SNAKES ALIVE!

Snakes Alive!

When I was a young teen my sister Barbara and her husband Pat Periman managed the Peace River Village Modern Trailer Park just east of Bartow on highway 60.  As part of their duties as managers of the park they had the responsibility of keeping all the yards mowed.  It was quite a task because every mobile home had to be mowed around as well as the open areas.  For a time I was hired to do some of the mowing, so I was at the park a considerable amount of time that summer.  I appreciated the opportunity to earn some spending money, and it also afforded me the opportunity to be on the river occasionally.

The park had a small marina for boats.  From the marina, boaters could follow a canal into Peace River.  Barbara and Pat had a boat there along with the boats of several of the residents.  One day I asked Pat if I could use the boat sometime to go camping down the river with a couple of friends and to my surprise he said that I could.

After getting our parents’ permission, James Connell, Dickey Bozeman, and I planned the camping trip with care.  I had a small pup tent and Dickey had a hammock.  We packed the food we would need along with essentials like sleeping bags, hatchets, and knives.  We each also took along a twenty-two rifle.  We launched the well-loaded boat about the middle of that summer afternoon for a night of camping.  About a mile down the river we found what we thought to be a good site for setting up camp, so we set up the tent and hung the hammock between two trees.

As we were busy setting up camp we began to notice movement along the water’s edge and discovered several snakes were moving onto land.  As the sun settled lower in the western sky the snakes began to climb the trees and curl themselves around the limbs that were hanging over the water.  We loaded our rifles and begun to shoot them.  When hit they would uncurl and fall into the water.  Before dark we shot twenty-six moccasins!  That’s what we thought they were…poisonous moccasins.  They could have been some other type of snake, but it would not have mattered.  We were deathly afraid of them.

As it began to get dark we kept thinking about crawling in that tent to sleep.  It was a simple pup tent which had flaps in the front that tied together.  No zipper.  There was no floor in the tent.  We began to frantically find something to shovel dirt upon the lower edges of the tent to try and seal it.  The flaps in the front were another problem.  There was no possible way of getting a good earthen seal along the front flaps. We could imagine snakes crawling into the tent while we were sleeping and getting into the sleeping bags with us.  I began to greatly regret the day that I thought about going camping on Peace River.

We debated leaving, but by that time we were quickly running out of daylight.  There was no way we could break camp, pack up and get a mile back up the river in the dark.  So we stayed.  Dickey decided that he would definitely retreat to his hammock hanging between two nearby trees; after all, it was his hammock that he had brought. It had a mosquito netting which zipped up.  It was obvious that the hammock would hold only one person.  James and I were left to deal with the snakes.

It was a fearful and restless night.  To make matters worse, it was a hot summer night and staying inside the sleeping bag was nearly impossible.  I imagined snakes all around me, but to my great relief when daylight came there were no snakes in the tent.  After a small breakfast we loaded into the boat to go exploring downstream.  While letting the boat drift with the current one would steer with a paddle while the other two used their rifles to shoot at things along the shore…turtles, snakes, alligators, squirrels, and such.  I was sitting in the back of the boat by the motor, but we had not cranked it that morning; we just wanted to drift with the current.

Suddenly a rather large snake came swimming out into the river from the shoreline.  James and Dickey began to shot at it with their rifles but with the moving boat and the swiftly moving snake they missed with each shot.  To our great surprise the snake turned toward the boat and headed directly toward us.  I began to pull the rope on the boat motor desperately trying to get the motor cranked.  Just before the snake reached the boat the motor cranked.  I put it in gear and we sped away.  I later learned that when frightened a snake in the water will head toward the nearest thing.  In this case it was our boat.  I have always been thankful that motor cranked when it did.  After killing twenty-six of his relatives the afternoon before, it looked as if this snake was out for revenge.

That was my first and last camping trip to Peace River.