CASINO TO CROTALUS

I was in Reno for the American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing Conference last week, which happened in the Reno Hilton. Reno is a casino town, and the Reno Hilton is a casino hotel. You can find the Reno Hilton off on its own to the east of Reno proper, enclosed by highways, a river, and acres of soul-deadening parking lot. Within the Reno Hilton, your dining options include Chevy’s, Round Table, an “Asian” restaurant called Asiana, a buffet place, a steak house, a sub shop, and a burger joint, all of which serve astoundingly overpriced and/or mediocre fare. The ground floor is an endless array of glittering slot machines, black jack tables, and horse betting booths, liberally sprinkled with miniskirted cocktail waitresses well past their expiration dates.

I found all this amusing in the extreme. The claustrophobia of the gambling floor, the complete absence of natural light at any hour, the desolate vacancy in the eyes of a gambler mindlessly mashing the same “bet” button on their machine, the never ending onslaught of blips and bleeps and flashes and neon all conspired to create an environment beyond my own reckoning, I maudlin pastiche of human depravity that I now know can only be appreciated in person. I was quite enthralled.

For about two days. Two days of paying $6 for a bagel and some warm sewage masquerading as coffee was just about enough to override my hankering for human misery. So I came back and caught a rattlesnake.

My first day working solo in the field was also my first opportunity to handle a venomous snake, the Northern Pacific rattlesnake (Crotalus viridis oreganus). I opened the trap, saw this rather large snake with a big fat head, and quickly closed it again, while I checked the other trap on the line. Then I got all my processing gear ready and laid out, grabbed the snake stick and tubes out of the truck, and started dealing with the rattler. The snake stick/tongs look like this:

It’s basically a 3 foot stick with tongs on the end. I slipped it under the middle of the snake and hoisted it out of the trap and onto clear, flat ground. Then I spent a long, long time maneuvering it into a a clear plastic tube to immobilize its head. Like the rest of us, rattlesnakes do not enjoying being shoved into tubes, and this poor things was no exception. It was exceedingly docile, never once struck at the tube, and it even curled up in a ball and hid its head under its body a few times. Finally, I got it in, got a good grip with the tongs, and replaced the tongs with my hand:

From this point on it was business as usual. It turned out to be a recap that had been captured a few days before, so I didn’t have to do much more than appreciate it. Rattlesnakes are really very beautiful animals, with big eyes, very smooth skin, and no inclination to crap all over you, like some snakes. The whole experience was beyond exciting. I was literally jittery, which is probably not a good thing to be when handling a venomous snake. Blood pumping, complete focus. It was great. No doubt this description would seem hilarious to my more experienced coworkers, but hey, I’m still sort of a n00b.

Rattlesnakes induce an immediate and primal fear. The buzz of their rattles demands attention like few other sounds in nature, and the defensive posturing of the snake itself is a message without room for ambiguity: “Back. The fuck. Up.” I get an immediate adrenaline rush whenever I see or hear one, but it’s always followed by the realization that rattlesnakes are not big animals, and if I wanted to kill one, it wouldn’t stand a chance. I wouldn’t even need tools. I would get bit, of course, and suffer intense pain, a trip the hospital, and possibly even death if I didn’t receive antivenin or if I was intensely allergic, but pain is the only guarantee. If I wanted to kill the snake, the snake would surely die, because I am much stronger. The snake, like anything small, knows this intuitively.

I want to know what the snake feels when it rattles and strikes, what neurons are firing in its brain, what hormones start coursing through its veins. I suspect such a portrait would bear close resemblance to mortal terror. The human risks pain, and that is frightening, but the snake risks its life in an encounter with man. I don’t even know what mortal fear feels like, so although the snake’s fear is like my own in kind, its scale surpasses my capacity for empathy. It is more afraid than I have ever been.

That’s what I think of when I see animals get defensive. Nothing original in that, of course. No doubt humans have been having this realization ever since the dawn of modern medicine. But many people still never have it, or I assume they don’t because there are still parts of the US where killing rattlesnakes is the stuff of festivals and amusement. Or maybe that’s something different…

ONE COMMENT

Vivien said on May 10th, 2006 at 4:17 pm,

Congrats on your first rattlesnake! No wonder it was docile and scared, if it had been through that tube before.