Our unwelcomed house guest.

Last Saturday, we were preparing for our friends to come over. Andy and I were abiding by our society-ascribed gender roles…he was working on the yard and I was cleaning the house. Kate was doing her part by watching TV. (It was “Letter Factory” and that is educational, and really, how else was I going to get anything done?)

I was feeling pretty good about the state of the house, so I went outside to pull a weed that had been flourishing right by the front door. The five-foot weed suddenly lost all importance when I saw what else was waiting for me on the porch.

It was a snake. A big one. Not your run-of-the-mill garden snake, but a four-and-a-half foot black rat snake.

I immediately went back inside and closed the door. I locked it, too, in case the snake tried the doorknob. Then I went out the garage door to find Andy, and once my frantic arm-waving finally got his attention and he turned off his iPod, I told him what I found.

We went over to the porch to examine it a bit further, and my science-teacher husband confirmed that it was in fact a snake.

Neither of us had the vaguest idea what to do, so he went and knocked on our neighbor’s door to see if he had any advice. The neighbor and his teenaged daughter came out to take a peek, but neither of them wanted any more to do with it than Andy or I did. So then we tried our other neighbors. The dad wasn’t home but the mom and the kids came over to check it out. She suggested we break out the shovel and take care of business, but we weren’t exactly racing each other to the garage so we could be the one to do the dirty work.

By this time the snake had curled up under a shrub. The neighbors wished us well and headed back to their homes, presumably to watch us out the windows. We tried to decide what to do. We thought about calling some of the farmers from our church, because we have heard that snakes are welcome in barns as they keep out the mice. We thought about calling one of Andy’s students who keeps snakes as pets.

Eventually we did what we always do when we have a wild animal problem or a home-repair issue – we called our friend Kyle who is much braver and much handier than we are. Fortunately, we got a hold of Kyle and he was willing to come to our rescue, but unfortunately he was about 30 minutes away from our house at the time. He told us not to kill it, and that he would take it to a friend’s barn. Right-o.

At this point the snake was still snoozing under the shrub, so I brought Andy a golf club and a beer and told him to keep an eye on it. I went back in the house, but Kate wanted to come out to see the “rattle snake.” So she and I came out to take a look right about the time the snake woke up from its nap.

It was trying to make an escape. I didn’t want it to escape, though. I wanted it to stay right where I could see it until Kyle could come take it away. So I told Andy to scare it back into the bushes.

Andy threw a beer can at it.

That didn’t work.

So I went to get a golf club for myself, thinking we could just nudge it back to its resting place. Not its final resting place, just where it had been sleeping.

So we managed to keep it somewhat contained for a while, until it seemingly remembered the way to freedom and became determined to get back to the field behind our house.

“Andy, I do NOT want to wonder where this thing is tonight.”

We kept trying to scare it back into the bushes. I picked up the weed whacker that was abandoned in our yard… I’m not sure what I was planning to do with it, exactly, but it seemed like it might scare the snake. Or something.

(This is the part that I pray the neighbors weren’t watching… ok, I’m sure they were watching, I just hope they hadn’t broken out the video camera. If they did, I bet you can watch this with your own two eyes on YouTube.)

Then the snake made a, well, slither for it, so Andy tried to fling it back into the bushes, but I freaked out thinking he was going to fling it toward me. I started to back-pedal as fast as I could, but between my Croc getting caught on the grass and the fact that I was still holding the weed whacker, I lost my balance and landed on my butt. HARD.

“What, did you think I was going to throw it at you?” Andy said to me.

“Well, I didn’t think you would on PURPOSE, but you’re not exactly an experienced snake thrower.”

Then Andy remembered that in the nature movies, they always hold out a trash bag in front of snakes, the snakes think it’s a hole and they go right on it.

“You bought trash bags at the grocery this morning, right?” he said.

I replied that, fortuitously, I had indeed purchased trash bags, and I went to get one.

When I came back out with a white kitchen bag, Andy was not impressed.

I bought those because they would look better in the trash can – I didn’t realize at the time that they were going to be necessary for pest removal.

Scratch that bright idea.

So I decided I was just going to kill it. Except all I had was a golf club and I was really doubting my ability to do anything other than really piss off this snake, so I decided against it.

Eventually Andy, the snake and I were all the way around in the back yard, and it was inhabiting the last flower bed available before its escape to freedom in the field.

We became pretty experienced snake throwers.

Finally Kyle arrived. He prodded the snake out of the flower bed and then picked it up with his bare hands. That’s right, with his bare hands. Like he was the Crocodile Hunter or something. He decided to take it to a creek within walking distance of our house, and he assured me that the snake was going to want to be by the water and wouldn’t come back to my house.

Ah, relief. We were vermin-free.

I called our friends who were on their way to our house to tell them that the situation was under control and it was in fact safe to come over.

“You had a black rat snake at your house?” our friend asked. “That means you have rats.”

Great. So much for being able to sleep at night.