Al Kyte's Life Take-Aways

Snakes have always fascinated me.  As a boy, I often picked up harmless ones and even received a few bites from gopher snakes that sometimes resemble rattlesnakes in their actions and appearance.  Unfortunately that sometimes gets them killed by people who don’t know they are harmless and quite beneficial in controlling rodents.   

We never saw rattlesnakes at our uncle’s cabin 4300 feet high in the Sierra, and were led to believe that it was too high in the mountains for them.  Yet a few years later, I saw my first rattlesnake at a higher elevation yet, above 8000 feet.  Apparently their presence is more dependent on habitat than elevation.  I have since seen a number of rattlesnakes and learned to let them be as long as there is no immediate danger to people.  I have even seen them on cold, spring mornings in a state of torpor, completely unresponsive to being tapped by my fly rod.

My most exciting encounter occurred in the desert country around 29 Palms, California.  As a military officer, I had been assigned a night’s lodging in a tent in the midst of many other tents.  As I settled in, I was sitting on a cot reading while heating some water with which to shave.  There was no floor in those tents, just desert sand.  At one point, a movement at the edge of my vision caused me to look in that direction where I was shocked to see a sidewinder rattlesnake coming across the sand directly toward me.  Desperately I looked around for something to hit it with.  Then I rose and moved off to one side, grabbing up a board that someone had been using to keep his feet out of the sand.  Moving around behind that snake, I brought the board down hard on it and without letting up on the pressure dragged it out of the tent.  When I did let up on the pressure, the snake had already been seriously injured.  After killing it, I buried the head so no one would get bitten by reflex action.  I am still amazed that the snake had found its way into a tent surrounded by so many other tents.

I never expected to see a different species of poisonous snake, but I did on a visit to Arkansas.  I had been paid to teach fly casting to some certified instructors from that part of the country, and their leader took me fishing one afternoon.  While wading along the shoreline, I spotted a snake swimming toward me—a copperhead.  Stepping out of its way and seeing no immediate danger, I watched until it disappeared into the shoreline brush.  The next morning I dropped in to the local fly shop to talk to the owner, a man whose unique way of expressing himself invariably put a smile on my face.  When I told him about that snake, he told me about a morning he came to work to find a copperhead coiled up on his shop’s welcome mat.  In his typical droll manner, he looked at that snake and said, “That’s not going to be good for business”.  Apparently he grabbed a broom and started sweeping the snake toward some nearby shrubbery.  Only after he had given it a half dozen ‘sweeps’ did the snake start striking at the broom.  He added, “Now if that had been a cottonmouth moccasin, it would have struck at the very first ‘sweep’, and directly at me, not the broom.”  

A couple of days later, I was looking at a big pool in a stream running through the college campus where we were holding our instruction, thinking that water would provide a good place to teach certain fly casting techniques.  When a groundskeeper happened by and warned me that cottonmouth moccasins had been seen in and around that pool, I thought of that shop owner’s story and decided to find some other place to teach.  Yet I did return to that pool a few times hoping to see one of those snakes.  Fascination is like that.