Personal History

The eastern king snake (Lampropeltis getula) can grow up to 4 feet long, but the one we saw next to the road back in the late '60s was only about 3 feet.  It was apparently warming itself on the blacktop near the side of the road and, startled by our approaching car, slithered off toward some high grass on the shoulder.

The family and I were driving back from the beach - one of the municipal beaches on the Long Island Sound, not one of the better beaches on the south shore of the Island.  The beaches on the Atlantic side had finer sand, better surf in which to play, and higher, arcuate dunes, but they were a longer drive from our North Shore home, and the beaches on the Sound, while stonier and with a disappointing size to their waves, were much closer.  It was a weekday, and the family and I were returning from an afternoon swim at the nearby beach on the Sound. 

Dad was driving the family car, a green Ford station wagon.  Dad always drove.  As was his want, he was wearing his trademark "Jake hat," one of those short-brimmed, vented hats fly fisherman hook lures into for safe keeping.  Everybody in the family was embarrassed by the hat - it was old, beat-up and grungy - and we called it his "Jake hat" because the Moms thought it made him look like "Jake the garbageman."  The name Jake wasn't as popular then as it is now, so apologies for any offense caused by the stereotype to anyone named Jake.   Also, apologies to garbagemen and all sanitation workers for any affront to a vitally important profession.  

In any event, Dad enjoyed acting the character and took a perverse pleasure in embarrassing the family so he wore the Jake hat every time we went to the beach.  Besides, it covered his bald spot and therefore, in his mind, made him look younger.  Also, don't underestimate how uncomfortable a sunburned scalp can be.  I know all this because I do the same thing now, wearing baseball caps backwards at rock shows and forwards while out hiking on the Tanyard Creek Trail.  

The Moms was in the front seat with Dad, and my two sisters - the girls - were in the back seat with my five-year-old brother, the youngest in the family.  I was about 15 at the time, and as was my preference, I was riding in the back stowage portion of the station wagon, laying on my back watching the branches of trees pass overhead through the side windows.  At this point in my life, I had graduated from childhood fantasies of becoming some sort of Jacques Cousteau marine biologist to an interest in reptiles and amphibians.  I had several terrariums back home filled with snakes and lizards I had captured, and had a fenced turtle pen in the back yard.   In hindsight, I'm amazed by the patience and tolerance of my parents allowing all those reptiles into their home.

I suppose that Dad, driving with his eyes on the road, saw the king snake first.  "Snake!" he called out and pulled the car over.  

I bolted upright within the second.  "Where?" I asked.

"Over there, in the grass by the road sign," Dad told me, and with the car pulled over a few feet away, I rolled down the back window of the wagon and jumped out to capture the snake 

I could see it tightly coiled up by the sign, trying to hide, and immediately recognized the yellow stripes distinctive of the common Eastern king snake, a not only non-venomous snake but a particularly passive and non-aggressive one at that.  I knew this because I had developed a passion for herpetology and had poured all over Roger Conant's Field Guide to the Reptiles and Amphibians of Eastern North America.  The guidebook was canonical to me and I had memorized the Latin names of at least those species native to Long Island and those I had captured on road trips across the U.S.  I knew how to identify the gender of turtles by the shape of their lower shells (males are slightly indented toward the rear), and knew how to differentiate species and subspecies of lizards and snakes by the number and placement of scales on their heads.  I even knew the names for the scales, the first, second, and third pre- and post-ocular scales, the inter-nasal scales, and the supra- and infra-labial scales above and below the mouth. In short, I was a nerd, but in times like this, my nerdiness was an asset because I could make a near-instantaneous identification of the snake.

Dad was not so sure of my abilities.  "It might be poisonous," he kept warning me, even though I kept reassuring him that it wasn't.

Capturing a snake is relatively easy once you know the trick.  You take a stick (a wooden putter golf club is perfect for the task, but really any stick will do) and pin the snake down just behind the head. Holding the stick in one hand, you use the other to reach from behind the snake (so it doesn't see your hand coming toward it) and grab it right behind the jaws.  Holding it there, it can't turn around and bite you, although it may wriggle and whip around ferociously trying to escape.  Some (I'm looking at you, Natrix water snakes) will even expel "copious quantities of foul-smelling musk" (Conant's description) to try and dissuade you from capturing it. But usually, once you've got it by the neck, that's pretty much all there is to it - you've got a firm grip on the snake and it can't escape or bite you.

So Dad and I came up with a quick plan on how we were going to capture the king snake coiled by the road sign.  With the Moms, the girls and my little brother watching from the car, Dad and I both got sticks. We decided that we would stand on either side of the snake, and that Dad would then use his stick to flip the snake out of the grass toward me, and then I would use my stick to pin it down and capture it.  That was the plan.

I didn't think Dad was afraid of snakes - at least not phobia-level fear.  After all, he let me keep a bunch of them in the house.  But now that I think of it, I never saw him handle any of my snakes, and he never seemed to be around when I had to remove them to clean their tanks.  He was basically a Brooklyn boy - raised in the city where he probably didn't have much first-hand experience with snakes in the wild.  At least not before his herptile-crazed nerd of a son came along and changed all that.  If he actually was afraid of snakes, than all the more credit to him for letting me keep them in the house. At the very least, he had no great affection for snakes but knowing my enthusiasm, there he was on the side of the road trying to catch one with me for some good, old-fashioned father/son bonding.

On this day, he was clearly nervous, standing as far back as possible, as far as his stick could reach, to flip it out of the grass and towards his waiting son..  He was a sight - the Jake hat, the Bermuda shorts wet from the swimming trunks beneath - leaning as far forward as he could with his stick out in front of him.

"Ready?," he called out.

"Yes!"

"On three," he said and then counted, one, two, three.

I don't know how nervous he was or how much adrenaline was pumping through his bloodstream, but on "Three!" he flicked the snake out of the grass so hard that the poor animal temporarily became airborne and flew toward me.  I was bent over, expecting it to be on the ground, but it hit me on the neck.  The force of the impact caused the snake to wrap around my neck - not like a constrictor but the way a piece of rope might if you threw it at a post or something.  The poor snake's head came all the way around me so we were momentarily face to face, and either out of instinct or simply because its jaws were open upon impact, it bit me on the cheek, just below the eye.

Much screaming ensued.  The Moms came out of the car screaming, Dad was screaming something, and I don't recall but I was probably screaming, too.  The girls and my little brother started screaming as well, as it seemed to be the thing to do at that moment. 

I grabbed the snake with both hands and uncoiled it from around my neck and threw it on the ground.  The snake, dazed, just laid there.  What must it have been thinking?  One moment, everything was normal, just coiled in the grass hiding from some curious simians, and then suddenly it was flying through the air, then wrapped around some teenager's neck, and then cruelly thrown to the ground.

But it would only get worse for the poor snake.  Dad, realizing what he had just done, went into full caveman mode - "Must protect family!" - and got a baseball bat out from the station wagon and beat the snake to death, which is probably what he instinctually wanted to have done all along. Adrenaline still pumping, be completely crushed its skull and pounded its head to a pulp, hitting until there could be no doubt that not only was it dead, but that it couldn't still bite, just in case that was something dead snakes could still do.

I was correct - the snake was not venomous.  And a snake bite doesn't really hurt that much.   In the course of my reptile collecting, I'd been bitten plenty of times and was usually bitten at least once each time I had to clean the snake tanks at home. It's not pleasant and it can draw some small beads of blood.  It's not unlike getting scratched by a cat - not an experience one exactly seeks out, but nothing traumatic or life-threatening either. So my shock, such as it was, was more from the unexpected chain of events that culminated in an airborne snake biting me on the face, which was a first - and only - experience for me.   

The Moms insisted that I be taken to the Emergency Room. I still hadn't convinced anyone that the snake wasn't poisonous and no one dared to disagree with her.  Dad gathered up the demonstrably quite dead snake for identification purposes and we all piled back into the station wagon and headed to the hospital. 

Seriously, I think the ER was more traumatic to me than the actual snake bite.  The small wound was efficiently cleaned with stinging antiseptics, and I was treated to an injection or two of antibiotics and a tetanus booster.  The doctors saw no evidence of a reaction to venom, although Dad kept wanting to show the dead snake to get confirmation that it wasn't poisonous.

"What kind of snake is it?," he would ask the doctors and I'd say "It's an eastern king snake, Lampropeltis getula," but everybody ignored me because what do kids know?  The doctors told him they couldn't make a positive identification because the head was so badly damaged, but the truth of the matter is that medical doctors, as well-educated and as erudite as they are, are not trained in herpetological taxonomy.  But as there was no swelling, I wasn't experiencing any burning, and I wasn't displaying any other symptoms of a reaction to venom, I was eventually discharged and we were allowed to leave.

For the record, I wasn't mad at my father for what happened - it was an accident.  Although on the one hand, it was traumatic and could have been much worse had it been a rattlesnake or a copperhead, on the other hand, I couldn't help but see the slapstick comedy in all of it.  To be honest, the whole episode was ludicrous if not downright hilarious.  And you should have seen the expression on Dad's face when he saw the snake hit me!

But here's the point to this whole story: growing up as I did in a lily-white suburb and attending an all-white, suburban public school, I had only limited exposure to persons of color.  Although by the time of this episode there were a few black kids in.my junior high, they mostly stayed to themselves in their own clique and I hadn't had much interaction with them.  I had my friends and they had theirs. But in the ER, I was treated and cared for by several black nurses and orderlies, and I was surprised by the amount of empathy and concern that they expressed.  The white doctors and nurses were professional enough, but their treatment and bedside manner were very clinical and cold.  They'd tell me "Your wound had been properly treated and dressed," or ask "Are you experiencing any other discomfort?," but they didn't show any real concern other than their professional responsibilities.

But it was different with the black care-givers.  "Oh, Lord," they'd bemoan, "this poor child was bitten in the face by a snake!"  They hold my hand and look me in the eyes and ask me if I was alright.  They'd ask me how it came to happened that a snake bit me on the face.

"My father threw it at me."

At that, they'd look side-eyed at Dad, standing there in the hallway under the cold, institutional light of the hospital, still in his beach clothes, including the Jake hat.  His swimming trunks made it look like he had wet his Bermuda shorts.  I can only imagine what they were thinking. "Well, you're alright now, child," they'd reassure me. "That's all that matters."  Today, they'd be calling DFACS. 

I felt so much better, so better cared for, under the black technicians than the white.  It was a most pleasant surprise - they were really, really kind to me!

Later that night, back home, I asked the Moms why the black people at the hospital were so much nicer than the white people,  why I felt so much better under their care and supervision.  "They can be very caring people," she reassured me. 

Which really was the wrong answer.  The Moms is most decidedly not a racist and meant nothing but well by her answer, but by today's thinking that was a racist response.  A caregiver, in fact several caregivers, had been nice to me, and those nice caregivers were incidentally also persons of color. But both myself and the Moms assigned the attributes of those few individuals, albeit very positive, to an entire ethnicity.  No sleight or disrespect was meant, but we were both still looking at certain people and seeing not individuals, but representatives of an entire racial demographic.

After all, based on the clinical, professional-to-the-point-of-antiseptic treatment by the white folks at the hospital, we didn't conclude that white people are very aloof and uncaring.

Anyhow, short version (too long, didn't read [TL/DR]): my Dad threw a snake at me.