Skinning a Snake

Skinning a Snake
By Ken Harris ©2007

Greenwood, South Dakota, summer, 1948. Our family took a summer trip to South Dakota. At the time I thought it was a simple vacation trip, the kind people take to major tourist destinations. Like Greenwood. In fact, my father was considering going into farming in the Dakotas.

But we traveled around South Dakota a bit. We visited some relatives in Greenwood on the brakes of the Missouri River, on the Yankton Reservation in Charles Mix County. All that’s left of Greenwood now are foundations where houses used to be. I imagine the Missouri River flooded so often that people just got tired of rebuilding. But Greenwood will always have a place in my heart because that’s where I taught myself how to skin a snake.

It came to pass in this town of Greenwood that some cousins and I came across a rattlesnake downtown. Of the group of us, I was oldest at 14 and so clueless I would be lucky to tell up from down at high noon. Being dumb kids, we killed the snake. So far, so good. A dead rattler isn’t likely to hurt us. We could just pitch it somewhere and that would take care of it. Right? Wrong!

A female cousin rather near to me in age, a rather good looking female cousin in fact, stated that she would like to have the skin for a decoration, maybe a hat band. Not to worry, said I, for I was an expert snake skinner from way back and would be pleased to present here with the trophy. As you might guess, I had never skinned a snake in my life. Or wanted to.

Just as an aside, I have observed that attractive females are dangerous to immature males and should be kept away until the young men are, what, say 50?

I cut off the snake’s head with a knife and buried it. Then I cut off the rattles because I thought she might want to wear them as a decoration on her prom gown. After I had removed the head and the tail, I had this long, headless, tailess thing which still occasionally squirmed. “What next, Ken,” thought I. Can I pretend to hear my mother calling?

Not with a good looking girl present. So I borrowed a single edge razor blade and began to cut along the center of the belly at one end of the snake hoping to finish at the other end without going to far astray. I cut too deeply a time or two and the snake’s insides began to become outsides. I mastered my gag reflex, for in those days I wasn’t even keen on taking out the garbage, and continued my incisions.

Once the surgery was completed my next problem was to peel the skin from the snake in one piece. Getting started was more difficult than you’d imagine. You have to immobilize one end which I did with a hammer and a nail. After the grand peeling I had two objects, a smelly snake skin and a slimy dead snake. Snakes aren’t slimy when they are alive and inside their skin. But dead and denuded, they are pretty slick rascals.

By now, though, I was home free. We threw the carcass away and pinned the skin down, flesh side out, with thumb tacks. Then we salted the skin. Mortons® iodized salt.

Everyone was pleased with our deed except me. Not only had I spent an entire afternoon in an inelegant enterprise, but my hands smelled I didn’t want to get them within six feet of my nose. My hands, unfortunately, were firmly affixed to my wrists, well within smelling distance.

So come all you young gentlemen and listen to my tale. If a good looking girl wants a snake skin, keep your hands in your pockets and your mouth shut. Let her skin it.

The Rattlesnake Farm

North San Juan, California, mid-1980s. This will be my last snake story. My next blog will begin a short series of goat stories.

When we moved to North San Juan, our house was located across a ravine from a large rock pile. Many of the rocks were outright boulders while others were merely to large to carry comfortably for more than a few feet. I think we're looking at a pile a hundred feet long, forty or fifty feet wide and with a fifteen-foot bulge more or less in the middle. Perhaps two hundred feet separated the rock pile from our house.

The pile was home to an immense den of rattlesnakes. If you think about it, rattlelsnakes have many admirable features. They usually warn you before they bite you. How many people do you know like that? They don't get drunk and pick fights, and they will back away from a confrontation if they possibly can. They only kill in self-defense or for dinner. That being said, you still don't want them loitering near the house.

I made no attempt to kill the snakes. With what, my .22? Ricochet bullets all over the place and end up shooting myself, Joanne or the dogs? Or what if I fall and break my leg or land on a snake? Or both? Bad idea.

That's why we started importing snakes. Whenever we saw a king snake or bull snake in the road, we stopped the car and grabbed it. All right, if you insist on perfect honesty, I stopped the car and Joanne grabbed the snake. Once she grabbed a bull snake, but just a little too far back of the head. The snake took two half-hitches and a bowline around her forearm and sank his fangs into her thumb. And there they sat while I drove home. Each one had the other one "gotchaed" and wouldn't let go. When we arrived home Joanne had to shake her arm vigorously several times before the reptile hit the dirt. They the snake left in search of a hole while Joanne went in search of some Iodine.

In 1984 I was playing the role of Jud Fry in Oklahoma. Joanne and I returned home from a performance late one summer night. Fortunately, the moon was full and Joanne saw the snake before she stepped on it. We turned on the lights and it was a rattler. We killed it. Why had the snake been near our house? It was thirsty and had come for the dogs' water. After that I put out water near the snakes rock pile. They stayed in their home, we stayed in ours, and it worked out well that way until we moved.

But word soon spread througout the county (it was a small county) that I was a maniac, putting out water for rattlesnakes. Hardly anyone approved. But a Water for Rattlesnakes Program offered the fewest possible negative consequences, and I still think it was the right thing. We never saw one near the house after that.

Boa Constrictor Search

San Diego, California, late 1976 or early 1977. Now you may have noticed that when it comes to snake grabbing, Joanne does the grabbing and Ken does the cheering. But I'm not afraid to pick up a snake. It's just not my favorite thing.

I was subbing in a classroom one winter morning in San Diego for a teacher who kept two boas in glass cages. It was a sixth grade. Sixth grade teachers do strange things. This particular teacher had worked with the San Diego Zoo before her reincarnation as a sixth grade teacher and had even bottle fed baby gorillas. Probably the school was happy that she would settle for two modest-sized boa constrictors.

The office clerk asked me if I would object to looking at two snakes all day. Apparently they had learned to ask that question early in the year. I said no, I had absolutely no objection. Snakes were quiet, they were seldom disruptive, didn't throw tantrums or refuse to do their homework. The human students could learn a lot from the snakes' behavior, if they'd just pay attention.

So as I walked into the classroom, I saw on my right a large glass case with a boa happily sleeping inside. On my left, however, was an empty glass case where a boa used to be. Apparently someone had decided to leave the top of the case open and the snake took the opportunity to escape.

A young, female student teacher was present when I arrived. The two of us conducted a systemic, all points search and finally located the snake, not a very big one, maybe three feet at the outside, wrapped around a carton of teaching materials trying to keep warm.

Now I have always been a feminist, an egalitarian, and believe that women should have an equal opportunity to be heroes. So I convinced her we should toss a coin, loser has to put the snake back. Unfortunately, I lost the toss.

I grabbed the snake behind the head and the poor thing was so cold he rapidly coiled around my forearm and oozed himself back and forth, enjoying my warmth. If he had been a cat, he would have purred. Now I don't really mind snakes. They're fine animals, beautiful even. But I don't want to snuggle.

I tried to deposit the snake back into his glass case, but for some reason he didn't want to let go. I unwrapped one end and he wrapped the other end back. I finally shook him free and he landed with a thud on some pine cones that were in the bottom of his case. That couldn't have felt good, but I winced, apologized, and then got on with the business of the day.

I tell this story to show that I also can catch snakes. It's not my favorite thing. It's better than network television, but it's still not my favorite thing.

Taiwanese Health Food

Lungshan Night Market, Taipei, Taiwan, December 30, 1971. -- Joanne, my son Eric and I were touring Taiwan with the Guam Science Teachers' Association as our 1971 Christmas gift to ourselves. On the night of December 30 we visited the Lungshan Night Market after a stupendous seven-course dinner.

Large office buildings loomed within a mile of the Chiang's presidential palace in Taipei, but after the main businesses closed and the power brokers in their three-piece suits repaired to their wives or mistresses, less formally attired capitalists appeared on the streets. They took over the center lanes of an eight-lane thoroughfare and set up their modest businesses. Strange people in strange attire with strange business enterprises set up their shops and hawked their wares.

A dentist showed up carrying his chair on his back, held in place by a strap around his forehead. An acupuncturist displayed a large chart showing the human body decorated with x's and dotted, curved lines. But the most amazing sight of all was the health food guy.

The Chinese have a theory of health consonent with their theory of the universe. The universe is composed of contesting opposites, yin and yang. Don't ask me which is which because I never could keep them sorted. Illnesses come in two varieties, hot and cold. If you're afflicted with a cold disease, a head cold, for example, you should eat a hot food. Dog, for example. On the other hand, if you have a hot disease, you need a cold food. Snake bile is a popular restorative. The bile of a venomous snake, the more venomous, the better. Taiwan doesn't have any native venemous serpents, so they have to import them. Here in the States we import ginseng. There they import bushmasters and mambas.

So, anyway, here we were, a group of 24 sophisticated teachers, wandering around the market with our mouths wide open. You'd have thought we'd just come into town on a wagon load of pumpkins. We stopped by a Chinese gentleman standing by stacks of wire cages. He bowed to us. We bowed to him. Then we bowed to each other some more. After sufficiently demonstrating our spinal flexibility he proceeded to show us some of his wares.

He picked a length of wire about a foot long with a hook bent into the end of it, opened up one of his cages, and fished around for a few seconds. Finally he brought out his wire with a blackish snake hooked over the end of it. We looked at each other, the snake and us, and finally the snake decided he didn't like what he saw. So he spread his hood.

Joanne and I were in front, of course. We all of a sudden realized that this guy was poking a cobra into our faces and instantly retreated three giant steps. If there were any children or pets behind us, they died. Two dozen people stampeding in reverse can create a lot of havoc. Sorry about that.

The vendor offered to kill the snake for us and let us sample a sip of cobra bile, but we none of us saw the need to kill a perfectly good snake just so we could decorate the streets of Taipei with our dinner.

Throwing Pythons

Throwing Pythons

Torremolinos, Spain, 1975. I met a great white hunter at a party. He complained that by the mid-70s the great white hunting business wasn’t what it used to be. Thanks to unfriendly poachers, vigilant rangers and inflation, there just weren’t that many safaris any more. Things had come to such an ugly pass, he continued, that he was available for almost any reasonably legal employment. Consequently, when a British movie company came to his part of Africa on location, he signed on with them as an assistant animal handler.

The plot of the movie was unbelievably bad by any standards. A white man and a black man were “chums” at Oxford. But even then the black man knew that he was going to return to his tribe, put on a lion skin, and become the chief. The white man knew that he was going to be a park ranger in his friend’s territory.

And there they both were, in the same part of Africa. But before the black man could assume his role as chief, he had to murder somebody. He did so, and lo and behold, the white man now had to bring his former friend to justice. I really wanted to leave the party right there and go out and see this movie. Not.

That’s where the movie was when the company arrived in Africa. According to the script, the black man fled to the “Land of the Snakes.” The actual film later even thoughtfully provided a title on the screen as the men entered the little patch of jungle. “Land of the Snakes.”

The black man was to enter the jungle with the white man in hot pursuit. As soon as the white man entered the jungle, the script called for a python to drop onto his shoulders. The white man was to brush the snake off, whirl, shoot the snake with his rifle, wipe his manly brow, and press onward. The rifle hand blanks, of course, because the head animal handler was using his own pet python for the shoot. The head animal handler was to stand on a tree limb drop his python on the actor as he ran underneath. The assistant animal handler cum great white hunter was to retrieve the python and pass it back up into the tree in the event things did not go well.

The only thing was, the actor was deathly afraid of snakes. As soon as he ran into the jungle someone called “Make Up” and the make up man ran up and squirted him in the face with water mist. This procedure even has a technical term, spritzing. The actor didn’t really need to be spritzed: he was already sweating profusely. It’s a good thing the film was in black and white because the actor was definitely an unhealthy shade of grey.

He finally mustered enough nerve to enter the jungle patch, but when the snake landed on his shoulders he threw the rifle high into the air and screamed “S HI T!” The director yelled, “CUT!” and said they had to do the shot over.

After the seventh shit-cut the python decided he’d had enough and tried to wriggle off through the jungle. The great white hunter caught him by the tail and tried to pass him back up into the tree, like passing a column of cooked spaghetti.

It took three days to get the shot, and then only because the director felt they had enough footage to cobble together, frame by frame, enough to get seven acceptable seconds of film. The snake had been dropped close to two dozen times, and it’s a wonder he didn’t slip a halfhitch around the actor’s neck and end everyone’s misery. That's what I would have done if I'd been the python. "Look, mate, we're all in this together. Can't we just do this shot?"

Neither python nor actor be.

Lessons in Snake Handling

Auburn, California, mid-1960s. We had a five-acre place near the town of Auburn, east of Sacramento in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains. We fenced and cross-fenced it for our horses and cattle and had a great year-round stream running along the bottom.

We had an abundance of snakes there, bull snakes, garter snakes, and king snakes. But no rattlers. The rattlesnakes in that area are very shy and don't like to share their living space with dogs, cats or constrictors.

On this particular occasion we had some children present, possibly ours, possibly the neighbors' kids, or maybe neices and nephews from Southern California. They might have been total strangers, just passing through. Joanne was doing some yard work when she saw a lovely king snake stretched out in the primroses. She reached behind the snake's head to grab him and teach the children how to catch one safely. But she reached too far back and the snake managed to turn it's head and hemstitch her hand.

Joanne turned the spontaneous snake-grabbing lesson into a spontaneous leave-snakes-alone-if-they-aren't-bothering-you lesson. "You see, if I'd left this snake alone, like I should have, I wouldn't be bleeding right now." The kids were most impressed with the blood oozing from her hand, and I don't imagine very many of them became snake handlers in their adult lives.

Cailidh entertainment

On this fine Saturday evening of this past January 5 our Scottish Country Dancing group gathered in the town of Bisbee, in the mountains just north of the Mexican border for a Twelfth Night Ball. The town is accessible by highway. We didn’t have to take a mule train or anything like that. Going there is just something our group does just to get out of Tucson for a while.

We danced, ate, danced some more. We also had cailidh (kay.lee) entertainment. Cailidh is a Gaelic word meaning entertainment where everyone gets up and does their own thing. (And people want spelling reform in English. Compared to the Welsh, Scots and Irish, we’re doing great.)

A husband and wife team conducted a do-it-yourself Twelve Days of Christmas with Scottish foods improvised as a substitute for the traditional gifts. They reminded me of Victor Borge conducting an orchestra. One woman read a Scottish poem in such a great Scottish brogue I couldn’t understand a word she said. Several people performed on instruments and sang. A woman read a wonderfully dreadful poem by a McGonigal, the “worst poet in Scotland.”

Although I hadn’t planned anything, I thought I might enlighten the evening by telling a story. I chose the story that I posted on this blog in January 1. As I got really involved with telling how Joanne and her brother, Fritz, killed these rattlesnakes and put them in a bag to bring home to mother, I could tell by the way some mouths dropped and some eyes bugged, that I was not offering up standard cailidh entertainment. Some of the people were shocked.

I loved it. I teetotally LOVED it. I proceeded onward with gestures and expressions.

I received a nice round of applause. Because I was through, I believe. Afterwards, several people came up to Joanne to offer stories of their own, but by and large the rest of the people at the dance were content without our company.

Joanne and I grew up in non-traditional circumstances and we’re a bit rough around the edges. I'm sure we'd disgrace ourselves at Buckingham Palace, but I doubt if that will ever be a problem.