Our Tuesday Visitor

The central air conditioning (A/C) system at our home sometimes doesn't come on outside when it is supposed to (when the thermostat inside our house "tells" it and the fan inside to turn on) because of a stuck set of "contact points" in the relay on the outside (compressor/condenser) unit. I have to routinely go outside with a screwdriver, remove the cover on one end of the A/C unit and unstick the relay that is inside the unit (I pull the power cutoff by the unit, first!). A few years ago, the most common reason for doing these quick and temporary fixes was because we live in Texas, where fire ants rule. Fire ants, being the electron-loving insects that they are, were attracted to the 220 Volts that the A/C uses, and their fried little carcasses sometimes jammed up the points and kept the current from flowing, thereby keeping the compressor and fan outside from running when they are supposed to. I haven't had a fire ant problem lately, because I've dusted the path that they have to take to get to the relay with ant poison, and this has worked for a couple of years.

The system has been malfunctioning again lately, but I guess that it’s because of corroded or pitted contacts, who knows. Well, the outside part has also stuck ON a few times lately, and when the fan cuts off inside, you still hear a kind of gurgling sound from the A/C evaporator/air-handler unit inside the utility room. This is rather bad, because if the compressor is doing its compression/expansion thing on the Freon, cycling it, etc, and the Freon cannot pick up heat, etc in the inside part of the A/C (and therefore cool the house), it could ruin the compressor, blow a Freon line, etc. Plus, it's eating up electricity. Well, on Monday, 6/8/98, when I got home from work at around 6 P.M. the outside A/C unit was running, but I noticed that the fan inside was NOT running when I walked through the front door. I changed clothes and took a screwdriver and carburetor cleaner spray (to try to help clean the stuck "points" in the relay) outside to the A/C unit, and in a couple of minutes had it working again. The larger of the two copper lines (the evaporator line) running from the outside A/C unit to the house had about 1/2 inch of frost on the section of the line that wasn't wrapped with black foam insulation, inside the A/C unit case.

There's an additional small point to mention here (small, but very important to the storyline): The pine tree that is only a few feet from the A/C has a few small limbs that hang down close to the top of the A/C unit. They have therefore been in the way when I'm doing my frequent "unsticking" jobs on the unit. I actually remembered this on Tuesday morning when my wife, Louise, announced to me that the A/C was blowing hot air. This meant yet another visit to the outside part of the A/C system. (Note: I've just got to replace that relay [again!], but for now...)

I was dressed in shorts and my old loafers, so being outfitted in my best working clothes, I went to the utility room and picked up my trusty Phillips screwdriver, the can of carburetor cleaner and I also remembered the pruning shears. When I got outside behind the house (I digress, but our house is earth-sheltered, with a berm of earth surrounding 3 sides of the house - on the back side of the house, the top of the grass-covered berm is only about 3½ feet below the back edge of our roof and it's on this part of the berm on which our outside A/C unit sits), I set the screwdriver and carburetor cleaner spray can down on the roof and started pruning away a few in-the-way limbs. The "main" limb extended about 5 ft out over the roof and funny thing, I noticed that it was hanging a LOT closer to the roof than it had been only the evening before when I was last working on the A/C. I didn't think much of it until I grabbed the next little limb on it to cut it off and I saw why the limb was hanging so low: there was a pretty good-sized snake sitting out there near the end, wrapped around the limbs and needles! It looked to be between 2 and 3 feet long, and I couldn't see its coloration or head to tell its potential for being poisonous, because of the thick pine needles on the limbs.

I quickly retreated down and around the berm to the front door and had enough sense to call our still-rambunctious 2½ year-old Cocker Spaniel, Rocky, and get him inside the house. I didn't want to take chances with Rocky being in the way or getting hurt in case the snake was poisonous. I went into our bedroom closet and got my .38 Special revolver (it took a few seconds to find it) and put a shot-cartridge into it. I told Louise, who was getting ready for work, just what I was doing getting the gun and everything. She said, "Kill the snake, then cut down the trees behind the house" and I said that if it wasn't poisonous I was just going to move it out into the pasture, etc. She repeated her orders, saying that she didn't want a snake coming into our house. I said that no snake would be coming inside our house, etc. I then went to the utility room and found a 4 ft or so length of closet pole and headed out the door with the gun in one hand and the pole in the other, making sure that Rocky stayed inside.

I arrived back at the A/C unit outside and climbed up onto the roof (I put the gun down on the roof, first - you know, safety first!). I then picked up the .38 and walked over to a point on the roof near the low-hanging limb. With the uncocked .38 in my left hand and the pole in my right, I approached the limb from higher up on the roof and poked the limb. The snake answered by poking his/her head out of the needles. I saw that while it was rather big, it was definitely NOT poisonous. It did not have a triangular-shaped head, which ruled out any of our local pit-vipers. Additionally, it had round pupils, which ruled out the only poisonous snake in these parts with round pupils: the coral snake. Besides, the coloration was wrong for a coral snake and no coral snake ever got this big! I poked the limb again and the snake dropped the 9 or 10 inch distance between the limb and shingles, onto the roof and then I saw that it looked closer to 4 feet long. This is like a fishing story...the creature keeps getting bigger. The snake slithered off of the roof and dropped down onto the ground between the A/C unit and the back wall of the house. The limb sprang up almost a foot, relieved of its scaly weight.

I set the still-uncocked gun down on the edge of the roof and jumped to the ground and walked over to the A/C unit. I tried to gently coax the snake out from behind the A/C but it kept striking at the pole, and all the while vibrating its tail so that it made a rattling sound whenever it touched another part of itself, the ground, etc, and it was then that I realized that it was the same kind (BIGGER, but the same kind) of snake that had bitten my youngest daughter, Meg, and then me, a couple of days before we moved into the house back in 1985. In Texas, this variety of snake is called a chickensnake, but is a ratsnake nearly everywhere else.

Well, it didn't really want to come out from behind the unit (which sits about 1 1/2 feet or so from the very short back wall of our house) so I was trying to pick it up in the middle with the pole. It kept on extending its head up about 1 1/2 feet or so, inspecting the underside of the overhang, etc and then it rotated its head and "neck" 180° and started trying to get inside the A/C unit thru the louvers, but its head and body were too big. I finally got the pole under its body and gently tossed it onto the grass about 5 or 6 ft from where I was standing. I then realized that my snake friend was nearer to 5 feet long and that it had a good-sized swollen area about halfway down its length, about two or three times the normal diameter of its body, and that it was about 8 or 9 inches long. Then I realized that the "happy" chirping coming from the nests of birds that had been in that tree wasn't going on like it had been the last couple of times I was working up there! I wanted a photo of this snake, so I threw a couple of pine-limbs on top of it, figuring that the snake would think that it was hidden from me, and would therefore stay put. Now I’m assuming that a reptile is capable of cognitive processes! Anyway, I ran back down the berm and into the house to get the camera.

I grabbed my trusty old Canon AE-1 and attached the flash to it, turned the flash on, made yet another trip to the utility room to fetch my handy 30 foot tape-measure, and ran out the front door telling Louise that the snake was big and I was gonna shoot a picture of it before I turned it loose. As I went through the front door onto the deck, I grabbed our garden rake that was leaning up against the front wall and headed back up the berm. (Note: smart move!)

When I got to the pile of limbs, I looked under it and saw that the snake was gone! I looked over to the A/C unit and there the stupid snake was - exploring the underside of the overhang again! OK, I was starting to get mad. I started thinking that I just might have to get rough with the snake, when it then did something to seal its fate: It had snaked (now that's a perfect verb to use here!) its way up the foam-wrapped evaporator line to where the line enters the back of the siding , just below the roof-line. I decided to set the camera down and get the .38, and couldn't find it (again!) for a few seconds, because I'd forgotten that I'd placed it on the ground when I'd gone inside to get the camera, etc. When I turned back to the snake, it had made its way up the evaporator line and part of it was also hugging the metal electrical cut-off box a few inches from the hole in the "wall." Well, where the uninsulated portion of the copper evaporator line enters the house, the hole is about 3/4 of an inch bigger than the diameter of the copper line. Guess what? You guessed it: Louise's prophecy was coming true! The snake thrust its damned head inside this hole and started going INSIDE THE HOUSE (all in one instant I had this scene of me running back into the house and telling Louise to grab some clothes and purse and to get the hell out of the house and then I'd burn it down because there's no way she'd EVER want to go inside the house again). In a rather quick (for me) movement, I picked up the rake in my right hand and the .38 in my left. With the rake, tried to extract the snake from my house. The snake had managed to get about a foot of itself inside the house when I (still rather gently) tried to pull it back out thru the hole (there was over 3 feet still outside!) - its tail was madly "rattling" the whole time. I even thought for a moment that it couldn't get the swollen spot thru the hole, but I figured that if it was birds inside there, the little birds would scrunch down easily, and in a few seconds the snake would be master of my house! I put the rake on the snake's body so that two tines of the rake were on either side of the body and pulled it back toward the swollen spot, hoping that this thicker part would "hang up" on the narrow opening between the rake's tines. No such luck, the swollen spot DID compress and allow the rake to pass over it, so I knew that I had one more, no two more things, to try before I had to risk peppering the side of my house with the pellets from the shot shell: Thing Number 1 was to try to hook a tine or two INTO the snake's dastardly body and pull the sucker out that way, and if that didn't work, then Thing Number 2 was to grab the ever-shortening piece of snake with my bare hands and pull it out. While the snake obviously was NOT poisonous, it was definitely a biter and I didn't want to be bitten by anything, period!

Well, dear readers, I managed to get a good "bite" (pun intended) into the snake with a couple of rake tines and pulled hard on it. It didn't want to come out. I guess it had wrapped around the inside part of the copper pipe, tied its scaly body into a sheepshank or granny knot, or had wrapped around a roof truss or something else. Whatever the case, I knew that I was gonna rip the bastard open more than half of its body length with the rake and if it did make it inside our house, it wouldn't be king (or queen) of our house for very long! It finally let go and I jerked it out (not gently this time!) onto the grass away from the house, threw down the rake and moved the .38 to my right hand. I was maybe 5 or 6 ft from its head and I cocked the hammer (I actually had the presence of mind when I loaded the cartridge into the chamber a few chapters ago, to put the chamber into the position that would revolve to the firing position with my first cocking of the hammer) and not really aiming, pulled the trigger and sent the snake to snake heaven (or hell!). It did the usual thing that dying snakes do, continuing to writhe around, etc, but its head and first foot or so of body were nicely bleeding in a dozen or so spots. I deployed my tape measure and after stretching out the snake as best as I could (it kept on trying to bunch up, etc), it was in the 5'4" range! I snapped a shot of it this way. I also put the tape measure by the swollen portion of its body and took a shot of that, too, for posterity.

I put down one set of tools and used the others to fix the A/C (as I sit here typing 2 days later, the A/C is still working and the snake is still dead!). I somehow lost the screw that held the cover on, so I had to remember bring another one out with me when I made my final visit to the A/C that morning.

I then went inside the house, found a replacement screw (it was a slot-head screw, so I had to get a "regular" screwdriver, too), etc and told Louise how close she'd come to having a new house and how in the future I'd always believe her when it came to snake predictions. I managed to get her to go outside with me and see the snake. No, it hadn't crawled off, but it had death-danced itself a few inches forward. I picked it up with the rake so she could see how long it was and where the swollen spot was, etc. I then walked over to the property line between us and a pasture next door, and pitched the dead snake over the fence. The snake got caught up on a small tree limb and didn't land completely on the ground. Like I said, it IS dead, because I checked it that same evening after work and it was still hanging there and Rocky hadn't found it (yet). With the new screw in place, I had finished my work and then had to head back inside the house to get ready for work.

But, before leaving the scene of the crime that morning, I had a chance to survey the ground around the A/C unit: there were gray feathers here and there, and there were two cracked-open bird eggs (about the size of pecans) and another that was mostly intact, but with fire ants already making their way inside it (I opened it up and a baby bird was inside - dead - but none-the-less, a bird - I knew that these were NOT snake eggs, but I knew that I'd need to report this to Louise!). There was also a little bird flying madly around the tree by this time, really making a lot of chirping! I guess his/her family was inside my old friend the snake and this particular little birdie was not real happy.

Not quite a Pulitzer-winning essay, but the events told in it sure have entertained everyone at the hospital. I'd have been a natural in the pioneer days, being prepared for Indian attacks, bear attacks, locusts, Jehovah's Witnesses, anything.