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Hysterical or Hiss-terical?
It’s been a good while since I’ve killed a snake in my bedroom.
OK, actually I don’t guess I’ve ever killed a snake in my bedroom, until a few months ago … though my sister did encounter a snake in her lingerie drawer years ago in Scottsville. She thought that was quite Freudian, and I guess the good news for mankind was that she did not kill it. She did note that it was a small snake.
Our snake was also pretty small, but any snake encountered at 3 a.m. at the foot of one’s bed appears larger than it probably is. When you get out of bed, groggy-eyed and barefoot, and wonder for a second why your belt is on the floor at your feet, only to have that heart-stopping moment when you realize how unlikely it is that your belt would slither and coil — well, at that point how big the snake is ceases to be important.
I met our snake during a visit Barb and I made in the late summer to a cabin in Southwest Virginia, where we’ve been going every year for the past 20 or so, to take in the Old Fiddlers’ Convention in Galax. We always stay at the same place, a wonderful pre-Civil War log cabin up at Mouth of Wilson where the view won’t quit, high on the ridge of a mountain range home to part of the Appalachian Trail, a fragrant Christmas tree farm and the very spot where the state government relocates all the bears that insist on knocking over trash cans in cities all over the commonwealth.
I mention all that to convey that this cabin is not exactly in the heart of a town or on a busy highway. Actually, it’s not even located in Mouth of Wilson, but outside Mouth of Wilson, in a little community called Volney. There’s no phone (and no cell phone reception), no AC and, until a recent year, no TV.
And, until this year, no snakes.
I never kill things, not even insects. I catch moths and wasps in paper cups and remove them from the house rather than squish them. So I do feel bad about killing something as big as a snake, even a small snake (though one not small enough for paper cup transport). Since it was the middle of the night and Barb was asleep on the other side of the bed, I couldn’t take a chance on having him get away from me to run loose in the room for the rest of the night. If I had had to wake her up and tell her there was a snake in the room somewhere that I had momentarily lost sight of, she would have been in the car in 10 seconds flat, not even waiting to pack, her feet never touching the floor. And I would have missed a lot of most excellent bluegrass music for the rest of that weekend.
Snake, you had to go. I was still trying to think, with my sleep-addled brain, of a way to get him out of the house without hurting him when he went into a coil, assumed a striking position and began to hiss at me. Then I switched from looking for a nonviolent solution to looking for a weapon, and all I could find was a big clay flowerpot — and, well, you don’t want to hear the rest.
When I recounted the story of my heroism to Barb the next morning, she took the news calmly, without even speculating on where the snake’s mother might be at that moment. She even said he probably was not hissing at me at all: “I bet he looked up and saw that big old flowerpot poised above him, and was probably just trying to say, ‘S-s-s-s-s-s-hoot!’”
But I did catch her later on her hands and knees checking under the bed.
Randy Fitzgerald teaches modern American literature at Virginia Union University. He was a longtime public relations director at the University of Richmond and columnist for the Richmond Times-Dispatch. Contact him at
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