Like Finding a Snake in a Driftwood Stack

Probably not many people felt the thrill I did a few weeks back when the prodigious rains of mid-March washed a whole bunch of snakes onto the beach down in Del Mar.

I first heard about it on the evening news. The three-plus inches of rain had reportedly cleaned the canyons behind Del Mar free of snakes and deposited them on the shore. Startled beach-goers were stepping between wads of rattlesnakes bunched up like seaweed, like little devils coughed up from hell itself. The civic workers were collecting them with nooses and piling them into buckets and trash cans. The head count was something like 132 snakes--most of them rattlers.

I watched this footage with the interest of any amateur reptile enthusiast. I noted, in one great big bucket of serpents on camera, the usual suspects--western rattlers, red rattlers, gopher snakes. I thought how lucky those beachcombers were to be able to see such treasures at Del Mar, and hoped they were smart enough to appreciate their good fortune.

Then lightning struck.

I spotted, in this writhing reptilian caldron, one of the most beautiful and rare of all our local snakes--a striped-phase California kingsnake. It stood out from the others like a diamond in a can of beans. For one thing, it was deep chocolate brown and yellow (not the colors of rattlesnakes or gopher snakes), and it was, of course, striped. There it was, four feet of herpetological royalty mixed in with all the commoners.

My heart went out to the elegant thing. I imagined racing down to Del Mar and plucking it from the bucket, then bringing it back for release in Laguna Canyon, but the toll road bulldozers came to mind and I dropped the thought. Why doesn’t somebody put these on an endangered species list? I guarantee you there are fewer of them around than gnatcatchers.

I thought back to the first striped-phase kingsnake I ever saw, which was an even-tempered female my father picked up for me one morning on his way to work at what was then Ford Aeronutronics in Newport. Dad drove the back roads in the morning and he brought me that snake--my first--when I was 8. She was gravid and laid eggs that I was too dumb to know how to hatch. (Later she was swindled away from me by a smooth-talking pet store owner who traded me a common gopher snake for her.)

*

The day after the newscast about Del Mar I saw in the paper a photograph of this same tempting bucket of serpents--the one with the striped kingsnake in it. I stared at that picture, imagining what a thrill it would be to run across such a thing on a beach in the middle of winter. I racked my tiny brain for some way to manage such a thing without a drive all the way to Del Mar, then hit upon San Onofre, where San Mateo Creek empties into the Pacific. It would be crawling with snakes. Perfect!

My brother, his friend Peggy and I got down there late Sunday morning. It was a sunny day with an occasional heavy white cumulus passing over. When the sun was unobscured the day seemed warm. But when a cloud covered the sun you realized it was still mid-March, still winter, still just 30 or so hours since Mother Nature had slapped us with a potent storm. It was the kind of day on which you tie your jacket sleeves around your waist, then you put the jacket on, then you take it off and tie it around your waist again.

We paid our six bucks to park and drove in. There were only three other cars down in front at San Onofre, which was odd because the surf was a consistent four to six feet, powerful and well shaped. It would have been a fine day to be a surfer, unless you were one of the two who tried to paddle out in that mean trough just south of Trestles and ended up being swept about a thousand yards down-current before struggling back to shore exhausted and defeated.

We gazed down the beach at the miles and miles of driftwood and debris washed in by the storm. The pure tonnage was impressive. For as far as the eye could see in either direction, the shoreline was literally piled with stuff. I could almost see the snakes mixed in with it, almost feel that striped king I was confident of finding.

We headed north toward Trestles. At first I started lifting up the driftwood and junk to find the snakes but soon realized there was just too much of it. It seemed obvious that the pure numbers of reptiles would make the lifting unnecessary anyway. Half an hour later I hadn’t found so much as a drowned lizard, though several strands of driftwood kind of looked a little bit snakelike, sort of, maybe.

We encountered a large sea lion lounging just beyond the waterline. He looked old and tired. I tried to imagine what he’d been through in this last storm, what it might be like to be a sea-dwelling mammal in a sea throbbing with storm surf, whipped by wind and pounded by rain. I really couldn’t.

His face was gray and his eyes spoke of experience, age and wisdom. Being true nature lovers, we pestered the poor thing so badly that he fled into the cold water to get away from us.

When we had gone another hundred yards up the beach, I turned around to find him back in his original spot, doing whatever it was he was doing.

By the time we hit San Mateo Creek we hadn’t found a single snake. We stood and watched the swollen creek rush out to sea. There were rapids of shallow white-water down which the gulls bobbed like cork floats. We guessed the water was maybe a hundred feet across and a couple of feet deep and it wouldn’t be prudent to cross it on foot. Stupidly, we figured it was safer to climb the railroad trestle and run along the tracks over the surging creek and pray that the Amtrak out of San Juan didn’t kill us.

“I think that train killed some people here not that long ago,” offered my brother. “What happens is they get on the trestle and can’t hear it coming. It smashes them before they even know it’s there.”

“More people die in train wrecks than in airplane wrecks,” I said, quoting a specious news story I’d heard on the radio the week before.

“Well, if we try it, we better run ,” Peggy said.

For a quasi-religious moment we stood there and listened. You could hear the waves crashing. You could hear the creek rushing. Aw, come on, if a train came you could hear that too, couldn’t you?

We climbed the trestle and looked ahead to the 100-yard sprint to safety on the other side. We looked behind us. We listened. Then we ran full blast.

I raced along, checking behind me. I felt the big rocks shifting under my feet; looked down at the creek below; tried to remember how fast the average man can run. Before I knew it we were on the other side and still alive. We smiled sheepishly and headed down to look at more driftwood.

The train came by 30 seconds later.

I never really heard it, just looked up and there it was--powering silver-gray over San Mateo Creek, irresistible as a force of nature, supple as a cat, undulating gracefully upon the steel track.

Later that day, snake-less and still thinking about the train, I wondered if luck is something you make or just something that’s handed to you. I vote for handed. We loaded a ton of cool driftwood, some empty ammo boxes and good rocks into the truck and headed home.