Claire Mullen
I consider myself not afraid of snakes. Am I a snake lover? Definitely not. But I've hiked remote trails, cooled off in rocky creeks, and camped in wooded areas all summer in this great snake-filled state, so I know it's almost inevitable that I'll encounter a reptile like a snake from time to time.
I’ve studied and almost know by heart the “North Carolina Snakes” identification chart I have saved on my phone, and I know to avoid at all costs any limbless species with a diamond-shaped head, a row of abdominal scales, oval pupils, or a rattling tail.
Although there were a few times when snakes got too close and caused me anxiety (or, more accurately, I got too close to them), I am proud of how I managed to remain relatively calm and handle the situation exactly as the experts instructed me to, by not taking my eyes off the snake and slowly backing away without making any sudden movements.
But nothing, really nothing, prepares you for a chance encounter with a snake in the home. There are no snake identification charts on the World Wide Web, no long lists of advice from well-trained wildlife professionals, and no experience with outdoor encounters with any kind of snake on God's green earth. None of that experience is enough to prepare a mother of two young children for the moment she opened the lid of the kitchen trash can to throw out a protein bar wrapper and found herself face-to-face, scaly, with a snake curled up like a bug among the crumpled paper towels and an empty applesauce bag.
This is not a theoretical situation, it actually happened to me last summer, and in case you are wondering how someone who doesn't think they're afraid of snakes handled this situation, I'll tell you.
First, like any strong, independent woman would do, I slammed the lid on the trash can, called my husband at work, and was impressively hysterical for the first 30 seconds or so after he answered the phone before I finally managed to gather myself together and utter the words, “There's a snake in the kitchen trash can!”
As I began to realize that the pesky snake wasn't going anywhere, I finally regained my senses and, in a panic, began to come up with my own plan to get rid of it.
First, I opened the lid again and scurried to the opposite corner of the kitchen, zoomed in as far as I could on my phone camera, snapped a photo of the eerily unconcerned fake thing, and texted my husband to confirm that it was probably a relatively harmless Japanese bush snake.
My husband calmly told me that we couldn't risk the snake escaping into the house and asked me if we could find a way to get the snake out of the house. I asked him if we could find a way to burn the house down instead.
After my husband reminded me that our landlord did not have arson insurance on our house, I realized that the safety of my family of four rested solely on my shoulders. I put my phone on speaker so I could contact my husband if the snake attacked me while I was trying to remove it.
I wrapped my trembling hands in the thickest oven mitts and used my longest tongs to slam the lid on the trash can, then held the top of the can down with the heaviest bowl I could find, took a few deep breaths, and grabbed the heavy aluminum can by its handle.
I held it at arm's length, ran across the back yard out the back door, and dumped the whole thing, snake and all, into a big green trash can and slammed the lid on. Just to be safe, I pulled a concrete cinder block from the tool shed and put it on top of the can so the snake would have nowhere to escape.
When I told my husband what I had done, rather than praising me for my bravery, he even had the nerve to chuckle at my unique snake handling technique and make some undertones about the “poor snake” and “expensive Simple Human trash.”
And apparently he's not the only Mullen man with a weakness for snakes, even snakes that would traumatize an otherwise peaceful July day for a modest mother and her two innocent children.
Within 30 minutes of texting my father-in-law the enlarged photo and story of the rescue, his truck pulled up to our driveway. Being a kind-hearted animal lover, he rummaged through the trash and found the snake alive and well at the bottom of the pile.
Using gardening gloves, he gently transferred them into ziplock bags that could be safely transported in a truck to their final destination, where they would be released into a field far from my house, which my father-in-law told me was miles from my kitchen.
To this day, we still don't know how that damn snake ended up in our trash can. I remain grateful to my father-in-law for saving me from a lifetime of guilt for condemning one of God's creations to a slow, painful death, trapped inside the double walls of a trash can sealed with cement boards.
And I am still quite ungrateful towards my younger brother, who after hearing the story of the snake in the kitchen trash can said to me, “I bet that snake was going after the first big rat that got in…”
