We took our small kids to visit John’s sister and brother-in-law in California while John’s parents were visiting them. We could see half John’s family in one visit, and Mary and John could see their youngest grandchildren. Meg and Steve were in the planning stages for building, and we all went to see the new house site.
After driving up the long, steep driveway from the main road far below we crested the top, coming into a weird grassy Martian landscape. John and I had never seen anything like it. We were fascinated. It was in a ring of ancient volcanoes, with the house site near the top of one of the seven or so hills. Looking from their hilltop across the valley to a neighboring volcano, you could see where a long ago explosion had removed a large part of the hill, leaving a hollowed out face. The blasted away bits were scattered all over the hill we stood on. Ragged, pockmarked, reddish-brown boulders the size of jumbo beach balls were scattered about in the long grass. The summers there are so hot and so dry for so long that although grass grows with the winter rains, it dries off to a bleached out yellow for much of the year.
Things were pretty dry when we visited. We’d purposely brought our farm boots though, as they had warned us about the snakes. Rattlesnakes are common in those hills, finding the open grassy terrain with the volcanic boulders scattered everywhere much to their liking.
John’s sister, Meg, said she intended to keep some goats. John and I had unhappily kept goats in the past, and still had a flock of sheep on our small Washington acreage at the time. We tried to imagine how she might keep goats in that dry place, but couldn’t see it. Part of her thinking was they would mow the grass around the boulders, and either discourage the rattlesnakes, or at least make them easier to see. If that was the plan we didn’t think it would work, as goats aren’t really grazers, but you don’t want to rain on some else’s parade.
None of us had any experience with rattlesnakes, so naturally we talked of them a lot. John and I got to chatting with Meg and Steve’s builder and he happily got to telling us his snake stories. His dog had been bitten more than once, and one of those times had required several days at the vet clinic, and the dog now had a permanently misshapen head, but otherwise seemed okay. I asked him how he normally coped with snakes and he shrugged, “I shoot ’em.” With any luck, his dog would alert him to a new snake without being bitten, and he’d take care of it.
And he told us about taking a newly killed snake, which must still have been in reasonable condition, and putting it in his big chest freezer, posed in a natural coiled position as though it were about to strike. When the Schwan’s ice cream man came to make his regular delivery he would go directly into the garage to leave their order in the freezer. The builder smiled. It had worked just fine.
Meg commented later that she’d never seen the builder talk so much and wondered what we’d done. But it was easy. In a landscape with dangerous animals, be they bears, alligators, or snakes, people have stories. All you have to do is ask, and listen. Stories will roll.
Image: Alan Levine from Strawberry, United States, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons ; https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caution,_rattlesnakes_(sign).jpg