Nature Comes Calling

A note to readers

Dear readers,

Just to keep the record current, I’m now posting on the blog the newsletter that I sent round to subscribers last year in early fall, with some edits incorporated. I finally resolved the issues that had me looking for a new web host. So we’re back in business, and another new post will be ready for you within the next month. For the time being, you can re-read this one if you like—I’ve updated it with the dénouement of the adventure detailed herein.

Yours in perpetual gardening,
Hecate, the truly Inconstant

Adventure Strikes

11 Sept. 2023

The indented part of my Subaru dashboard—the place housing the little screen that tells you your MPG and nags you to get service—looked weird when I got into the car. It had yellow stripes and it moved.

Ever seen something way out of place and had your brain fail to register it at first? It must have been at least 2 seconds before my amygdala (always first past the post in such situations) shrieked Snake!!! Well, not a big deal. I studied my brother’s Boy Scout manual as a kid, so I knew this wasn’t rattler, coral snake, or *heaven forbid* water moccasin. Not poisonous. I feel kindly towards snakes, and had been wishing for some in my garden. Especially one big enough to dispatch my rabbits. But nonetheless, a snake in my car??? Where it most certainly did not belong?

I doubted I’d be quick enough to grab him just behind the head (Boy Scout manual tip). So I rummaged thru the bags on my passenger seat for a canvas one, the better to capture Slither-in with. But he meanwhile he must have done some thinking too. When I looked up from the bag, I saw him half disappeared down the vent for the windshield defroster. Dropping the bag, I made a grab for his tail, but not fast enough. Slither-in had slithered out.

What the ???

We pause for a moment to consider this question. How would a snake get into my car? I’ve read about snakes somehow sidling their snaky way into the landing gear of planes, stowing away and riding across thousands of miles of ocean. Like the brown tree snakes of Australia that landed in Guam back in the 1940s. They have since eliminated nearly all of Guam’s native birds and other vertebrates, before hitching more rides and spreading to other Pacific islands.

A relative of the dramatis persona.
Photo by Courtney Celley/USFWS, https://www.flickr.com/photos/usfwsmidwest/37741563212/

But tree snakes specialize in climbing. This little guy (maybe 18” long) was an earthbound fellow. The best I can figure, he’s probably a garter snake, unless he’s a salt marsh snake who somehow hitched a previous ride up from the Gulf Coast. Near as I can figure, he must have been cozily settled inside the bale of salt marsh hay that I bought week before last and left in the car for a day or so before moving it to the garage. No doubt he decided to grab a nap on the dashboard to recover from the exertion of working his way up that high. Too bad he woke up before I could catch him.

Adventures in Problem-solving

What to do? I do not qualify for dismantling dashboards. So I phoned my local car repair shop and explained the situation. The answer came back, after some discussion in the background: they do not do snakes. Then I called my usual Subaru service shop, the one I’ve shelled out big bucks to every six months or so for the past ten years. They said they Don’t Do Snakes either. They even declined to take the dashboard apart so I could get at the snake myself. I am not feeling the love, O Subaru.

Next, I called the town animal control officer, who promised to get to me as soon as she’d seen a lady about a dog bite. She pulled into my driveway in a huge white truck round about 11 ack emma and proceeded to investigate. Naturally, Slither-in had not obliged by sunning himself again on the dashboard. So she had only my word for it that there was indeed a snake camped inside. She poked around under in the dark nether regions between the dash and the floor but found nothing.

Then she investigated the rest of the car, such as she could see for the junk that I have stored in the back seat and the rear compartment. No Slither-in. She banged on the dashboard, poked around a bit inside the windshield vent with a zigzaggy metal stick. Nada. We even opened the hood of the car to see whether a snake might have exited that way, but it looked pretty tight. She went back to inspecting the interior. Meanwhile I refilled the windshield-washer fluid that, while peering under the hood, I discovered badly needed replenishing. Better than standing by just watching.

Wherein the Author Elicits Insights on Animal Control

While she was hunting for the snake-in-car, she shared with me the story of an adventure in animal control she experienced two days earlier, chasing an escaped heifer up hill and down dale for four hours. “Every time I managed to get near her,” she told me, “somebody would come running up to ‘help’ and scare her, and I’d have to track her and try all over again.” Heiffy got herself across a busy main road twice and traveled several miles in the course of her wanderings. By the time she graduates to full cow she’ll have bored her fellow bovines to moo point with the tales of her travels.

Finally, around noon, the animal officer confessed herself stumped about what to do to find my critter. She opined that, given that location of his hideout, only a Subaru specialist should be removing pieces to find the darned thing. Then, having retrieved her flashlight from my car’s interior and her sunglasses from the roof of my car, she was off to her next adventure.

The Zen of Snake Removal

Okay. Car repair places don’t do snakes. Animal officers don’t do cars. Now what? I called two friends who use a different Subaru repair place, thinking they might persuade the guy running it to cope with this novel situation. One of them knows a lot about cars (has one just like mine, only cleaner) and snakes, and she said there are plenty of small holes all over cars and the serpent would find its own way out. She said it would cost way too much to remove the dashboard for a snake hunt.

Reassured, I decided to leave the car in the driveway for the weekend and let nature take its course.

Today, though, I really had to get to the grocery store.

I was certain that by now the snake would have long departed. I drove myself blithely to Trader Joe’s, spent a good 45 minutes in the store carefully selecting fresh veggies and healthy proteins and then buying a bunch of stuff I shouldn’t have, wheeled the cart to the car, carefully arranged the four bags of groceries in the back seat, slid into the driver’s seat and lo! There was Slither-in, stretched out where the windshield meets the dashboard, enjoying the view on the driver’s side. And dang if he isn’t at least 24” long, maybe longer!

Again, he reacted faster than I could, and before I could decide what to do, he’d turned around, gotten himself to the passenger side, dropped to the floor and disappeared under the front passenger seat. By the time I got over to that side of the car, he had once more vanished.

In Which We Ponder Meaning

You may wonder what philosophical insights I could possibly derive from this situation. I suppose I could reflect upon the over-compartmentalization of expertise, such that neither experts on cars nor experts 0n animal control can figure out how to extract a snake (animal) from a Subaru (car). But no, we’re all already used to that Catch-22, aren’t we? (And frankly, I’m glad the animal control officer didn’t try taking apart my dashboard.)

I could observe that if I could unwittingly pick up an animal that ain’t where it oughta be and drive all over with him in my car, then maybe it’s not so surprising that plenty of flora and fauna get transported to new environments where they wreak havoc. (What havoc is the snake wreaking, you might ask? Not much, I guess. But I’m extrapolating, which is what philosophy is for anyway, no?)

Or I could just note that whenever you think you’ve seen everything?—You haven’t.

As for Slither-in, he’s had plenty of escape chances. I opened the passenger window for him and he chose to slink off and hide instead. I left three car doors open while I unloaded the groceries but I suspect he never took the opportunity to decamp to my waiting garden.

Poetic Justice?

He’ll regret it. By now, unless he’s discovered a hidden store of snake food in my car, he hasn’t eaten in at least ten days. Had he cut and run, he could at this very moment be feasting out in the garden on invasive jumping worms and slugs and tiny (very tiny; his mouth is small) mice.

And as for the Subaru service shop, well, my dashboard screen reminds me every day that I need to get an oil change, replace filters, and get the tires rotated. They may end up Doing A Snake after all.

Epilogue: A Week Later

By this point I was certain that snake was either dead or gone. So I wasn’t exactly primed for action when I sauntered out to the car on a misty later-in-September morning. Before even opening the door, I spied Slither-in, back in his favorite basking spot soaking up the rays that had just started to hit there.

With lightning reaction speed and great determination (translation: in a panic), I spun myself back to the front stoop and grabbed up my gardening gloves. Then I whipped open the driver-side door, grabbed Slither-in before he had time to sniff* my presence, and flung him sideways into the front garden island.

My hope was that he would make short work of the bunnies that had been devouring all the asters. But he must have had other ideas. The asters kept getting shorter.

But the Subaru service people didn’t have to Do A Snake. Too bad.

*A P.S. on Snake Senses

Now that we’re in 2024: I recently read a fascinating book by Ed Yong, An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Worlds around Us. In that, I discovered that Slither-in probably hadn’t reacted to seeing me, since snakes see very poorly. Instead, he smelled me, using that little pink forked tongue of his. And the fork, it turns out, helped him to pinpoint my exact location. The moral of that story, I suppose, is that if you want to sneak up on a snake, it helps to be in a glass bubble….

Meanwhile, your turn!

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