(Editor’s note: The following column was previously published June 24, 2012. Tammy is on vacation at the beach — and she hopes she doesn’t encounter another monster snake.)
It’s time to tell the snake story again.
When I say snake “story,” do not get the wrong impression.
This isn’t like a fish tale. This is true. I swear on my Associated Press Stylebook.
My sister-in-law, Sonja, reminded me of the 14-year-old incident at a recent family gathering.
When she mentioned the big-snake adventure, my 18-year-old said, “What snake?”
I realized he was just a toddler at the time, and he didn’t know about the near-death experience we’d been through.
My husband automatically said, “Oh, it was a little bitty garden snake.”
Yes, if garden snakes are 6 feet long and thick as a telephone pole.
We were at Kiawah Island, South Carolina, in honor of my in-laws’ 50th wedding anniversary.
The condo was gorgeous, but my sister-in-law and I started getting bites. We realized the condo, expensive as it was, had fleas. We called housekeeping and were advised we needed to move to another unit for 24 hours while they fumigated, I guess.
As I was lugging some of my stuff down the stairs (our husbands were off playing golf), I saw — as I put it 14 years ago in a column — the biggest snake I have ever not paid admission to see.
I screamed, and I screamed, and nobody came. I saw housekeepers, and I screamed, “SNAKE!”
(Terror can be translated in any language.)
They said it was a poisonous adder.
I decided to scream some more.
Bill, my teenage nephew, finally heard my cries. As the story goes, he told Sonja (picture his hands on his hips), “Tammy’s in distress!”
He came to my rescue and saw the snake with his own eyes and thought it looked poisonous.
He went to call someone to take care of it.
I ran up to get my camera, but I was out of film. (Yes, film.)
My hands were shaking as I loaded the camera. Sonja and I got on the bumper of my van to look over the wooden fence at the Godzilla snake, as she named it. Because the camera had gone from the cool condo to the hot outdoors, the lens fogged, and before I knew it, the snake had gone into a hole in the ground (probably to run to its mother, the Loch Ness Monster).
Our husbands wouldn’t believe us when we talked about how humongous this snake was.
They’d seen an alligator on the golf course they claimed was 4 to 5 feet long. Yeah, right.
Later, at the nature center, we saw a snake that looked similar to what we’d seen: a nonpoisonous yellow rat snake, which can grow to 6 feet long, I read. The one we saw was above average.
I went to the World’s Largest Reptile Show in Conway last week.
There were all kinds of snakes, including pythons, mambas and a diamondback rattlesnake.
Pretty dang big.
But, the biggest I’ve ever seen was the one that got away.
Senior writer Tammy Keith can be reached at (501) 327-0370 or tkeith@arkansasonline.com.