Rattlesnakes

The rattlesnake slipped into the creek and swam away with elastic curves. I watched it go with relief and apprehension. I was glad to see the big sucker turn tail, but I’d been in the desert for all of five minutes and I’d already spotted a rattler –how long before I came across another?

Some people are terrified of snakes. I’m not. That doesn’t mean I want to cuddle with them or tickle their fangs Steve Irwin-style. I just don’t mind observing them from

a safe distance, the way you slow down on the highway to get a better look at a car wreck. Oh, that looks bad. Real nasty. Glad I’m nowhere near that. I guess I have what you call a healthy fear of snakes. But that day in the Texas desert, my fear was quickly changing from healthy to toxic.

It got worse the next day when I drove the empty stretch from Pecos to the Guadalupe Mountains. The desert unfurled in hills of red rotten earth, and the hard shrub looked like five o’clock shadow. This is their home, I thought as I drove along. This is where rattlesnakes live. Odd thoughts started creeping up. How many rattlesnakes per square miles of desert? If I set out in a random direction one hundred times, how many steps would I have to take, on average, before getting bit by a rattlesnake? How many did I drive by per mile of road? How many had been born on this hill, or that cliff? I could have stumped the greatest rattlesnake statistician.

I pulled up to the visitor center and walked straight down the middle of the paved walkway. A ruddy ranger with goose-feather hair greeted me.

“How can I help you?”

“I’m going up Guadalupe Peak in the morning,” I said. “Do you guys have maps or anything?

“Of course, hang on just a minute!”

Rangers are always eager to give you a free map or two, even if it only shows the way to the john, so I wasn’t surprised when he vanished behind his desk. In the meantime, I wandered around the exhibits in the visitor center: accounts of the Guadalupe Mountains’ geology that a layman had no hope of understanding, 3-D maps of the entire range, and a gaggle of stuffed rodents baring their ugly little grins behind a plastic case. And nestled between the furry buggers was a stuffed rattlesnake. No, not one. Two. Actually…there were five. The Guadalupe Mountains boasted no less than five (five!) types of rattlesnake, each more eager than the last to take a chomp at my ankles. I was about to hike up the tallest mountain in Texas. Over eight miles of trail scrawled across the

dusty desert. What were my chances of not running into one of these? Of not getting bitten? Did anyone ever even make it out of here alive?

“Sir? I have some maps for you.”

The ranger was standing behind his desk with a pile of paper that would have made a notary blanch.

“Thanks,” I said.

I hesitated. A guy in a loose pink shirt had just come in and was standing behind me so he could speak to the ranger.

“So, uh, are there a lot of rattlesnakes out there?” I asked, and the guy behind me snickered.

“Oh yes, absolutely, yes,” the ranger said, as if delivering amazing news. “It’s that time of the year. You’ve got to watch out.”

“Great. So, how often do people get bit?”

“Oh, it happens. It certainly happens.”

He was downright jovial about it.

“But you guys keep, like, you know, anti-venom here, or whatever?”

More snickers.

“Oh no, not here. They have that at the hospital. That’s why you’re supposed to take a picture of the snake that bit you so they know what type to use.”

“Super. I’m just supposed to ask the snake that bit me to stay still so I can take a picture of it? Where’s the nearest hospital anyway?”

“Oh, well, it’s a ways, I suppose.”

I didn’t press the issue. A sign outside the park said “nearest gas: 111 miles.” It left no illusions on the proximity of a hospital.

“So, uh, what are my chances of being bitten, you think?” I asked in a lower voice so the pink shirt guy wouldn’t hear.

“Oh, who knows?” the ranger said as though I’d just asked him about the meaning of life. “All I can say is it’s certainly the season. They like to crawl out onto the path and spread out so they can sunbathe. I think they actually fall asleep. Last week I was driving down the service road and there was a huge snake lying across the path. I honked three times, right by it, and it didn’t move.”

“Uh-huh.”

“But you know, not every bite is fatal. Sometimes, a bite only results in the victim losing a limb. Or sometimes, a rattler will dry-bite you, just to scare you. It won’t actually pump venom into you. Except for the babies. A baby rattler’s bite is always venomous, because they can’t control their venom glands yet. That’s why they’re the most dangerous.”

“Listen man,” the pink shirt guy interjected. “Your chances of running into a baby rattler are, like, totally insignificant.”

I turned around and instantly disliked him. Maybe it was his squash-like forehead, his square glasses sitting way too high on his nose, or his ugly pink shirt, but something about him made me quite certain that this wasn’t the first or last time he had said “listen man” to a complete stranger.

“Well, actually, that’s not true,” the ranger said. “Just yesterday when I got out of my trailer, I almost stepped on one. They’re certainly not shy.”

It was bittersweet. Pink shirt guy had been put in his place, but unfortunately his place was one crawling with deadly baby snakes. In any case, I’d had it. I scooped up my maps and let these two rattlesnake scholars hammer it out.

I crawled out of my tent at 6:00 A.M. the next morning. The night was coffee-black, and too cold for rattlesnakes to be out yet. Good plan, dude, I thought as I packed up camp. Get up and down the mountain before the sun’s even out. There and back while the snakes are still snoozing. I shouldered my rucksack and started down the trail, my trekking poles clicking on loose rocks.

I hiked a few switchbacks carved into the mountainside, zigzagging between flowering cacti. The trail was steep and soon I could guess the rough shapes of the desert below me in the early morning light –the sun was rising. A blinding little disk strained into the blurry horizon, dusting everything with red light. Suddenly I could see everything. Every little piece of wood in the way, every root poking out onto the trail. Have you ever noticed how much an innocent stick lying on a trail looks like a snake? When you’re convinced that a pack of rattlers is about to bite your face off, they are indistinguishable.

I made my way up the mountain, my heart shuddering at every sinuous branch emerging from the dirt. I stopped every time I spotted a lizard scurrying between pebbles, sure that I was about to receive the ultra-venomous bite of a baby rattler. At one point, I cried out in terror when I walked on something scaly. Upon closer inspection, it was a fallen conifer branch. Scaly-looking to be sure, but not a snake.

I remembered what I had read on Wikipedia the night before. If a snake bites you, the best thing to do is get to a hospital ASAP. Even if you have to run and jump down the trail, time is the critical factor. The sooner you get treatment, the less damage the venom does to you. Another great piece of advice from the same article: keep your heart-rate low, your metabolism non-existent, and your body inert. Getting the system going only pumps the poison out to your vital organs quicker. So basically, get help as quickly as possible, but don’t hurry. A catch-22 if I ever heard one.

I kept walking, leaping back several feet every time I stepped on a branch or saw anything move. If backward-jumping was a sport, I was setting multiple Olympic records.

By eight o’clock, I had to stop for water. The sun was still low, but the dry desert heat was already in full effect –my back was doused in sweat. The rocky notches along the path shimmered and smoked like bacon hitting the pan.

“Good morning!”

I nearly jumped straight to the summit. I looked around, ready to fight off what could only be a devious new kind of talking snake.

“Up here.”

One switchback ahead of me, an old man in shorts and sneakers was perched on a small boulder. I heaved in relief and made my way up to him. He wore a polo shirt with a halo of sweat around the collar. His face was an olive mask of wrinkled leather beneath a dust-streaked ball-cap.

“Well, I saw you coming a while ago,” he said, sucking in his Ws. 

“I could tell you were quite a bit faster than me, so I figured I’d let you catch up.”

His voice had the cadence of boats swaying in a harbor.

“Thanks,” I said.

“I’m Chuck,” he said, holding out his leathery hand. “Chuck Garrett.”

“Jean,” I said.

“Huh?”

“Jean. Like Jean-Claude without the Claude,” I recited.

“Ah, so you’re French?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And now, tell me Jean, what is your name? Your family name?”

“It’s a complicated one,” I told him, laughing.

“Well, Jean-Claude without the Claude, welcome to the West,” he said, gesturing at the desert splayed out below us.

“Thank you,” I said, and actually meant it. “I’ve just gotten to the West.”

Chuck nodded as if he already knew.

“It’s beautiful country. If you’ve got the time and the means to see it, then it sure is beautiful country.”

"Yes, sir.”

“There’s so much to do and see here,” he said. “You could keep at it your whole life and only scratch the surface.”

“I don’t even know where to start.”

“Well, this is a good place to start.”

“It is,” I agreed. “Have you been here before?”

“Once,” Chuck said. “But it was rainy and socked it. I couldn’t see a thing. I got to the summit just to say I’d been there, but I couldn’t see my own hands.”

I felt a little ashamed. Here was this old man trudging up the mountain for the second time in hopes of taking in the views, and I’d spent all morning staring at my feet and scanning every branch in the path.

“Well, you go right on ahead,” he said, motioning to the path as if holding a door for me. “And I will see you on the summit if you do linger there to enjoy the view.”

“I’m sure I will. Thank you sir.”

I moved away quickly –I was tired but I didn’t want to betray his perception of me as a fast hiker.

I took me two more hours to reach the small summit plateau. Two long, torturous hours of cringing at every root, recoiling from lizards, inspecting every grain of sand in the path before taking a single step, and all along wondering when I would feel

a sharp and sudden puncture in my ankle. In no hurry to plunge back into the snake-infested wilderness of the trail, I sat down carefully on a big square rock and enjoyed the 360 degree view. Chuck joined me about twenty minutes later.

“Well, well,” he said, still sucking in his Ws. “You’re still here, huh?”

“Yes, sir. It’s a beautiful spot.”

“It sure is, it sure is.”

He sat down next to me. I made a vague motion towards the desert.

“You’re getting your view this time, huh?

He didn’t answer right away. When he did, I could practically see the boats swaying in the breeze.

“You know, Jean, there are places in this world that I simply do not have the vocabulary to describe.”

I looked back down. The ground gave way twenty feet ahead of us and plummeted down a pine-covered hillside, and then back up a rocky saddle onto the backside of El Capitan, a large rock tower guarding the southern approach to Guadalupe Peak. Beyond, as far as I could see, cliffs and dunes converged into the supple curve of ridge-lines, crisscrossing, raveling and unraveling to a horizon fudged into a hazy white sky. Again, I felt ashamed.

I said goodbye to Chuck and started down the mountain. The midday sun was blazing and even moving downhill felt difficult. I thought about Chuck’s words and did my best to take my eyes off the path and admire the scenery. However, the closer I got to my car, the more I sped up my pace. I didn’t want to run into a rattler just as I was about to make it back to my car.

About a quarter-mile from the trailhead, I ran into two guys with huge backpacks on. They were both sweaty and, for some reason, giddy. When they saw me coming down, one of them called out.

“Howdy!”

“Hey,” I said back.

“You seen any snakes?”

My heartbeat accelerated.

“Um, no. You?”

“Check this picture out.”

He shoved his iPhone in my hands. And there it was. A gigantic rattler crossing the path. It looked more like a boa constrictor to me.

“Where was it?” I asked.

“Oh, just past the parking lot. Like two hundred feet in.”

I handed the phone back to him and they moved on up the trail. From where I was standing, I could see the parking lot. I could even see my car. It was just a quarter-mile away. Ten minutes, and I’d be there. So what if a rattlesnake had crossed the path? It was long gone by now. What were the odds of another one appearing on the same section of trail this soon? I was fine. Totally fine.

I took a few steps forward slowly, then walked a hundred feet. I stepped over a big rock, and something slithered across the dust from underneath, sending me jumping back yet again. It was a lizard.

I ran the rest of the way.