SnakeS in the HouSe

I currently cohabitate with a snake—and I don’t mean my wife. I don’t consider snakes as pets, and yet here we are, my wife, a large snake, and I all living in the same house. And, no, I haven’t always tolerated serpents as housemates. In fact, I have snakeaphobia, otherwise known as herpetephobia, from the Greek for “I’m very afraid of her pet snake.” Not really, I just made that up. Herpetephobia is actually the intense fear of herpes, which is a very good fear to have. You don’t ever want herpes sinking its fangs into you.

But back to my fear of snakes. I saw a snake once in our driveway, turned, and hotfooted it back into the house and told my serpent-loving wife of the sighting. She asked, “What kind of a snake was it?” and I said, “It was a snake! I didn’t stick around to study it.”

We have a sliding door into a storage room under our deck, and snakes like to squeeze into the door track, so when I open the door, I do so slowly so as not to mangle any door-track squatters. Once, as I opened the door cautiously, I caught some movement in my peripheral vision, and then realized a snake head was swaying toward me at eye level about 6 inches from my face. In moments like that, I always begin a rad dance move that has been widely called the “rapid backpedal serpent shuffle.” I’m pretty sure Michael Jackson plagiarized it for his moon walk.

Another time my stereo speaker wires, just inside our front door, seemed to move, and I asked myself, “Is there any plausible explanation for how a speaker wire could wriggle and then disappear behind the speaker?” I really, really wanted there to be a rational explanation, but after a few seconds of musing, “I answered myself, “No there is no way a speaker wire can do that.” Then in a calm but charged, almost singing, voice, I announced, “Carolyn, there’s a snake in the house.”

Still another time we heard a disturbing high-pitched cry in our house that we’d never heard before. I traced it back to our bedroom, where between a window and the screen, a snake was trying to swallow a tree frog and already had about half of the frog’s back-end in its gullet. The frog was screaming and trying to jump out of the snake’s maw. Jumpin’ Jehoshaphat! I hope you’re able to purge your mind of this horrifying image, but good luck. I’ve never been able to.

So back to our permanent housemate. I guess if our house were associated with Hogwarts School, it’d be the House of Slytherin. The reptile in question is an eastern black king snake (according to Carolyn), and it resides in our attic in winter; I see its shed skins up there all the time. The rest of the year it lives above the ceiling in Carolyn’s art studio. She had the ceiling installed because even though she likes most snakes, she was not a fan of having them drop down out of the insulation onto her work bench or onto her head. She also bought a snake stick, a long-handled grabber that can hold a snake (for several seconds before it wriggles out) without hurting it. She uses this as necessary to relocate larger belly-sliders that get too chummy for comfort.

Despite my fear, I tolerate our tenant, which is non-venomous and which eats venomous snakes such as copperheads. I’ve also noticed we have fewer mice and squirrels in the attic since Blackie signed the lease. We used to be treated every night to the sounds of an overhead rodent bowling alley. We never knew when they’d strike next. But now we don’t hear as much scurrying, chewing, ball rolling (probably hickory nuts), or apartment building. It turns out that snakes are quite a bit quieter than our previous four-footed co-occupants.

So I guess I’m as surprised as you are that I’m willing to live with a snake—as long as it keeps a low profile, which it literally does. And I guess that living in the woods makes for strange—but strangely happy—bedfellows.

(Bill Spencer is author of the book Uranus Is Always Funny.)