Gary doesn’t like snakes. Not one bit. Living on a farm, though, there are plenty of opportunities for reptilian encounters.

Here are just a few:

Pssst! Up here!

The other morning, Gary headed out to our garage to hop on his John Deere lawnmower, as the grass in our yard is in rapid-growth mode. First, he backed my vehicle out of the way.

Walking back in to get the mower, a scruffy old bird’s nest on the ground right in the middle of the garage caught his eye. As he swept it out, Gary noticed additional “nest fluff” was drifting down from above.

So he looked up …

Smiling down at him was about two feet of snakety snake.

It was his very own Kaa moment from The Jungle Book:

The snake and Gary stared at each other for a moment. Then my husband grabbed a corn fork to help ease his new friend down to terra firma.

Well, the corn fork wasn’t long enough to engage the snake. The rock rake worked great, though, as Gary relocated the three-foot corn snake far, far away from our garage.

Snakes far a-field

Gary shakes his head in disgust as he recollects all the snakes that didn’t watch out for him as much as he watched out for them over the decades.

For example, while baling hay.

Words of Wisdom sidebar: Gary always says it takes three people to bale hay: One person to drive the tractor, one person to unplug the baler, one person to cuss full-time.

On one particular day, Gary’s dad was driving their Allis-Chalmers tractor, pulling a roto-baler. My future husband noticed with a start that a snake was in the windrow and it was too late to do anything about it.

“Thppp! Into the baler it went,” he described with a gleam in his eye. The “thppp” sound effect was like when you suck in the final four inches of that last piece of spaghetti.

Gary knew no snake would survive the rollers of the roto-baler. But he also knew he wouldn’t survive coming upon Flat Snakey months later when unrolling that particular straw bale for moo-cow bedding. So he made note of where he placed that bale on the wagon and later removed the serpent before storing the straw in a barn.

Don’t make me say it again: Chew your food!

This story is from Gary’s late mom. She grew up on a farm, too, and had her share of run-ins with snakes.

Once, when she was young, a snake got too close to the house and was given a fast-pass to snake heaven. Curious about an impressive bulge in the snake’s otherwise sleek physique, one of Rita’s brothers used a pocketknife to take a look.

Out popped a froggy. He’d apparently been swallowed alive – and whole – and was greatly appreciative of the children’s inquisitiveness. He quickly hopped away.

A theater asp (or two)

Back in the late 1980s, I was business manager for a few years at Lincoln Amphitheatre, a 1,500-seat venue in nearly Lincoln State Park.

One evening, I’d escorted a travel writer to her seat close to the enormous stage. As I headed back up top, where no one was sitting, I noticed something move.

Saints preserve us – a snake!

What to do, what to do. I didn’t want to draw attention to it by screaming, as tempting as that was. The sun had just set and the amphitheatre was cool enough that perhaps the really, really long snake would stay put while I called for a park ranger.

But in that massive seating area, how would I remember the snake’s exact location? (This was long before cell phones with built-in cameras.)

A quick look at the seat row solved the problem instantly.

Row S.

S is for Snakes. The ranger arrived within minutes and stealthily escorted the cold-blooded audience member off to a more suitable locale.

Things didn’t go quite as smoothly later in the season. I was getting pretty worn out and decided to head for home right after Act 2 of the musical drama Young Abe Lincoln got underway. It was about 9pm and instead of walking down the long curvy drive to the parking lot, I descended the three flights of concrete stairs.

About six steps from the bottom, I stopped in my tracks. There was a huge snake! I ran back up the steps to the box office and called for a ranger.

They sent two.

It was a copperhead. A biggie. And an uncooperative one at that. The rangers are trained in relocating snakes, but even they struggled capturing it using what looked like a very long fishing pole with a noose at the end of it.

Standing and watching from a safe distance, my anxiety increased with each song that wafted out of the amphitheatre. Soon, very soon, 800 audience members would be heading our way.

Just in the nick of time, that pain in the asp was captured and whisked away to a new home. So much for me getting home “early” that night – but at least I had a good story for Gary!

And speaking of copperheads, Gary says his late Uncle Joe and cousin Renus were collecting fieldstone for use in landscaping years ago. Copperheads have a distinctive smell and Renie nervously asked his dad if he’d caught a whiff. Joe replied he didn’t smell a thing and they went back to work.

Later, Joe fessed up to Gary that he’d smelled it, too, but knew if he’d admitted it, “I’d be picking up all those rocks by myself.”

You’re gonna need bigger windshield wipers

About a dozen years ago, Gary was discing a field fairly close to our house. He was watching out for snakes, as always.

Now before you try to explain that there are good snakes and bad snakes, poisonous and non-poisonous, let me just tell you: Gary’s having none of it. “Snakes is snakes,” he says, and that conversation is over.

At one with nature in the field, Gary noticed a hawk flying overhead. He figured the hawk was looking for breakfast, and there was a tasty morsel in the field somewhere.

The red-tailed hawk suddenly swooped down into the field and then straight up into the sky again.

The tasty morsel was a four-foot snake.

“Better thee than me,” Gary thought as he watched the hawk fly westward, the snake twisting and turning all the while.

Finally, the hawk had enough and released the snake, which fell to earth.

Well, not exactly. The moment of release took place over our country road and a car just happened to be driving directly below.

A car? Our son John’s car. The snake fell onto his windshield as poor John was driving to work. It bounced off and slithered away. No doubt in the direction of our garage …

John couldn’t wait to tell his dad about it that night. “Dad! You won’t believe what fell on my windshield this morning!”

“Oh, I saw,” Gary said with a shudder, and commenced to tell his middle son the rest of the story.

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