#snakesonplane

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Unexpected

May 5th, 2016

Usually, our car is a safehaven.  When it rains, we run inside and watch the drops roll down the windshield.  When the mosquitoes begin to swarm at dusk, we shut the doors and windows and laugh as they gaze at their inaccessible dinner.  When we get unexpected freezing temperatures, the car becomes the warm cozy bed for the night.  When we get woken up by bears flipping rocks… we scurry from the wimpy nylon of the tent to the confines of the cars metal frame.

Now however, my views of the car as a home sweet home have changed.

After coming back from a day of climbing, I went to clear the hood of our car from the array of items we left drying in the sun.  About to pick up our tin cup, I realized there was a scaley head poking out from beneath it.  Snug under the wiper, running along the base of the windshield was a snake?!  After recovering from the quick shock and confusion, I went back to investigate, but he was on the move, slithering into a tiny hole that enters the engine area.  Rusty arrived, and we began knocking along the metal panels, trying to scare him back out.  Slowly, snakey reappeared on top of the hood, scootching along the windshield.  We finally see that he is about 3 feet long.  I fetched Rusty a super inadequate stick (it’s really hard to find a stick in the desert on short notice), and he wrangled the bugger off the car to the brush about 20 feet away.

Immediately after being placed on the ground, instead of slithering away, the snake made a beeline straight back towards the car!  We brushed him away with the stick, but to no avail. As he settled into an angry coil beneath the car, Rusty hopped inside and carefully backed the vehicle about 25 feet away from the snake.  Eventually, (after finding a better stick), we relocated the agitated dude about 75 feet away from our car and campsite, into a bush. All was well when he slithered under a rock.

Now however,  I no longer see our car as a safe place. From the engine area, there is snake sized access into the car's interior through the holes for the electrical wires.  If he can get on top of the car somehow, he can most defintely get inside.  I now consciously check the floormats for uninvited poisonous or non-poisonous slithery friends looking to hitch a ride or grab a meal.  Maybe that snakes on a plane movie isn't so unreasonable if we have motherFing snakes on our motherFing car.

PS.  No snakes were hurt in the making of this blog post. PPS.  We don’t advise handling snakes.  We deduced that this guy was not a rattler (by the lack of rattle and the shape of his head), however, were unable to fully identify him.   PPSS.  Always have an SD card in your camera or you miss unbelievable things like this and have to write a blog post explaining it.

~Leah Wz.