Gopher Snakes

 

 When I was little and growing up in Berkeley, I kept lots of snakes for pets, but they were all little snakes, ring-necked snakes and garter snakes and, I learned, if I turned over the strips of bark on the ground that peeled off the eucalyptus trees, I could find Sharp-tailed Snakes, which gave me special pleasure because I had it in my head that these were very rare. But the first large snakes I caught and kept as a kid were gopher snakes, and I have been fond of them ever since.

Across the street from our house there was a large vacant lot (large enough that eventually four houses were built on it, which will tell you how long ago this was, in a Berkeley long-since devoid of vacant lots). When I was a kid, that lot was my bit of nature for finding my various pets to make cages for, and one day I was hunting for interesting insects to keep in jars when I looked down  a hole in the ground and saw a gopher (I am talking about the rodent, now, not the snake) looking back up at me. I got a quick look at its orange incisors, then it disappeared, and a whim took me that I could dig out its burrow and catch it when I got to the bottom.

The burrow ran along just inches below the soil, and the dirt was so soft I could dig it out just by pulling it up with my hands. By the time I had  spent all day at it, I had a good sense of the turns and twists, the sidings, the changes in depth, the areas that were lived in, the others that were just roads, and suddenly there were two enormous gopher snakes in it each one longer than I was tall. 

One broke and "ran" for it, whishing through the grass, the other sat still, and I picked it up and cradled it in my arm. It never attempted to bite or struggle as I carried it home and began building a cage for it.

The next connection with gopher snakes was twenty-odd years later when I moved to Iowa City to earn my PhD. One day my wife and I were driving down a busy highway when we saw a large gopher snake in the middle of it. Huge semis were roaring by and it seemed like its good luck would leave it very quickly. I pulled over, waited for a break, raced out and snatched it off the road. I don't remember if it bit me, but it was hissing loudly and showing little in the way of gratitude. We were driving an old VW bug which had the engine in the rear, so I opened the front compartment, which was empty except for the spare tire, dropped the snake in and slammed it shut before the snake could slip back out.

When we got back to our apartment, Cheryl held its tail while I unwound it from round and round the spare tire. It was still hissing; I don't think it ever stopped. We put it in an aquarium I had with me which had a very weak wire screen top. And every evening before we went to bed we came into the room where it was kept, searched around until we found where it was hiding after having escaped from the aquarium, then Cheryl held its tail while I unwound it from the shelf of books it had wound around, as it hissed furiously at us.

We didn't mind turning this one loose when we left Iowa City.

 Go forward thirty years while I have my career, and retire.

Go forward twenty more years of gentlemanly retirement, and we move to Tucson.

There to discover that gopher snakes are one of the commonest snakes.

Except that they are a different subspecies, the Sonoran Gopher Snake. I was rather shocked by seeing this one, which seemed half yellow and, fully stretched out, long and thin enough to be two snakes.

But let me hasten to say, this snake, in some magical way, pulled itself together and before my eyes became the big muscular constrictor that you see in the picture at the top of this blog. That picture was taken two minutes after this one, and my life-long image was preserved.