Not A Fish Tale

It’s my wife, Brenda’s birthday tomorrow and we’re in Grapevine Canyon near the Colorado River to celebrate. It’s April 7th and the desert flowers are in full bloom.

            There are showy desert marigolds, glorious orange somethings, plants with red and purple flowers. It’s a sea of colors as far as the eyes can see. Jojoba. Sage. Wax agave. Prickly pear. Ocotillo. Donkey tail. Joshua trees. Red barrel cactus. Native American petroglyphs all over the rocks.

            And snakes. Lots of snakes. Only you don’t see the snakes. Don’t hear them either. It’s the Spirit Mountain Wilderness.

            There’s a guy on a hill of rock looking at something. He looks down. I hear him say it’s a Mohave Green Rattler. Highly poisonous.

            “You found a snake,” I ask.

            “Right there in that brush.”

            I step closer to where the man is standing. I look at the bushes but don’t see the creature.

            “Stand right where I am. Look through those branches.”

            “Now I see him.”

I take out my cell phone and take a photo. The snake isn’t moving. But his eye is looking right at me. His skin blends with the rock. You don’t see him unless you look closely.

“When I passed this spot this morning, he was with a female. I don’t see her now, which makes me a little nervous. She could be around here and we’re just not seeing her.”

The snake is giving me the stink eye. He is waiting to see if I’m stupid enough to get any closer.

I’ve just come up snake eyes in the craps game of desert hiking. If this serpent could talk, I swear he’d be saying, “Ewww another of the Lord’s lowly two-legged creatures. You can always tell by the way they smell.”

I wonder how it is that this man I’m now standing with, knows so much about snakes. I ask if he’s a herpetologist. He says kind of.

I say that’s like kind of being the guy in a porn video. He just laughs. I ask Brenda if she wants to see the snake. Let’s get the hell out of here is all she says. She says she has to pee real bad.

            I wouldn’t say she is scared shitless. I’d say she is scared the other way around. Snakes scare the bejesus out of me too. But being in such proximity to this creature has me curious. But Brenda wants to get out of here and I’m asking the man more questions.

            I enjoy seeing the snake out in the wild. Brenda obviously not.

The man’s name is Mohave Mike. I determine this from the tattoo on his chest. There it is in big blue words on his sun baked skin. I wonder if he sheds his skin like a snake. I ask Mike how he tells the girls from the boys. He says the males generally have longer, thicker tails. The male rattlers also have two sex organs.

            “You mean they have two penises.”

            Mike nods yes.

            “I guess that means a rattler can have sex with two women at the same time. I guess it isn’t so bad being a snake after all.”

            Mike laughs again and shakes his head.

            “I got to get going.” Mike says as he heads off the rocks.

Turns out Mike is telling me the truth about male snakes having two penises. Afterwards, I look it up on Wikipedia. The sex organs are called hemipenes. The only way to know for sure if a snake is a male is by inserting a probe where the sun don’t shine. That sounds as bad as some of my visits to the urologist. He’s always sticking some kind of probe inside me.

The woman Mike is with, tells me to be careful coming off the rocks, seeing as how the black sweatshirt I have tied around my waist has loosened in all this excitement and slipped down around my ankles.

“No worries. I got this.”

So of course, I trip and lose my balance for a moment.

By the time I make it down the hill my wife is even more pissed, which makes the entire experience entirely worth it.

I have a newfound respect for snakes. I won’t get upset anymore when my wife gets mad and calls me a snake. I’ll consider it a compliment.