This time of year, just days away from the official start of spring, always reminds me of rattlesnakes.
Years ago when I was a teenager out in West Texas, rattlesnakes and seismic exploration crews would come out of hibernation and spread out over the desert about this time each year. And I spent a couple of summers among them both, as a "jug-hustler" laying out geophone recording lines with the old Robert H. Ray Co. and Petty Geophysical Co. crews.
The idea, then as now, was to place geophone lines in a fairly straight pattern. And that frequently leads one through underbrush that a wise person instinctively would avoid as a likely snake habitat. It wasn't long before the warning buzz of an angry rattler was more familiar than my own Mama's voice.
Rattled
One morning I was working my way back up the geophone line I had laid out along a dry creek bed, using my short pick to bury each geophone a few inches below ground. I was just reaching for the next one when a snake's warning rattle froze me in my tracks.
The trick to dealing with a rattler is to spot where it's hiding so you'll know the safest direction to jump. So I stood still and looked around carefully for my visitor, without success. The rattling had stopped, so I figured it must have crawled away. I again reached for the geophone. And again the loud rattle brought me up short. Once more, I looked around, but still no snake. The rattle halted until I again reached for the geophone—then it sounded, louder than before.
By then, I'd looked everywhere for that snake—everywhere except under a small bush, just inches from the geophone. With my pick, I gently pulled it aside and came face-to-face with the biggest rattler I've ever seen. Had it been fish instead of reptile, it would have been Jaws. The only thing between me and snakebite was the rabbit that the snake was in the process of swallowing when I interrupted its breakfast.
Friendly help
Of course, you don't always find rattlesnakes like that. Sometimes they find you. Or, worse yet, your coworkers find them for you. Like the time I finished laying out a geophone line and came back to the truck to find some of my fellow workers grinning at each other like they'd just won a lottery. "Hey," one called to me, "come here."
Now at a moment like that, common sense says you're minutes away from being the butt of a practical joke. But machismo makes you go, anyway. I went over, walking through a big brown patch of dead cacti. They already were laughing so hard they could hardly stand, but they managed to point down at my feet and yell in unison, "Snake!"
I looked down at a rattler with its head tucked under the cactus on which I was standing. My eyes told me the snake was not moving and must be dead. My mind told me that, if it weren't dead, those yahoos wouldn't be standing that close to it. But my feet shouted to me, "Get us the @#&* out of here!"
From a standing start, I leaped 5 ft straight up and 5 ft back in a single bound. If I could have patented that move, I would be a rich man today from royalties I'd be collecting from acrobatic Chinese martial arts movies.
Ironically, the closest I ever came to getting snake-bit was on a bare hill with absolutely nowhere for a rattler to hide. Again, I was burying geophones and was reaching for the next one when I caught a flash of movement out of the corner of my eye. I snatched back my hand just as a baby rattler, the same color as the surrounding dirt, struck the empty air below my palm.
The snake was only a few inches long but as poisonous as an adult. It was so young that there was only a button where its rattle would grow. But that didn't prevent me from chopping it into a jillion pieces with my little pick.
Afterward, I felt weak in the knees and staggered over to a small boulder to sit down. Guess what I heard on the other side of that rock.
