The Snake Didn’t Understand

It’s rattlesnake season in the Santa Monica Mountains. This may not impress those who live in Beverly Hills, but if you’re out hiking in the boondocks around Topanga or above the homeless compounds of nuclear-free Malibu, take heed. The snakes are out early this year and they’re looking for trouble.

My assertion, I know, will be challenged by those who contend that a reptile--unlike, say, an outlaw biker or a member of the Southside Crips--lacks the capacity to look for trouble and will not go out of its way to engage in the kinds of antisocial behavior generally associated with higher forms of life.

“A rattlesnake,” as one animal lover put it,” will not don a ski mask and rob a liquor store or get drunk and run you down in a crosswalk.”

Maybe not, but they will bite rather indiscriminately and the bite can cause a good deal of misery for someone who, in the first place, was simply hiking along a mountain trail or pulling a few weeds.

I am moved to consider rattlers today because of the appearance of two of them in my own back yard and to the anguish a friend endured when he was bitten.

The snakes in my yard were discovered by a worker who killed one and herded the other into a large jar. He took both the live snake and the dead snake with him when he left, for what purpose one can only imagine.

Perhaps, as my wife suggested, he will eat one and use the other for an exciting new form of worship.

The friend who was bitten is Ollie Gunst. He was spraying poison oak recently around his Fernwood home and reached down to pull a clump of weeds and zap! Mr. Snake clamped on his little finger. Ollie spent four days in a hospital, most of it in intensive care.

When I asked him how it felt, he said, “Boy, that was a bummer.” Ollie is Danish and the Danes are not known for either their ebullience or their poetry. That the bite, however, was an occurrence he would not care to repeat came through loud and clear.

A woman in the area who protects All Living Things suggested that the rattler was reacting naturally when Ollie mistakenly jerked it from the ground like a clump of chickweed.

“He grabbed it by the neck,” she said, “and the snake bit him. You’d have done the same thing.”

My wife said later that the woman was mistaken. “You’d have never bitten Ollie,” she said.

“This is a big year for rattlesnakes,” Fire Department Capt. Sam Hernandez told me. “We’ve had six calls already this spring, and that’s just on my shift.”

Hernandez works out of L.A. County Station No. 69 in Topanga, which is called upon whenever there is a problem in the community. Last year, for instance, a firefighter used a shovel to decapitate a rattler coiled under our apricot tree.

“Most of the time we try not to kill them,” Hernandez said. “We try to relocate them to isolated areas.”

The firefighter who did our snake in put it another way. “I’m going to have that little sucker for a hat band,” he said.

A state park ranger calms rattlesnakes by talking to them. I will spare the poor woman mountains of mockery by not using her name.

“It’s only my personal philosophy,” she explained, as though I might misinterpret it as general state policy. No fear of that. Trans-species communication ended in California with the Jerry Brown era.

“I believe we transmit anger, love, hate and peace,” she said. “If I go after a snake with intent to kill, my blood pressure goes up and my heart pounds.”

“You figure a snake knows that?”

“It’ll coil up and get ready to strike, won’t it?” she said. “Creatures detect negative karma.”

I didn’t mention that last year an 8-year-old boy without a hate in his heart reached down to pet a snake and got bitten. “I wish I’d never touched it,” he said later. Ollie Gunst felt the same way.

“I walk up calmly to the snake and say, ‘I’m not going to hurt you,’ ” the ranger said. “ ‘I’m going to take you to a nice, safe place. I’m a ranger, so just stay calm.’ ”

“You tell the snake you’re a ranger?”

“I try to relax him.”

It was only a day later that, driving on a street near our house, I encountered another rattler.

“Stop and explain to Mr. Snake you’re a newspaper columnist,” my wife said.

I ran over Mr. Snake instead.

“Well,” she said, looking back, “I guess he knows it now.”

I guess.