re: #60 allegro

It’s late and just no reason but a wildlife story from my distant past…

I was a young woman, college graduate and a Yankee… three terminal strikes against me as a FWS biologist in Texas. I had major odds against me with the trappers I needed on my side to do my job but I had one thing on my side: I wasn’t afraid of snakes. For whatever reason I have always had an affection for the critters and have a sense for when they’re nearby. That made me a great “sweeper”. So one day I went out to clear the area while the trappers waited and watched and suddenly I shot straight into the air like a cat. They were like, OMG is she bit?! They had never seen me freak like that. Turns out I stepped on a piece of garden hose, one of those scaly looking hoses.

Never lived that one down.

I was a snake guy myself (Northern Virginia Herpetology Club!) in my early teens and we went to the old barge canal north of the Potomac in Maryland, late fall, to collect snakes. Leaves were falling, cool weather, expecting lethargic reptiles based on the forecast, and we arrived around noon to a much warmer day than expected.

Long and short of it, I stepped on a Copperhead that I didn’t see in the leaves.

If you haven’t been snakebit, it’s a surreal experience. I was wearing 5” hiking books and the bastard bitch hit me in my left calf an inch above it. Imagine being initiated to The Pain Of The World without an introduction- being injected with a shot of Drano and fuming nitric acid.

So I stomped the snake with my right foot, screaming my lungs out, and fell over backwards doing the chicken. I was helped back to the parking area and got an ambulance call out from the phone there, and I got a ride to Bethesda, where they gave me a shot of antivenin and kept me overnight.

The bite of a Copperhead is a vanishingly rare fatality event, but boy howdy it makes you feel sick for a while. When I woke up the next morning it looked like the inside of my arms and legs were lined with yellow highlighters- that was my lymph system carrying dead blood cells to my gut.

It took two years for the lost muscle (a chunk about 3” X 1.5” and 1” deep) in my calf to regenerate.