Thursday, September 5, 2013

Rhumba

Found a baby rattlesnake in the house when we got here last fall—not dead yet but dying, stretched S-like on the large glue board I’d set out to catch the scorpions and daddy longlegs that hold barn dances in our empty house while we’re gone. This is my fancy about what the critters do in our absence: dozens of pale tan creatures, barbed tails arced high, sashay their long-legged partners across the living room floor, or lasso and ride the skittery six-inch black centipedes that sometimes scurry along our baseboards flaunting their wicked orange feelers. We find their desiccated corpses under chairs, beneath windows, laid out in the empty laundry basket when we return in the fall. My mind thinks: What has exhausted them so? A barn dance. A play party. A Wild West rodeo. More likely it’s the poison I spray in the crevices before we close up the house to head north for the summers, but I enjoy the barn-dance fancy.

Our rattlesnake problem isn’t fancy, though. It’s fact.

“Watch out for the snakes,” my husband and I tell each other when we go outside to walk or work. Our rock house sits on a rocky bluff in the Sans Bois Mountains of southeastern Oklahoma. Somewhere north on the ridge behind us is a winter den. If you’ve seen the rattler scene in True Grit, you’ve got the picture. This land where we live is the same country. The Sans Bois and the Winding Stair are twin ranges: rugged, low, humpbacked mountains slashing east to west above the plains, thick with hickory, oak, southern pine; they hold the same jagged sandstone bluffs and limestone caverns. When the days shorten, the rattlers come passing through on their way to that hidden crevice, where, until spring, they’ll sleep entwined in great complicated knots, moil all over each other, crawl outside to sun themselves on warm days. A group of rattlers gathered together like that is called a rhumba, by the way. A rhumba of rattlesnakes.

One strangely warm November day in 2011, Paul and I watched a five-foot diamondback crawl out from beneath the ramp to our shed. The snake was beautiful, really, ruddier than most, and as thick around as my forearm, its rattles lifted high as it moved in no particular hurry but with clear purpose, down into a rocky drainage ditch, up again on the far side, continuing across the ridge in obedience to that den’s siren song. I come from a people who will not allow any poisonous snake to live. My husband is a city guy from Boston with no family tradition of snake killing. Whether either of us could have brought ourselves to shoot that diamondback is a moot point, however. We didn’t have a gun.

My dad has been mentioning this lack ever since we bought the place years ago. He took one look at the rocky ridge behind the house, the huge sandstone slabs that lie tumbled about the property like a giant’s toy blocks—a thousand places for a rattler to love—and shook his head. “Y’all might want to think about getting yourselves a gun.”

Okay, we’d think about it, we said. (...)

I wrote a story once about a fellow who liked to drink in bars in southeastern Oklahoma with a young rattlesnake coiled under his hat—he’d sweep off his hat to reveal the baby rattler, just to shock and impress the ladies. That fiction was based on a true story my dad told about a cowboy snake wrangler from Heavener who did such things, and died from it. When I was researching the story, I learned a few facts. Rattlesnakes can strike two-thirds their own length and get back to coil so fast the human eye can hardly see it. They have medium-to-poor eyesight, a perfected sense of smell through that constantly flickering tongue, and excellent motion detectors via bones in their jaws that can feel the tiniest mammal footfall. They have acute heat sensors in the pits between eye and nostril—that’s what gives them the name “pit viper.” When a rattler strikes, its fangs pierce the flesh, instantaneously injecting venom as if through a hypodermic needle. Venom is the correct term, of course, not poison, although locally we still, and probably always will, call them poisonous snakes. In humans, a rattlesnake bite is horrifically painful. Symptoms include swelling, hemorrhage, lowered blood pressure, difficulty breathing, increased heart rate, fever, sweating, weakness, giddiness, nausea, vomiting, intense burning pain. If left untreated, death can come within hours.

Most species of rattlesnake—the velvet-tail, the ground rattler, even the eastern diamondback—when disturbed, will try to withdraw. Not the western diamondback: it will stand its ground. It may even advance to get within better striking distance. Western diamondbacks account for the majority of snakebite deaths in the United States. They account for most of the rattlesnakes we see on our mountain. Two weeks after the shed-ramp rattler, we encountered another. This time the whole family was there to witness.

by Rilla Askew, Tin House |  Read more:
Image: Wikipedia