Yikes, It's a Snake! One More Time God Spared My Life

Let me go back in time. I forgot all about this event, which was pretty significant. When I was about 10 or 11, I attended Camp Fire Girls weekly and loved it. My mom saved enough for me to go to camp that summer for a week. We got to sleep in cots outside and it was great fun. I remember the big pool that we got to swim in every day....except.....

One night a friend, named Colleen, and I were talking late into the night. When our camp counselor told us to keep it down, Colleen crept over to my sleeping bag and together we continued our conversation until we felt something heavy work its way onto our legs on the cot. It was dark but we could see it was a large snake.

We decided the best plan was to keep absolutely still until it left. But it curled up and went to sleep. After what seemed like a couple hours, Colleen could take it no longer and decided to get out of the sleeping bag and run, which she did. At that point, she rudely disrupted the sleep of the snake, who got mad and struck out. I was left alone and so it bit me on my knee and foot as I too escaped.

We went immediately to the camp counselor and woke her up and told her what happened. She laughed and said it was unlikely. We took her to my cot, where the snake was back to sleep. When she saw it she nearly fell over the cot next to mine trying to back away. I have such a visual memory of this event.

She then went and woke up the camp nurse and people in charge. They made a tourniquet around my upper leg and raced me to an emergency room. They cut open the two places where the snake had bit me; the snake fang marks were still there. I don't remember what else they did. In my memory they drew out a lot of blood from the sites of the bites, but that could just be a child's image of what happened. They said it was either a side winder or a blue racer from the descriptions. But if it was a side winder, I think I would have been dead, don't you?

A blue racer; from animalspot.net

In any case, they took me back to camp, with bandages. The worst part was that they wouldn't let me swim the rest of the week. I was pretty bummed about that.

When my mom came to pick me, up no one told her what had happened. I described it all to her on the way home and showed her where the snake had bit. She had a hard time believing it, but eventually, seeing where the bites had been, she did. I had scars over those two places for several years. I still remember it was my right knee and left foot where it bit me.

Since then I haven't much liked snakes. Guess they don't like me either. One day when we lived on our ten acres I was getting ready to do some wash. I opened the lid and saw that the inside tub rim at the top was all curvy. It looked like the rim had melted or something. Then it moved! I screamed, closed the lid, and Bill came running, When he opened the lid, the snake was still there. He went to get our nearest neighbor, Spence Wimer, who brought his BB gun and killed the snake right there inside the washing machine.

We've since had more encounters with snakes when we lived on land in Athens, Ohio, but nothing so dramatic as the ones shared here. When I was in ninth grade, I wrote my narrative story about this event (the story that Ray Bradbury read--if you saw that blog).