I was very young when I encountered my first. You never forget your first, or so they say! We were walking along a popular path just outside my hometown called the “Sailor’s Walk” with friends of ours. It’s a lovely country stroll that, conveniently, ends up at a rather delicious pub. My friend Lizzie’s dad picked up a small you-know-what and showed it to us. I certainly screamed very loudly and was so terrified I could not walk past it, so he put it in a Swan Matches box and likely safely delivered it someplace else when we were further along and no one was looking. The evidence of all this can still be found in a notebook where I wrote and illustrated the documentary of this in a story called “The Danger Walk.” That was when it began.
Lizzie and I later went on a vacation to the island of Crete, where it was just lovely to lie on the beach in the sun by the turquoise waters of the Mediterranean. In those days, I do believe we put olive oil on our skin to help with the tanning process. I digress. All of a sudden, someone was rubbing sandpaper over my tummy. I screamed and leaped to my feet, still hollering. A you-know-what had just traveled across my stomach, I am not kidding you. After the ruckus I made, it quickly left the scene, and Lizzie and I never lay near the long grass on the beach ever again.
If you have not guessed by now, I am a snake-phobic, which is not great if you are living in the prairie hills of California — home to many species of what we will call “Slitherers,” including the revolting Rattle Snake, which terrifies the bejeebers out of me. My old cat Bone had certainly met a rattler or two in his time, since he received at least two face bites that we know of, but he had no issue with them. Husband went looking for a rattler once that had slithered off the driveway into the bushes. I ran inside the house and locked all the windows and doors. Yeah, that kind of phobic. Thank goodness he never actually found the wretched thing.
Husband got used to welcoming, in the spring, his friend Leroy and later La-Roy, you know the “good” snakes, the King snakes that we are supposed to make a home for in order to keep the toxic ones away. I still can’t abide them, sorry. One year we didn’t see the pair at all, to my certain relief. The next year, husband comes running in the house, holding a black and white wriggly thing in his hand… “Look! La-Roy is back, La-Roy is back!” HE WAS IN MY HOUSE WITH A SNAKE, THE VERY THING THAT I CANNOT STAND!
“Get out of my blank-blank house with that thing!” I yelled very loudly in a very mean voice. He does understand that I am phobic, I think he just forgets sometimes.
We keep the feline population levels up at Solace, so that our levels of Slitherers are down, or, hopefully, non-detectible to my eye. Our cats do a mostly marvelous job of keeping them at bay and consequently destroying the vermin food chain at our place, so that the pesky snakes stay at the neighbors’ houses and not ours. Note the “mostly”….
We have had a bit of an issue (understatement) with rats in our attic of late. I believe this has been going on for a bit, because by the time we could hear the little rascals scampering around over our heads and having a good old time up there, several litters had likely been produced. Not to blame the husband for this, but it’s easy to do, because he used to be all things house and, therefore, it would be his responsibility. Another thing that failed to be completed by the onsite building supervisor is that holes that appeared in our garage sheetrock were not repaired. There were a couple of choice ones right there at ground level by the water heater. All a rat or mouse had to do was enter the holes and find their way up to the attic for play time. They could happily eat all the chow that is around the place, when you have a whole menagerie you feed twice a day, and go back and forth to their home upstairs. Easy peasy.
When I returned home from a trip, things had swiftly deteriorated. It was like apartment living, where the upstairs unit likes to start their parties about 10 p.m. and go on hard into the night. “Call the Exterminator!” I ranted on to the onsite building supervisor. “Call the blank-blank Exterminator…” (“I’ve put bait up there,” he meekly responds with no sign of any positive results….) Finally, he is about as sick and tired as I am of the subject and calls in the Pros. The Exterminator visits every day with his traps and seems to catch a lot of those darn “long tails” (as they call them on the Isle of Man because they don’t use the R word), but still they could be heard rustling and scratching and running. Good heavens, we have an infestation!
One day I see The Exterminator rushing away from our house. “Snake in the attic!” Husband texts me, helpfully, and I respond with a series of very bad words. “Why is he leaving then if there is still a Slitherer in my attic?” I text, just a bit flustered. “Oh, he has to figure out how to trap it…”
“What? So I have to go to sleep with a snake above my head?” For a snake-phobic, that is an extremely grim thought, near impossible. I checked all the holes around the ceilings of my house and concluded that, if it was a slim slitherer, it might still be able to squeeze through the gap in our interior sprinkler head opening IN MY BATHROOM. Good grief. I forced my son-in-law to come over and investigate. (He brought his snake stick with him; he is not a fraidy cat, like some.) He went up there and found… NOTHING! I was losing it. “Oh, he’s probably snoozing in the insulation,” says SIL casually. I am going crazy at this point and make husband go up there later (probably not the best idea for someone who’s disabled, but he’s all I had at that point). HE FOUND NOTHING!
“It’s possible that it slithered out of the open gap through the stucco near the roof, where the birds lay every year,” he says, helpfully. Possible, hmm. S-I-L came over the next day and went up again, when the attic was warmer this time, likely to encourage some snake-basking in the attic. Again, nada. So here we are. This snake-phobic is forced to reside with a “possible” snake above her head for the indefinite future.
And to think that all this drama started many decades ago when I encountered a baby adder on a grassy path in the U.K. Some things go very deep, you know.
Soledad columnist Lucy Jensen may be reached at lu*************@***il.com.
