It’s Not Rocket Surgery Macho, Macho Man

Cutting a 10-foot serpent down to size

Illustration by Saige Roberts and abeadev / Shutterstock.com

I heard the version of my name where the “Y” at the end of Gary lasts about five seconds. Unlike the three-second version, which means one of the kids did something wrong, or the two-second version, which means we need to talk, the five-second version means something cataclysmic has occurred and requires immediate attention.

We had just returned home from a weekend at the beach. I went into the great room. Berneice went into the bedroom. Big mistake. Berneice came face to face with the most unwelcome of visitors, a snake.  

I reached the bedroom doorway and there I saw the beast. At first glance, he appeared to be about 10 feet long. As I caught my breath, I realized it was closer to 5 feet. (Photos would confirm a length of about 18 inches, but that’s not the issue here).

The first thing I did was grab my big cooler and put it over the snake, trapping it until I could think this through.

I quickly weighed my options!

1. Sell the house.

2. Call for help.

3. Deal with the serpent myself.

Option 1 required moving my entertainment system so, it was dismissed; option 3 was never a realistic consideration, so option 2 it was.  

I have always believed one of the top five reasons to have children is to help remove snakes from the house, and finally I was going to enjoy the payoff. We called our geographically closest boy, Dustin. Unfortunately, he and his wife, Ashley, were driving back from Jacksonville and they were still 150 miles away. Later, he admitted even if he was on the couch it would not have mattered; he didn’t do snakes. 

So I called my go-to guy and baseball teammate Chip Campbell, who lives just around the corner. After promising him beer and food, he agreed to come help. Twenty minutes later, he showed up at my front door in full catcher’s gear. Seriously. Mask, chest protector and shin guards. He even had an umpire’s whisk broom. I started to laugh, but then I got it and offered, “Good call, Chippy.”

Chip and I moved to the bedroom to survey the crisis. Immediately, we realized the opaque cooler meant we could not see what the snake was doing. Was he casually enjoying the darkness or testing the perimeters for a weakness? We quickly realized we needed visual confirmation. 

A piece of glass covering our wall art seemed right. My plan was to carefully slide it under the cooler and get the snake to sit on top of the glass. Then we would flip the cooler over, dropping the snake to the bottom, and inspect the snake through the new glass top. 

As I started to carefully slip the glass under the cooler, I asked Chip to get ready to help me flip it over. From behind the bathroom door, I heard Chip say, “I didn’t hear that?” OK, I’m utterly alone. My plan failed when I put too much pressure on the cooler, breaking the glass. Now I’ve got broken glass and a snake.

We needed another plan. We needed a see-through box. That way I could just lift the cooler up and Chip could replace it with the new box. We found a hard plastic hatbox and started planning the switch.

Logistics had to be carefully considered. After applying a cold compress to Chip’s forehead, we rehearsed the moves. I would pull off the cooler and Chip would replace it with the hatbox. Chip asked why I would be moving away from the snake and he would be moving toward it. I convinced him the snake was after me, not him, and that seemed to work. I could hear Berneice on a phone in another room, booking a hotel.  

The moment had arrived. The moment our ancestors prepared us for when they were dragging their knuckles around a campfire. All our instincts and senses would be in play. I looked at Chip and he looked back through the wire mask — an unspoken man-to-man communication. It was go time.

What happened next was a blur of hands, feet, brooms and baseball gear. To this day I don’t remember exactly what occurred; I just know the snake was in the hatbox and Chip and I were still alive. 

We let the fog clear and looked at each other with glazed eyes, and after a brief silence did what men do — jumped up, bumped chests and yelled, “YEAH BABY!”

Killing the snake seemed unnecessarily cruel, so we carried the hatbox out far enough away from the house to assure the snake would not come back — just across the state line in Georgia.

As time passes, my chosen weapons, a hatbox and a broom, will give way to the more macho parts of the adventure. In a few years the snake will be back to the initial estimate of 10 feet, and I’ll be wearing the boots I made from the skin. I’m pretty sure Chip will back me up. 

Gary Yordon is president of The Zachary Group in Tallahassee, hosts a political television show, “The Usual Suspects” and contributes columns to the Tallahassee Democrat newspaper. He may be reached at gary@zprgroup.com.