Save the Wails!

As a kid growing up in the Texas Hill Country, I learned to keep a weather eye out for rattlesnakes. Not that there are rattlesnakes everywhere you step, but there are enough that it’s a good idea to pay attention. Because getting bit by a rattlesnake is like being shot. You can’t get unshot, and you can’t get unbit. You might survive both, but either will ruin your day.

We found rattlesnakes pretty often around the house. Once, there was a five-footer on the back porch, right in front of the door. Once, I stepped on one while running, and almost got bit. I skinned and stretched that one, and got Mae Polk to make me a belt out of the skin. You get used to rattlesnakes living in Texas. They go with the territory, like jalapenos, and chicken fried steak, and praying for rain. Everyone in Texas prays for rain. Even the atheists.

Every time we ran across a rattlesnake, without fail, we killed it. That’s what you do with rattlesnakes. Unless you’re a knothead and go around catching them alive to sell, like I did for a while, you don’t mess with rattlesnakes. ‘The only good rattlesnake is a dead rattlesnake’ is the kind of thing Texans say. And those Texans are right.

But they do things a little bit different up in Massachusetts, evidently. My crack research team recently ran across a news item that has me scratching my head and wondering just what, exactly, they’re putting in the clam chowder up there these days. Because the folks up around Bean Town have decided they’re running a little thin on timber rattlers, and they’re fixing to import a bunch of them. And a 1,350-acre island on the Quabbin Reservoir called Mount Zion will be set aside, by the Massachusetts Division of Wildlife and Fisheries, just for rattlesnakes. Really.

According to Tom French, who is the MDWF yahoo in charge of this stellar plan, says the timber rattler has been in decline in New England for some time, and there have been no recorded rattlesnake bite deaths in Massachusetts since colonial times. Tom seems to think this is a Bad Thing.

Humans, Tom says, are the culprit. Old Tom is sharp as a tack; he is. The Washington Post quoted him saying, “Throughout human history, snakes of all types have been feared, maligned, and persecuted.” Us pesky humans are obviously being unreasonable, since we have some strange notion that we should be able to walk around without getting bitten by venomous reptiles. Shame on us.

Tom says this sanctuary will be a Good Thing, not only for the snakes, but for people, too. He neglected to elaborate on how, exactly, having an island full of deadly rattlers handy will be a plus, or what it will do to the housing market in the nearby towns of Barre and Hardwick, but the Mass. residents are understandably skeptical. A lot of them have been calling Tom, concerned that the snakes will decide to visit.

Rattlesnakes, in case you didn’t know, are excellent swimmers, and it’s less than 100 yards from the island of Mount Zion to the rest of Mass., which is pretty much chock full of Massachusettsites, or whatever you call them. Plus, there’s a bridge. So there’s that.

The island will be off limits to people, although I can’t imagine why you would need to make that a rule, unless the general population of Mass. is dumber than poke salad. I don’t think they are, since a lot of them are asking how Tom intends to let the snakes in on the fact that they’re quarantined. Tom has assured the folks that the snakes will be perfectly happy to stay on the island, although how he knows that is somewhat vague.

And these aren’t going to be small, wormy snakes, either. No. They’ll be raised at a zoo in Rhode Island and let loose on Mount Zion when they’re five feet long. So we’re talking Arnold Schwartzesnakes here. And they’ll probably be bach. (note to self: readers will probably not think this is as funny as you did when you wrote it at 2 a.m.)

But Tom seems to think Mass. needs these snakes, although he’s a little fuzzy on the question of why. Ireland, after all, has been snakeless for centuries, and they’re doing just fine, except for trying to kill one another all the time. They’re happy not to have any snakes. We just recently celebrated St. Patrick’s Day, for crying out loud, because Pat ran all the snakes out of Ireland. He’s a hero, despite the fact that I think his PR has overreached a tad.

But this is what happens when well-meaning activists manage to attain positions of authority beyond the level of picking out paint colors. They want to save the whales, or the owls, or the Concho Water Snake, or some other unsuspecting example of critterdom we can do without just fine--thanks all the same. They seem to forget that man is supposed to be part of the equation, and they try to negate the human influence entirely.

Personally, I don’t have anything against snakes but, like the good folks of Massachusetts, I don’t much care to have them up against me . . .

Kendal Hemphill is an outdoor humor columnist and public speaker who once ate a chicken that tasted like rattlesnake. Write to him at [email protected]