Long Time Leaving (45 page)

S
ome day, I have been telling myself for years, I am going to visit the annual rattlesnake roundup in “Whigham, Georgia. Probably there is some big event that you have always been meaning to attend, but somehow every year you see in the paper that, for instance, Swine Time in Climax, Georgia, or Mule Day in Calvary, Georgia, or the Okra Festival in Bells, Tennessee, has slipped past you again. That's how it's been for me and the “Whigham roundup. I even wrote a poem, nigh onto forty years ago (oh, man),
in the Atlanta Journal:

That was sour grapes. I just never got around to going down there. Life intervenes, you know how it is. Then my friend Vereen Bell, the English professor, who grew up not far from “Whigham in Thomasville, Georgia, mentioned that he had never been to the rattlesnake roundup either. He had, as a young man, escorted Miss Gum Spirits of Turpentine to a dance. But that wasn't hunting snakes.

If I had spent as much time talking to people about investments as I have about what to do if a rattlesnake bites you, I would be a rich man today. I haven't had all that much to invest, but I haven't ever been bit by a rattlesnake, either, and yet I have kept right abreast of current thinking on what to do when it happens.

As a Boy Scout I was taught to cut little X marks on the bite holes and
suck out the venom orally—as long as you didn't have any sores in your mouth—or with that little suction cup in your snakebite kit. It saddened me to throw that kit away. Eventually I gathered that the current thinking was, you weren't even supposed to suck out the venom, at all. End of an era.

But that didn't quench my interest in snakes. I had a boa constrictor around my neck once at a flea circus in Times Square, back in about 1961. Years later, I visited a snake and animal farm on a highway in Virginia just one day too late to watch the python eat his monthly piglet. I bet it was an awful sight. And I came so close. I couldn't wait around another twenty-nine days.

Timing is key. Vereen and I had in mind going to the rattlesnake roundup in Whigham last year, but we started looking into it too late. For eleven months, however, while to all the world he appeared to be focusing primarily on William Butler Yeats, Vereen was, in fact, bearing this year's roundup date in mind. That's what you have to do. At the New Year, he called the town hall of Whigham to ask about the roundup, and somebody there advised him that a Mr. James Cox was “most involved in the snake end of it.” I called Mr. Cox and he recommended his son, Joe Cox, but then Joe had to work, so it was his friend John Lodge who took us— Vereen and his wife, Jane, and me—out gathering diamondbacks on the day before the thirty-fourth annual roundup festivities.

John Lodge lives alone in his ancestral home—nice big old place, needs some work—with a cowbell on the front porch for a doorbell. But he didn't hear us ring it because he lives only in the back part of the house. We went around back there and found him. He has been rounding up rattlesnakes since he was a boy. In 1971, he caught the second biggest snake ever registered at the roundup, thirteen pounds four ounces, six feet long.

And, of course, you know how it is so often, one of the first things John told us was “This is a terrible day to hunt rattlesnakes.”

But we walked for four or five hours through stands of fifty-foot pines and through knee-high sawgrass, and although I can't claim to have rounded up a rattlesnake personally, I can tell you how to.

There had been torrential rains so that all the holes were full of water. “I've seen a hole full of water and there's a big puddle of water all around and the snake'll be sitting right at the top of that hole with his head just out of the water,” said John. “But they will go down into that water, too.”

Snakes hibernate in holes. That's why the roundup is held in January, when they're just beginning to stir but you know where they are. A snake
won't dig his own hole. He will either get down into a stump hole—where a tree has been blown over, uprooted—or into an abandoned rat hole, or a gopher hole.

Now let's get clear what we're talking about, when we talk about gophers, down South. We're not talking about those rodents that the University of Minnesota names its athletic teams after. We're talking about land turtles, tortoises. Why are they called gophers? Well, according to a Florida man quoted by Zora Neale Hurston in
Mules and Men,
one day God was making animals down by the water's edge, and he made a turtle out of mud “and throwed it in de water and it swum on off. Devil says, ‘Ah kin make one of those things.’ ” And God argued that he couldn't, and the Devil insisted, so God told him to go ahead and try it, and the Devil went off by himself and made something out of highland dirt and showed it to God, and God said that was no turtle, and the Devil said yes it was too, and finally God said, well, he would blow the breath of life into it but it was no turtle, and he inspired it and threw it into the water several times and it kept swimming back out, and God said, “See, Ah told you dat wasn't no turtle,” and the Devil said, “Well, anyhow it will go for one.”

Or you may prefer the dictionary version. The rodent gopher is of the genus
Ciberius,
whereas the land turtle is of the genus
Gopherus.
The Latin name comes from the eighteenth-century word for a land tortoise,
magopher,
of obscure origin. May have something to do with gopher wood, an unknown material that the Bible says was used in building Noah's ark, but we just don't know. Anyway, reptile gophers were gophers before rodent gophers were.

“We used to have a pet gopher,” John Lodge said. “Go stomp our feet and he'd come out of his hole and we'd feed him. 'Course I was just a little boy, but you'd stand on him and he'd rise up and walk with you.”

Rattlesnakes and gophers seem to cohabit all right. “Lot of times,” said John, “to get to the snake, you got to get past the gopher.”

Here's how you do it: you take a fifteen-foot length of black three-quarter-inch plastic pipe, and you stop up one end of it with a twelve-gauge shotgun shell (because it fits exactly), and you make two holes in the pipe just above the shell, and you stick the stopped end of the pipe into the hole, and you poke and whirl, and, well, snake the pipe around until it gets ten feet or so deep, and then you put your ear to the unstopped end and listen.

If you hear a rattle (you'd recognize it from the movies, a shiver-inducing cross between a flutter and a sizzle) or a slithering noise, or a
sound like a basketball being pumped up, you have gotten past the gopher and are listening to an irritated snake. The basketball noise is the snake swelling himself defensively. If there's no noise, you blow through the pipe and listen again.

But what happens when there's been a big rain is that the gophers and the snakes get up onto ledges—holes that the gophers dig off to the side and then upward, so that the water doesn't get into them. That's what makes for a bad day for hunting rattlesnakes. Also, you keep getting mud in your listening ear.

Vereen and Jane and I did get to hear a gopher breathe. “Way down under there. Sort of like a beachball being inflated.

Although John worked a lot of holes, hard enough to unclog every drain in Whigham, he couldn't pick up a single snake sound. But here's how we were going to catch them if we heard them: we'd stop up the hole with a rag and come back when the snake had come up to see why he didn't have any air. I say that's what we were going to do, because that method is legal. What isn't legal anymore is pouring just a bit of gasoline into the pipe so the fumes will bring the snake rushing out. This, however, is the traditional, reliable, and still most common method. Environmentalists say that while gas fumes won't kill rattlers, they may endanger other snakes down in there, or maybe the gophers. I don't know. I'm just telling you how it's done.

And if we had flushed a snake, John would have pinned its head to the ground, with his old Ping golf-club shaft with a hook welded onto the end of it. Then he would have grabbed the snake by the tail or got the hook around its body and flipped it into a plastic bucket.

A lot of people had been doing just that around Whigham. John himself had caught forty over the previous three weeks. Altogether 446 snakes were brought in the next day for the festivities out back of Whigham High School.

We passed up the crawfish fettuccine, the shark kabobs, and the alligator kabobs, and even what was announced on the loudspeaker as “some of the finest fried mullet in the world,” because we wanted to have room for fried snake. We waited in line half an hour for that.

It comes in segments. It tastes, yes, sort of like chicken—but maybe more like frog legs, which is to say like chicken wings if they were green. Here is the last part of the recipe contained in the official Whigham Rattlesnake Roundup program: “Place in oil heated to 400 degrees and cook until brown or until meat floats.”

People who brought in live snakes (dead ones don't count) were paid,
by the Whigham Community Club, seven dollars a foot for diamond-backs, four dollars a foot for timber rattlers. Just a few snakes were cooked. Most of them were sold to a venom company: Bioactive, a one-man business operated by Ken Darnell in Portal, Arizona. Snake venom is useful not only in the manufacture of antivenom but also as a coagulant or reactant in various processes involved in pharmaceutical research. Darnell was on hand milking snakes—tossing them around briskly. He would take them back to Arizona where they can live a life of regular milking, like cows only less willing and more linear.

How Darnell got into venom was, “I was standing on a corner in Opp, Alabama, and somebody asked me if I wanted to milk a snake. After that, that's what I wanted to do. I started up my company because I was worried I couldn't support a wife, but it turned out nobody'd marry me anyway. The first venom business was started forty-five years ago by Bill Haast, who's eighty-three now, has been bit forty-seven times, and has a forty-year-old wife. In Punta Gorde, Florida.”

Darnell asserted that “the number of snakes brought in to roundups in Georgia is very small in proportion to the population of the state. But in Texas, where people are riding the roads all the time buying all the rattlesnakes they can, the snake population is threatened and the rodent population is expanding.”

“I never tried to feed a big rattlesnake but I have fed baby ones,” John Lodge said. “What I do, I go to Tallahassee and purchase little mice. Well, once I put a big old field rat in a cage with a snake and went to look later, and the snake and the rat were dead. Looked like the rat had tried to eat the snake and the snake had bit the rat, but I don't know.”

After a while, you got used to seeing big old fat six-foot rattlers hooked up out of red wooden boxes marked DANGER and deposited by the dozen into plastic garbage cans. But it was something to see. Little children would be yelling, “Ooo!”

I'm sorry to say there was no Rattlesnake Queen.

Now I've been to the rattlesnake roundup. On my deathbed, I won't be berating myself for never getting around to it. The way John Lodge's Uncle Sport berated himself, in conversation with John and his brother, some years after Sport allowed the family land to get away: “If I'd had one ounce of intelligence, you boys woulda been millionaires.”

It's good to be reminded of what all may be down in holes in the ground. While we were in Georgia, there was a story in the Atlanta paper: radar equipment had indicated that something, perhaps the body of a woman who had been mysteriously missing for nearly thirty years,
lay beneath a certain Forsythe County garage's concrete floor. “There are items beneath the earth,” an investigator was quoted as saying, “items that are not consistent with the earth.”

But do you want to know what I saw that weekend that was stranger than snakes? The nearest newspaper to Whigham is the
Cairo Messenger.
This is the
Messenger's
motto, emblazoned on the masthead:

“The man who wandreth out of the way of advertising shall remain in the congregation of the dead.”

I
go back to the manual typewriter—so unassumingly connective and responsive it was, like an acoustic guitar. But I am not a cyber-moron, despite what you might hear from two different Microsoft voices named Anouk, three widely differing PC Connection voices named Keith and Steve and I forget, a nameless and particularly unpleasant anonymous voice of Toshiba “tech support,” and one actual bodily person at the authorized Toshiba service location (which, yes, was separated from my house by no more than thirty-six miles but also by a slippery, steep, winding goddamn mountain road), followed, later, by an utterly contradictory telephonic voice from that same location. Ten days and several rediagnoses later, there is only one thing clear: no one can say why my two-month-old laptop lost its mind. It has a new one now—for how long, who knows? And I am out $260.

You may say my problem is I'm Southern, so I expect service people to say, “Oh, Lord, I know how it is. Lemme see if I can't he'p you out a little bit with this thing.” Yes. I do think that would be a normal attitude for a service person to take. All I'm saying is let's talk. “When I am dealing with the machine itself, I can sort of force myself to accept that “computer help” is an oxymoron. As a writer composed of flesh and blood, I feel obliged to put things in terms a reader can understand. The machine addresses me in terms that it can understand: “Warning: You are about to download something that contains executable code.” If the machine were a poet, it would be Ezra Pound, not Billy Collins.