Chapter 6 ~ Things That Slither!

I don’t like snakes and never have.  It may go back to my having heard stories about what one of them did to Eve in The Garden, but personally, I think it goes back to the Heber Creeper incident when I was 8.* 

The Heber Creeper is a narrow- gauge railroad that runs from Heber City to Provo, Utah, through the Provo canyon.  At one time, I understand, it was a prolific and functional rail line.  Today it is used mostly by tourists or by Hollywood types when they want to portray an old narrow-gauge steam engine on the screen.  When I first knew it, it was just two rusted bands of iron tied together with ancient and weather wood.  Weeds grew along the line and between the rail ties, unhampered by more than the foot traffic of an occasional fisherman.

My grandfather was one such fisherman.  He had a favorite summer fishing hole, a place where the Provo River eddied around a cluster of rocks.  That’s where the big ones hid – in the deep pool created by the eddy.  I loved my grandfather.  I lived for the summers when I could spend a week by myself in Provo with him and my grandmother.  I was especially excited when he would close the barbershop for the day and we would drive up into the canyon. 

My great-aunt Ett had a cabin in Wildwood, just across the road from the Provo River.  I can still hear the sound of the tiny creek that trickled over the rocks under the back porch.  I loved to lay in the big bed at night, listening to the crickets and the flow of the water, snuggled in a thick quilt to keep warm against the surprisingly cool nights so high in the Wasatch Mountains.  The sounds and the coolness and the fresh pine smells would lull me to sleep, despite my excitement and anticipation of going fishing with Grandpa in his special place at dawn.

On one such morning, I awoke with the sun full on my face.  I could hear my grandmother and my aunt talking in the kitchen.  I pulled on my jeans and shirt and hurriedly laced my oxfords, only to find that my grandfather had left without me.  In retrospect, he probably needed some time without my constant chattering, but at the time I was crushed.  After breakfast, Grandma and Aunt Ett sat down to play gin rummy and I was left to my own devices.  Did I ever tell you that I was sometimes a very mischievous little girl?

It didn’t take long for me to become bored and I was certainly hurt by having been left behind.  I knew the way to the special place.  I’d gone there with Grandpa often enough.  I walked down the dirt lane, crossed the highway by the park and headed across the Provo River on a thin suspension bridge. (What was it Kathleen Turner said to Michael Douglas in Romancing the Stone?  “That’s not a bridge; that’s Pre-Colombian art!”  That scene could have been filmed at that spot on the Provo River!)  Once across the road, I found the tracks of the Heber Creeper.  All I had to do was to turn left and follow the tracks.

It’s amazing how quiet it is when one is a chatterbox and there is no one to whom to chatter!  I remember humming to myself, quite oblivious to my surroundings, when I heard a humming sound that wasn’t coming from me.  I stopped in the middle of the tracks and listened.  The sound seemed to be coming from a bush to the left side of the track about parallel to where I stood.  I’d never heard anything quite like it and wondered for a moment if it might be a cricket.  If I caught a cricket and took it to my grandfather to use as bait, perhaps he wouldn’t be so upset with me for doing what I was in the process of doing. 

I took one small step closer to the bush and that cricket buzzed even louder.  I don’t know what it was at that moment, short of divine intervention, but I was suddenly terrified.  I began to run and I didn’t stop until I reached the special place and found my grandfather.  Fortunately, he was a creature of habit and was actually there.  Unfortunately, he was just as angry with me as I thought he would be.  He immediately reeled in his line and marched me back up the tracks of the Heber Creeper toward home. 

Unbeknownst to me, my grandmother had discovered my absence shortly after I left and, having once been a very mischievous little girl herself, quickly surmised what I had done.  My dad’s cousin, Wils, was playing tennis just down the road and my grandmother sent him after me.  About the time my grandfather and I were about to the place where I had heard the cricket, we saw Wils.  He was just standing there, looking down at something in the middle the tracks at his feet.  When we got closer, I could see what was crumpled there, its head hidden under a rock:  a huge snake, still coiled, with a pattern of diamonds down its back and it’s rattle laying oddly still at the end of its tail.

~ ~ ~


Carmon actually liked snakes.  Maybe liked is too strong a word; he respected them.  Like so many things in nature, he seemed to have an innate sense of their purpose in the larger scheme of things. I, on the other hand,  thought they had been put on this earth simply to scare the bedoobies out of me!

I often told Carmon that he’d been born 100 years too late.  He would have made a wonderful pioneer or mountain man.  If you took him out into the wilderness, stripped him naked, and left him 1,000 miles from nowhere, so long as you left him his pocketknife, he’d survive.  Not only survive, he would flourish.  I used to have visions of such an event occurring and of the powers-that-be coming back a year later to find that he’d carved a kingdom.  Nowhere was this affinity for nature more apparent than in his relationship with snakes.

Unfortunately, he also had a slightly warped sense of humor about them.  I remember the night, early in our marriage, when I went into the bathroom to wash up before fixing dinner only to find a large rattlesnake curled up in the bathroom sink.  The fact that it was made of rubber didn’t make me stop screaming, first in terror, then at him. 

Years later, I saw a similar sight of a rattlesnake coiled up, this time in a dish in my refrigerator.  I had the same sense of shock, followed by revulsion.   This one wasn’t made out of rubber.  It was skinned.  Carmon later rolled it in flour, salt, and pepper, and fried it in bacon grease.  He and the children ate it for dinner.  They said it tasted like chicken.  I couldn’t tell you if that’s true or not.  I never tasted it.  I spent the evening shut up in my bedroom!

© Gebara Education, 2001.  No portion of this book may be copied by any method without the express written permission of the author

* To read more about the Heber Creeper snake, go to http://www.lds.org/friend/2005/08/run?lang=eng for a short story I wrote about the incident from a child's point of view for the Friend magazine.

Picture of river with bridge from www.photoshow.com  
Picture of snake rattle from www.wikipedia.com
Picture of rubber snake from www.lovodobari.freehosting.bg  
Picture of Texas Rattlesnake Recipe from www.weekendcowgirl.com