Sharing a hole with a snake
A couple months ago, my best friend from Fort Worth was down for a few days, and I got him to help me put in a new drain line for the new walk-in shower I’m installing. The new line had to be tied into the existing sewer line underneath the porch decking. I had the deck boards removed and we dug down to the existing sewer pipe. In order to connect to the sewer line, the pipe had to be cut and to do this, all the dirt had to be cleaned from around the pipe.
The hole was about three feet deep and my buddy was upside down in the hole head first and was cleaning the dirt from around the pipe with a garden tool. I didn’t know this at the time, but my buddy has a serious phobia for snakes. Well, this black snake about three feet long was apparently sleeping in a cranny underneath the porch and decided to slither into the hole.
I had never heard my friend scream like a girl before, but he did that day. I had also never seen him move so fast. When he made it out of the hole, which didn’t take but a second or two, he was a much lighter shade of white. Fortunately, the snake was not a lethal species, but instead was a common water snake. It did look a lot like the lethal water moccasin though.
As soon as my buddy got out of the hole, he grabbed the shovel we used to dig the hole and pinned the reptile to the bottom of the pit. He then began poking the snake with a wild intensity. He probably could have killed the snake with the curse words spewing from his mouth. The snake did not suffer, but my best friend will never be the same. He was not bitten or harmed in any way, but that is the last hole he will ever stick his head in. When it was determined that the snake was in fact not a water moccasin, we both had a good laugh. We laughed for different reasons however. I laughed at how fast Robert exited the hole backwards, then at his nearly white color. I also laughed at how wildly he flailed the shovel at the snake and his long strings of curse words which continued for some time.. He laughed simply because he had survived the ordeal.
When you live in a swamp, there are always critters to deal with and you just never know when you are going to run into something unexpectedly. This is reality, but it is still always a little unnerving. My buddy will never be the same, but we are and always will be best friends.
