Chapter 15

Snakes in the Grass, Birds in the Closet

The sun disappears behind the hill

The bullfrog drowns the whip-poor-will

The stars stretch out like a coup de ville

Let’s take a ride

“Tire Swing Time Machine”

Life around Starmount was nothing if not wild. There was rarely a day that we didn’t come across some make and model of serpent or walk in the winged shadow of a great blue heron or osprey. The ground slithered, and the sky sang. We loved both birds and snakes, but the snakes held our attention unlike anything else.

Northern Florida was a prime terrarium for the more cold-blooded creatures, and our encounters sometimes happened close to home.

I was nailing up boards on The Fort with Jim when we heard a woman’s terrified shriek. Now granted, we were all of ten, so we didn’t have much room to judge anyone else’s high-pitched vocalizations, but we did know this scream was out of the ordinary.

It was coming from Clay’s backyard, so we hopped Jim’s fence and ran through my backyard, arriving just in time to see the aftermath of a four-to-five-foot oak snake falling out of a large, yes, oak tree. After abruptly leaving its high perch, it had come to a sudden stop upon the head of the Hudson’s housekeeper. She had been out back cleaning off her mop when the serpent took a good fifteen-foot nosedive, landing with freakish accuracy atop her head. Hence, the screaming.

Torn between our natural inclinations to laugh at someone else getting the crap scared out of them and gawk open-mouthed at the sight of this gray-and-black snake quickly making its way back toward the base of the tree, we did a little bit of both, and neither very gracefully or much appreciated by the housekeeper.

By the time the snake reached the tree trunk and had begun its ascent, Clay’s mother had joined the chaos. Wearing a robe, smoking a long cigarette, and holding a German Luger pistol, she walked up to within a few feet of the tree, steadied her stance, and took aim at the serpent with an all-too-eerie mastery. The other parents began to gather, alerted by the housekeeper, still screaming and ruffling her hair, and Mrs. Hudson’s Dirty Harry-like declarations of, “Make my day, you slimy son-of-a-bitch.”

It was a toss-up as to which was louder: the repeated sharp cracks of that Luger going off or my mother yelling, “Oh God, Ruth has her gun out!” Both sounds, combined with the housekeeper’s ongoing screams, served as the soundtrack to the epic sight of snake parts flying in all directions.

In the end, Ruth Hudson’s aim was true enough to kill the snake, freak out the parents, and utterly thrill us kids.

Even at our young age, my friends and I had already embraced an earnest wilderness ethic and had learned to enjoy snakes without killing them (mostly). But the combination of a German Luger firing, the housekeeper screaming at the top of her lungs, and the raining down of snake guts made that event overwhelmingly cool. That moment immediately became a fixture of Starmount lore.

As if our personal adventures were not enough to fill our summer hours with all manner of things dangerous, several of us enrolled in a summer camp officially called the Helen Griffin Nature Camp. The name was too long for us to master, so we just cut to the chase and called it Snake School. Jim Stevenson, a Leon County High School biology teacher, ran the camp. He was the son of Henry Stevenson, a Florida State University professor and possibly the most famous Florida ornithologist. We were in expert hands.

Every day for two weeks, from about eight in the morning to five in the evening, we learned all there was to know about northern Florida’s snakes and birds. It may seem a bit redundant for our parents to pay money for us to tramp through the woods catching snakes, but there was a method to their madness. They knew that we would be catching snakes either way, so I guess sending us off to camp would at least put a stop to our unappreciated habit of bringing our reptilian captives home, like a new puppy. Plus, everyone trusted Jim Stevenson. And maybe, they thought, learning from an expert might make snake catching safer.

The Snake School curriculum divided our time between Stevenson’s house and field trips through the tall grasses, creeks, swamps, and woods around the area. On alternating days, or when the weather was bad, we spent our time in Stevenson’s animal-filled house, studying birds, turtles, frogs, and, of course, snakes. His house was a medium-sized place, with several interesting rooms, most of which reflected an almost-fanatical allegiance to the field of biology, his beloved profession and passion.

Stevenson kept more than a few live reptiles in the house, though most, but not all, were of the nonpoisonous variety. There were the orange-and-rust-colored milk snakes and corn snakes, nasty-tempered water snakes, gray rat snakes (oak snakes), black rat snakes, and small green garter snakes. One of my favorites was the ultrafast shiny black racer snake.

On occasion, Stevenson would pull out a more serious-looking crate and carefully expose us to the venomous snakes with which we were already familiar from our backyards. Taking care to control our exposure to these snakes, he aimed to protect us from them by educating us about them.

He started with the more common copperhead. It was, as its name suggests, copper-colored with earth-toned markings, with the triangular head typical to most vipers, and was widely known to deliver a bite that could cause pain and tissue damage, but rarely death. By the end of the camp, we would see live rattlesnakes, cottonmouths, and even the elusive neurotoxic coral snake, all up close and personal.

Snakes filled Stevenson’s house, but there were even more turtles and native birds, most of them dead and mounted. Listening to his lectures was interesting, but poking at the eyes and pulling on the feathers of those stuffed, earthbound fliers was worth the price of admission alone. There were big black crows; barred owls; an anhinga, more commonly known as a water turkey; and various smaller birds, much less interesting than their larger counterparts.

Still, Stevenson made his lectures more than appealing. In a relaxed, academic style, he transported us with stories of these animals from birth to death. Through his words, we were able to see and understand the natural world around us. We saw the treetop nests filled with open-mouthed osprey chicks and the darting dive of the oil-skinned water turkeys wielding their long pointed beaks, plummeting into the water fast enough to catch and kill large fish. During Snake School, I took to heart the extraordinary power and allure of nature, and I began to imagine my place in it for years to come.

Though captivated by Stevenson’s stories and stuffed birds, his house-turned-classroom was not the same as the open field. Jim Maples and I loved being outside, which meant that our indoor attention spans would often unhinge from even the most captivating lecture; sometimes, even, from talks involving our favorite crated snakes and dead birds. Our inattention bordered on the rude and disruptive at times, and that meant only one thing: the closet. And not just any old closet. This closet was dark, hot, and smelled a lot like a dead buzzard, probably because there was an actual dead buzzard in there. At some point during Snake School, every camper had an opportunity to commune with the dead in that closet.

Our level of obnoxiousness defined the duration of our closeted prison sentence, but it never lasted longer than a few short minutes. Still, there is something unnerving about being in a small dark space with an ornithological corpse. The dead bird was smelly and cast an ominous shadow, even in the dark. But the bird being dead wasn’t what bothered us; it was the thought of it coming back to life that caught our attention.

“So, that bird’s dead, right?” I asked.

“Yep,” Jim said.

“And when it was alive, it ate dead things?” I asked.

“Yep,” Jim said.

Then I posed what I thought was the kicker. “So, do you think its ghost will eat us or eat its own dead body?”

The difference between being young and old is in how one might respond to that question. Jim was silent, but I knew he was giving it some serious thought, rather than rolling his eyes in the dark.

Halfway through our two-minute sentence in that dark space, our imagination-filled musings themselves seemed to come to life.

“Jim, I think it moved,” I said, my voice trembling with half-fear and half-hope.

“Yeah, I don’t think it’s dead...anymore,” he replied.

“What do we do now?” I asked.

“I don’t know, but whatever you do, don’t play dead. Maybe it will eat itself!”

We laughed.

Now that I’m older, the whole throw-you-in-the-closet-with-a-dead-buzzard when you’re being bad seems a little over-the-top, but we frankly never felt that way about the experience at the time. The closet and the buzzard were both scary and gross, but scary and gross were two things we held in high regard. Anyway, we were ten years old, and we were Sons of Starmount, so we were never permanently unnerved.

We eagerly looked forward to the days when Snake School convened outside in the field, where we got to actually hunt and catch snakes. Stomping through high weeds and low water was a significant step up from lectures and quality time with the closeted buzzard. On field trip days, we would all pile into Stevenson’s 1957 yellow Chevy school bus and head out into prime snake territory. Sometimes we were turned loose to upend, scrape off, and dig through whatever may be hiding the prey at hand. Most of the time though, we would follow along dutifully and anxiously in Stevenson’s footsteps. We tried our best to spot some slithering shadow, forked tongue, or curled-up striker before he did. Seeing a snake first was a rare but gratifying accomplishment, considering Stevenson’s eagle eye and well-tuned sixth sense for snakes.

One particular day in the field stood out from all the rest: the day Jim Stevenson was bitten by a snake right in front of us. It was about as thrilling a moment as anything a ten-year-old could experience. Granted, we had already experienced many of our own close brushes with the fangy death around Starmount. We had stepped over logs sheltering all kinds of snakes, dared one another to pick up copperheads and rattlers, and, on many occasions, even swam past the deadly cottonmouths that lived in Alligator Pond. We certainly felt the thrill of danger in those moments, but we never saw a significant bite until that day. And it wasn’t just any snake that bit Jim Stevenson on the leg—it was a cottonmouth.

I don’t remember if he was stepping over something or if he just brushed past the camouflaged viper when it lunged at him. He yelled out and leaped backward as the kids right next to him scattered like field mice. We were all used to jumping and running when sounds and shadows shot out toward us from darkened spaces but seeing Stevenson jump backward put that moment in a desperate light. He was not a jump backward kind of guy. We knew right away that something was wrong.

Stevenson had two assistants, and one of them loaded him up in a car and raced off to the hospital. He left his younger assistant, a teenager, to guide us out of the woods and back onto the bus. This kid was in over his head, both in his ability to wrangle wild ten-year-olds and, as we would soon find out, his ability to drive a school bus. Let’s put it this way: Stevenson weathered his snakebite far better than the gears and clutch on the old bus weathered the teenager’s attempts at shifting.

A graduation ceremony of sorts marked the end of Snake School that summer. We gathered in Stevenson’s backyard, and each of us gave a presentation on a particular type of snake. I talked about my favorite snake, the black racer. I was well-versed in the ins and outs of that snake and was able to communicate its feeding habits, skin-shedding schedule, and, of course, its namesake speed.

I held the snake as I made my presentation to Stevenson and the parents. The snake, unfortunately, was far less enamored with my act than the parents were and decided to take my presentation in a whole other direction. It simultaneously bit my left hand and shat all over my right hand. Thinking of that double-barreled attack now, I feel both freaked out and nauseous. At ten, however, gross is good, and shocking is funny. My mastery of the snake’s story and ability to deal with it biting me and attempting to turn itself inside out in my hands, all the while explaining its life and habits, made me feel a sense of competence well beyond my years.

What is it about being a kid that seems to hold our fear of snakes at bay? Or perhaps the question should be, what is it about getting older that brings that anxiety back to most of us tenfold? For a brief moment in time, my innocent courage, naive bravado, and blind luck all held sway over me equally. And like the rest of the Sons of Starmount in 1977, the wild held us as tightly as we held the wild.