it had never occurred to him to kill the snake but now he just wanted to bash its head with something and make it stop fighting. He tried to imagine a way to knock it out but not kill it, like they do in the movies. When the good guy hits someone in the back of the head and they crumple like a melting iceberg. He’d seen it successfully executed enough on television procedural crime dramas to have a general idea of where to hit a person but he didn’t have a clue about knocking a snake out cold. “Fucking A,” he screamed, at the snake. This struggle was going to have to be straight up. Man versus beast.
He kept walking, turning his head around less often to see where he was going and trying to retain as much energy as he could. While he walked his mind thought back to his wife who was no doubt at home and probably somewhat concerned about him by now. He thought about the first time he knew that they were probably not meant to be together. It was during the first month of living in the apartment they shared and a day after they had returned from their honeymoon. A guy friend of hers had come over for dinner and to watch a movie. He was a bartender, downtown and throughout the meal he peppered the conversation with stories about all the girls he fucked and fights that he had gotten into while they had been away. The entire conversation seemed horribly inappropriate to him but she was completely enthralled. She doted on the guy, serving him more and more drinks and at one point even massaging his shoulders, while he ended every one of his stories with, “and then I said,” and the dolt, quoted some phrase that no doubt he had heard said in an action film starring an African American comedian.
When he rose to fetch his third soda, she chided him and said to her now tipsy, male friend, “he can’t hold his liquor but he keeps a great house,” and the both of them just about died laughing. At some point the guy looked over at him with some sympathy and pity and he felt lower than he ever had. It was like being in junior high school and he was the kid with supermarket shoes and a dirty face. That night, when he finally went off to bed, he fell asleep to her giggling and the fucker asking if he could take a shower.
He wished his wife could see him now. He wanted her to see him in an epic battle with a truly formidable foe. He thought that maybe she would see through the conservative polo shirts and topsiders and see him as a rebel. A regular bad ass. But he also knew that it wouldn’t really matter, not to her at least and he wondered out loud, if there were any women on the Orange County Herpetology Forum.
The sun was now straight overhead and somehow he was covered in dirt and dust. It looked like he had been rolling around on the valley floor instead of on his feet all day. The snake was still fighting just as hard as he had when he first grabbed its tail and for the first time, he thought that he might have to let it go. The heat was unbearable, his mouth was as dry as the dirt that covered him and now, his arms felt like solid stone. He turned around for the first time in almost fifteen minutes and with horror saw the chain link fence that he forgot he had scaled the day before.
“Jesus Christ,’ he yelled out at the sky. Immediately, he felt a little bad for saying it. He was an atheist but most of the time he tried to respect the faith of others and substitute the word with a choice euphemism like, “jeezy creezy,” or “Geez louise.” The fence was trouble for two reasons. One, the obvious difficulty of climbing over it while holding a struggling fourteen foot Burmese Python. But even more disturbing, was that this was the first definite landmark that he had come to and he realized with great sadness that he was still two hours away from the car. That is, assuming that he was not carrying the aforementioned Python. He was almost in tears but it thrilled him a little to be able to use the term, “the aforementioned Python,” even to himself.
The fence was five feet high and in perfect condition. No holes or breaks. The top had these little twisted parts of wire that would cut into him if he wasn’t careful and was sure to cut the hell out the snake. As he stood there he thought about last night. Early in the conversation, she had told him, that he never fought for anything. That she hated him for not even being willing to fight for her.
“There’s been plenty of fighting,” he had told her, sadly. “And it doesn’t seem to have accomplished anything.”
He thought about her leaving. Actually, he thought about letting her go and suddenly he had an idea. It seemed obvious now but like any great discovery, he had only come to it out of sheer necessity. What if he lifted up the fence just enough to let the snake slither through and then let it go? Could he hop the fence and catch it before it got away? He was out of options so he slowly started climbing hand over hand up the snake’s long body and towards it’s head. He tried to keep the body above him, in the air so that it couldn’t get a hold on the ground and after ten minutes of fight he had his hands around it’s huge neck. Its head was the size of a shovel and it opened and snapped its mouth struggling to twist back and take a chunk out of his arm. With his back up against the fence he lifted the bottom of it and turned the snakes head and under it. He let go and just like he had envisioned it, the Python made a thrust forward and darted under the fence.
He quickly hopped over the fence and ran towards the snake that was slowly lumbering away. Right then, he decided to not pick it back up, but instead to try to herd it towards the car. It kept him running back and forth, constantly from one side of the snake to the other, but the idea worked perfectly and as the sun begin to drop towards the hills, he saw the car.
When he was a hundred or so feet from the car, he made another lunge for it and found that the snake had completely given up. By then, it was practically tame. He gently picked it up, feeling bad for it for the first time and he stopped for a few minutes and considered letting it go, after all, he realized, he really had no idea what to do with it when he got it home. But just like he knew he would all along, he opened the trunk of the car and softly laid it down and was careful to not slam the top shut so that he didn’t startle it more than he had to.
He slept for an hour in the car and then pulled his ’84 Camry back onto the 405 and headed home. When he pulled into his assigned space at their complex he realized that there had never really been a question of what to do with the monster and he fished through the glove box for the spare pocket-knife that he kept inside of it. His father had given it to him on his wedding day. He opened the trunk and the snake barely even moved. He emptied out the plastic tub he kept his jack and spare tools in and softly laid the apathetic snake inside of it.
A few minutes later, he was cutting a small cross into the screen window that hung over his downstairs neighbor’s bed. The snake slid perfectly through the hole and he watched as it exited the bedroom and made its way down the hall and towards what he presumed was the kitchen.
Even a snake that size would probably never attack a full grown adult but he was sure it would give him the adulterer the scare of his life. And if later that night he happened to hear a ruckus, he knew that he was sure to go downstairs and see if he could assist.
“Although,” he said with just a hint of a smile and a shitload of honesty, “ if that guy has a dog or a cat, that thing is completely fucked.” And when he said it out loud, for the first time in a long, long while, it didn’t even occur to him to feel bad for using such strong language.