Inspired by Snakes on a Plane

With the random talk about the sure to be aweful Sam Jackson movie, Snakes on a Plane, going around on the internet, I got to thinking about my own experiences with snakes. I'm not the biggest fan of said reptile, but I find them curiously interesting. Whenever Kristin and I visit the pet stores in our frequent mall crawls, we take plenty of time to examine the reptiles, especially the snakes. I'm pretty sure before too long we'll have one as a pet.

When I was growing up on the farm, I'd occasionally see snakes here and there. Usually they were gardener snakes that weren't much bigger than the length of your forearm and no thicker than a hot dog. I never tried to pick them up or play with them because I was a little bit spooked by them (it's the slithering!), but I would often examine them as they moved across the yard or through the fields.

One day as I was bailing hay for our neighbor, who thought it was fun to promise to pay us $6 an hour and then only give us $4 an hour (at this time the minimum wage was something like $4.50 or so). Let me tell you, $4 an hour for bailing hay is not worth it in the least. Bailing is easily the hardest farm work I ever had the pleasure of doing. I'd rather wrestle a hoard of midgets for $4 an hour before bailing for my neighbor ever again.

So as we were bailing it came time to unload the 5 or 6 hay racks we'd filled throughout the afternoon into the hay loft of the barn. Since the loft was usually 100+ degrees because it was enclosed and insulated with an inordinate amount of bails around the edges, of course it was my job to be up there while our neighbor unloaded the bails off of the racks.

As the bails were coming up into the loft, I was busy stacking them, at one hell of a pace I may add, because all my lazy neighbor had to do was set the bails on the conveyor that took them up to the loft while I had to get them off the conveyor, carry them to the area of the loft where I was stacking them, and then stack them. So it was a lot more work for me and I couldn't control the speed they were coming. Yeah, this was my least favorite part of bailing.

In a rush to catch up with the stack of bails that was accumulating at the end of the conveyor, I was stacking somewhat haphazardly, and as I tossed the bail I had up onto the fourth row stack, which was a little over shoulder height, a wiley snake came tumbling down onto me! I almost filled my drawers since I was absolutely not expecting to be assaulted by a snake while stacking bails.

I could have sworn the snake wriggled its way out of the bail I was hoisting up, but that would have meant it somehow survived getting scooped up by the bailer, getting packed into a bail, and then didn't somehow get killed when the bail was tied off, shot out, and stacked by myself. That would be quite a feat for a snake, if you ask me.

So if this little story teaches you anything, snakes are badass mofo's, and you definitely don't want a group of them taking over a plane. They can survive ANYTHING.