No, I didn't pee myself

…I don’t recall too many things from my younger years when my mom and I lived with my grandparents. I do remember that I ran around inside and outside the house without any shoes on 90% of the time. Shoes were pretty much only worn when we went to town or the middle of the winter. Periodically I had to be held physically down so they could dig the slivers out of the bottoms of my feet that had accumulated from grandma’s rough wooden floor. I do remember the time I stubbed my foot on Grandpa Busters corked logging boots (those are the boots with the spikes on the soles so loggers can have firm footing while running around on a logs loose bark) thrown to the side of the dinning room as I ran by. With me screaming like a little girl, my grandpa quickly picks me up and takes a look at the damage, puts me back down on the floor and tells me in his deep voice “I’ve been hurt worse eating chicken”. In those days we didn’t get babied, survival of the fittest.

My mom has already chimed in about me not liking spiders but what I really hate is snakes, especially the ones that have rattles on their tail, rattlesnakes. My first vivid recollection of a rattlesnake is when I stepped on one with my bare foot as I was running out through grandma’s front room screen door. It had stretched itself out on the wooden front porch, lying itself in the warm morning sunshine. When I felt it under foot and looked down seeing what I had just stepped on I screamed like a little girl, again and just kept on running. Through my growing up years I have seen dozens of these poisonous snakes and killed a few myself. My next real notable rattlesnake encounter was when I worked for the Forest Service during summer vacations while going to high school. One summer I worked on the trail crew. We were quite a ways out in the Kalmiopsis Wilderness Area maintaining the old trail that passes through Doe Gap. I was hiking ahead of the rest of the trail crew when I suddenly felt something hit the side of my left leg. At first thinking it was a stick that I had kicked up while walking but looking down I see in fact it was a fricking rattlesnake. It was still fanged into my lower pants leg. That is just before I cut him in half with the Swedish brush axe I

was wielding, while leaping sideways and skyward and screaming, yep like a girl,  all in the same half second. Finally coming down on a run I look down and now I still have half a rattlesnake still glommed onto my pants leg. It’s lucky I didn’t cut my damn leg off with that limbing axe trying to get away from that fricking snake. The darn thing had been apparently sunning itself on the back side of an old snag stump that was located right along the edge of the trail. Just as I passed the rotten stump it stuck, startling it or thinking it had a small animal for a meal (I was lighter on my feet in those days). Lucky for me I wore what’s called linemen’s boots, built like a logging boot but with a much higher leather upper portion. The Rattlesnake hit the boot leather rather then the sweet meaty flesh of my leg but it did get fanged into my Levis. After getting him removed in pieces from my leg and my pulse back to something sort of normal I noticed the whole lower part of my pants leg was wet (no not from peeing myself) from venom. I have had a fervent fear of Rattlesnakes ever since that day...