Rattled

SHAWN JONAS is on the prowl. It’s a windy morning in Central Texas. Gusts hammer the metal roofing of an old abandoned farm as Jonas combs through the tall grass, littered with rusted slabs of sheet metal. There’s no explaining why homesteaders left such a mess, but that was years ago. Today this is rattlesnake country, home of the Western diamondback.

Jonas starts pounding on the debris. His buddies do the same. Each carries the tool of the trade -- a pinner -- a golf club-like instrument, perfect for making a racket and for nailing a snake. The din starts picking up. One man kicks over a metal cone, revealing two coiled snakes, their tails buzzing softly. Jonas edges closer and, after jumping back a couple of times, pins the snake’s neck against the black prairie soil, grabs the snake behind the jaws and plants his thumb against its skull in a three-point headlock.

One of Jonas’ buddies opens a burlap sack. Jonas eases the tail inside, and in one frantic motion, releases his fingers on the jaws and chucks the head into the bag. Instantly his friend twists the neck of the sack and ties it shut.

Next stop: the Taylor rodeo grounds where crowds are gathering for the 33rd Annual National Rattlesnake Sacking Championship, one of 28 annual rattlesnake roundups in the United States.

As legend has it, roundups started in the 1920s when communities cleared schoolyards and parks of the vipers during the spring. But this explanation -- as with many rattlesnake tales -- is more convenient than real. Small towns from Georgia to New Mexico learned that rattlers draw crowds and crowds bring money. Whether set up as a roadside attraction or a carnival, roundups hype the human fear factor. Boys, and a few girls, test their mettle in snake stunts, and the Jaycees cash in.

Roundups’ forked road

In recent years the contests have dwindled in number due to changing times. Not many young men want to scout snake dens when they can blast aliens in a video game, and animal rights groups call the stunts brutal and protest the slaughter of reptiles at such shows as the popular roundup held in Sweetwater, Texas, near Abilene.

“The roundups are extremely cruel but people can ignore the cruelty because a reptile can’t scream,” says Andrea Cimino, wildlife campaign coordinator for the Humane Society of the United States. “It’s hard to tell if a snake is suffering.”

In their defense, snake handlers argue the contest is no meaner than a rodeo. “I use [snakes] just like I’d use a horse if I was rodeoing,” says snakeman Jackie Bibby.

Some biologists say the roundups could deplete snake numbers, but population surveys are inconclusive. In some states such as Pennsylvania, Cimino says, snake rustlers pursue timber rattlers, a threatened species. But that’s not the case in Texas where the Western diamondback is plentiful, according to Andy Price, biologist for Texas Parks and Wildlife Department.

Regardless, snake handlers seem immune to critics. At one event, the snakemen at Taylor walked right past activists who chained themselves to a fence in protest. As rattler roundup photographer Chris Hamilton puts it: “They really don’t care what you think.”

At the rodeo grounds, snake handlers drink beer and show off their catches before crowds arrive. Shane Mowery fishes around in his truck bed for an empty cat litter bottle. He turns it upside down and dumps a rattler on the macadam. Mowery advertises himself as a snake-removal expert -- the herpetological equivalent of a termite exterminator. He boasts that he has 17 rattlers at his house.

As more hunters arrive in pickups, drag out coolers and release their squirming wares, it becomes obvious that a rattlesnake is hardly a demon. When a handler’s attention strays and a snake is momentarily free, it lies still or tries to crawl away. Throughout the event, the men strive to make the snakes look menacing while the snakes mostly try to escape.

The circle of snakemen makes way for the arrival of the show’s star, Bibby, holder of four world records in rattlesnake stunts. Wearing his trademark black derby, the Fort Worth resident is built like Shrek, with the green ogre’s bald head and friendly demeanor.

Bibby claims to have been struck by a rattler eight times and proudly shows off his left thumb, which is whittled to a point like a sharpened pencil. The dead flesh around the bone was removed after a bite he received at Taylor last year. “We was winnin’ and I didn’t want to quit so I stood around and stood around,” Bibby says. He didn’t go to the hospital until a week later when the pain had become “a burning, horrendous, terrible feeling.”

Bibby may be speaking for all snakemen when he explains his reason for playing with vipers: “I’m an egomaniac with an inferiority complex and I’ll do anything to get attention.”

The other snake handlers look up to the 54-year-old drug and alcohol rehabilitation counselor. He’s the only one of them who has appeared on “The Steve Harvey Show” and the only one who travels with an entourage fitting a rock ‘n’ roll star: motor home, kids, groupies, handlers and a giant monitor lizard named Monty.

Bibby’s peers are less flashy. Shawn Jonas grew up roping and riding cattle, but today the 32-year-old is a customer service representative at a telecommunications company. His hometown, Taylor, is drenched in Western character but the West is getting hard to find, squeezed out by a new Super Wal-Mart and by the high-tech industries infiltrating from Austin 25 miles southwest. Struggling through a divorce and often chained to his cellphone, Jonas seems wedged uncomfortably between worlds.

His buddies find what jobs they can as meat cutters and prison guards, but they grew up with bolder dreams. Their heroes were Pecos Bill, a mythical Texas hero who rode a mountain lion and used rattlesnakes for reins, and in Taylor itself there was Bill Pickett, a black cowboy who invented the sport of bulldogging when he bit an ornery bull’s lip and held on like a bulldog. Jonas is no Pecos Bill or a Pickett, but he can stuff 10 rattlers into a sack faster than most anyone.

Getting the party started

Once underway, the roundup starts to spin with carnival rides and trinket vendors. The air smells of popcorn and beer, and a wet-dog stink emanates from a booth where vendors sell snakeskins. The stage is enclosed with Plexiglas and elevated so that spectators can watch the show from the snakes’ point of view. Some 80 diamondbacks skulk in the corners. A few shimmy up the walls trying to escape, but most -- even the huge ones with heads the size of a man’s fist -- try to crawl to the bottom of the pile, away from kids rapping on the side of the pen.

As many as four or five men stand around the snake pit. They wear starched jeans and high boots to protect themselves from ankle strikes, and they kick back into place any snakes that venture from the corners. Coiled snakes skate across the polished floor like hockey pucks. To incite strikes, the handlers wave a boot inches over the huddled snakes. The snakes that spring out are rewarded with a kick to the head. As the tension mounts, the rattling sounds like steady rain.

A handler grips a snake with the three-point lock and dangles it in front of the spectators, daring them to touch its cool, smooth belly and examine the rattles, delicate as seedpods. The handler then squeezes open the snake’s pink mouth inches from a viewer’s face and jams his pinner under the fangs until a drop of lemonade-yellow venom oozes out.

When the show begins, handlers in blue T-shirts with “Heart of Texas Snake Handlers” printed across them, tease individual snakes out of the tangled heaps and toss them in the middle of the arena. For his first stunt, Jackie Bibby stuffs six snakes, tail first, into his mouth and spins around like a Tilt-a-Whirl.

“No way! There’s no way!” a man in the crowd shouts.

The announcer says: “Let me stress to you children never ever play with snakes out in the wild. Leave ‘em alone. They’re dangerous.”

The handlers unfurl a sleeping bag on the floor and a goateed man crawls inside. His friends feed snake after snake into the bag, then zip it shut. Perhaps not surprisingly, nothing happens. Rattlesnakes are not inclined to strike if you hold still or move slowly, but that would be news for the crowd.

The big event -- snake sacking -- calls for teams of two to race the clock pitching 10 snakes into a burlap sack. Most contestants are rough with their pinners, snatching, grabbing, even stepping on snakes. But when Bibby and his partner, Ken Garrett, take the stage, the tempo changes.

Garrett claims to be something of a snake whisperer, handling the snakes before a competition to sense their temperament and trying to calm them rather than rile them. “I’m a hunter,” he says. “I believe in man’s dominion over all animals. The snakes are there for the use of man.”

Once Garrett has his snakes lined up, the race begins, and he flings them, tail first, one after another into the sack that Bibby holds open.

When they’re done, the announcer reads off the times and proclaims Bibby and Garrett winners, with a time of 30.75 seconds, but the speaker system garbles his words and by now no one in the crowd really cares.

At the end of the roundup, the snakes are packed into plywood boxes and stacked in Robert Ackerman’s truck. Ackerman’s a snake dealer who pays up to $3 a pound depending on the market. A large diamondback will earn its handler as much as $9 and be sold off for snake kebabs, golf balls, coin purses and cellphone cases.

Ann Japenga lives in Palm Springs. Some of her essays have been anthologized in “True Tales of the Mojave: From Talking Rocks to Yucca Man.”