I pulled into the driveway as the sun was starting to set, happy to finally get home. As the garage door went up, I noticed something moving by the threshold – a snake.
Panic immediately set in because I have a gigantic fear of snakes. And now one was between me and my back door.
I didn’t know if the snake was poisonous or harmless – as if a snake could be harmless, I thought with a shiver running down my back.
I sat in the car, motor idling, watching the motionless snake. Maybe it was dead, I thought.
And then it started to slither. Not very far, but just enough to let me know it was alive and waiting for me.
As I watched that snake, the irrational fears took over. The three-foot long brown snake suddenly grew to about 10 feet in length. I couldn’t see the snake’s head, but in my imagination, the head turned and the fangs were bared, poison dripping from each sharp tooth. The venom was burning into the concrete as the snake tried to hypnotize me with its snake eyes.
I forced myself to return to reality and looked across the street to see if my neighbor was home. Arthur loves snakes and is my go-to person whenever I spot something reptilian in our back yard and my husband’s not home.
Arthur’s rescued me before. My husband was out of town one evening, but he’d told me to call Arthur if I saw any critter in the back yard that bothered me. I went out to empty the pool’s skimmer basket, and that’s when I saw something black and thin swimming across the water.
I pulled out my cell phone and called my neighbor.
“Arthur, there’s a snake in our pool,” I said, my voice shaking. “Can you come over and get it out?”
I’d barely gotten the second phrase out of my mouth when Arthur came running up my driveway, his twin 8-year-old boys right behind him.
He leaned over the pool and smiled.
“It’s just a water snake,” he said. “Perfectly harmless.”
To which I gave a very logical reply.
“Good,” I said. “Kill it. Kill it dead and kill it quick.”
He told me that snake wouldn’t hurt anything and was actually beneficial to our back yard. The snake, he said, killed rats and other undesirables lurking in our back yard.
“That’s nice,” I said. “Kill it.”
Being the animal lover he is, Arthur got the snake out of the pool and relocated it to the furthest reaches of our back yard. That had to be hard to do when an irrational woman was screaming “Kill it Arthur! Kill it!”
But tonight, Arthur wasn’t home.
My husband wasn’t home.
It was me and the snake.
I had an advantage, I thought. I was in my car. That vehicle weighs 2,000 pounds, much more than a snake. One push on the accelerator and I could squish that snake flatter than, well, a snake.
Almost as quickly as I thought about using my car as a battering ram, my hopes were dashed. The snake was right next to the small step up into the garage and the car tires would go right over the reptile and he’d be free to chase after the car and the driver that tried to kill him.
And then I knew what I had to do. The only way to get in my house safely was for me to get out of my car, run into the garage, get the hoe and hack that snake to death.
After five minutes of trying to talk myself out of it, I finally opened the car door, put my foot out and touched the toe of my sneaker to the concrete. And then the snake did a remarkable thing.
It slithered away into the grass.
It was safe. I was safe. No harm. No foul.
I pulled my car into the garage, ran into the house and slammed the door shut. I knew that I’d come a long way toward conquering my fear of snakes, just by putting my foot out of the car.
But between you and me, dear reader, I’m not sure I conquered anything. Let’s just say in the battle between woman and snake, hesitation was the definite winner.
This column was originally published in The Fort Bend Herald.