At the age of 23 and barely a year out of college, I had an encounter I can recall as vividly as if it happened yesterday. It was a beautiful fall morning in Texas, 40-something degrees on its way to 70 with only a hint of the morning dew left to drip from the season’s last blazing red and shimmering yellow leaves, each hopelessly clinging to the oaks scattered across the hillside for a few final days. The fresh smell of cedar filled the air and the clouds had left the eternal blue sky to itself for the day.
I slid down from the tree I’d hunted from that morning and silently crept along the top of a Texas mesa, 100 feet higher than the bottom below, working my way through the evergreen shrubs, and around scattered, flat stones where a single misstep would break the silence and end the hunt. I had worked my way around a particularly thick cedar, moving slightly to my left and angling downhill. My left foot lifted twelve inches above the ground and advanced forward across a large, holey rock covered with a small cedar log when I spotted trouble.
Three feet in front of my left big toe and just eighteen inches from its landing spot downhill coiled the largest snake I had ever seen in my life. For the next two hundredths or two hundred seconds, my life advanced like a slow-motion replay still recorded on my internal Tivo.
I saw an enormous wad of coiled snake with not one but two heads about two inches apart, raised, and pulling back into a well defined and unmistakable strike position. A rattling noise increased in intensity by the millisecond and a shaking tail rose above the coil several inches behind the two heads. In my mind’s replay, I don’t see a second rattle, though I suspect it simply blended into the wad or shook so close to the other that they combined to appear as one. I remember my mind screaming DANGER! and being able to slow but not stop my momentum as gravity pulled me down the hill and forward. My unavoidable next step had a known, but not so happy ending.
I held the stock of the rifle in my right hand near the trigger housing and the barrel in my left, angling from my right hip to about a foot in front of my left knee. The barrel pointed slightly to the left of the wad of snake at an angle most fortunate for me. I instinctively swung it to the right, probably quicker than nature would suggest I should have, but time to quibble did not exist. The two heads pulled back further and the noise of the rattle amplified as inches closed between my foot and the pile of snake. My finger raced to the trigger. It’s odd that I don’t recall clicking from safety to fire with my thumb, but I also don’t remember taking a breath, feeling my heart beat, or suppressing a scream that would have made any five-year-old proud.
I certainly did not think about it at that moment, and to this day still wonder if I recognized the wad as two snakes mating and expected to kill them both with one shot, or simply thought I had stumbled across one jumbo mutant snake with two heads. I honestly do not know. Nor do I know if I expected to kill it or them or just hoped I would do as much damage to them as they were about to do to me. My best guess is that I knew trouble waited to greet my next step, and the innate, logical, and only thing I had to do was strike first and hope for the best. I knew that I could not stop my momentum and avoid that next step, and there was no question that before the next tick of the clock I would violate the privacy that this beast demanded. I don’t recall for certain, but I think my heart skipped three beats. I fired before I could be scared to death.
I held the stock of the rifle in my right hand near the trigger housing and the barrel in my left, angling from my right hip to about a foot in front of my left knee. The barrel pointed slightly to the left of the wad of snake at an angle most fortunate for me. I instinctively swung it to the right, probably quicker than nature would suggest I should have, but time to quibble did not exist. The two heads pulled back further and the noise of the rattle amplified as inches closed between my foot and the pile of snake. My finger raced to the trigger. It’s odd that I don’t recall clicking from safety to fire with my thumb, but I also don’t remember taking a breath, feeling my heart beat, or suppressing a scream that would have made any five-year-old proud.
I certainly did not think about it at that moment, and to this day still wonder if I recognized the wad as two snakes mating and expected to kill them both with one shot, or simply thought I had stumbled across one jumbo mutant snake with two heads. I honestly do not know. Nor do I know if I expected to kill it or them or just hoped I would do as much damage to them as they were about to do to me. My best guess is that I knew trouble waited to greet my next step, and the innate, logical, and only thing I had to do was strike first and hope for the best. I knew that I could not stop my momentum and avoid that next step, and there was no question that before the next tick of the clock I would violate the privacy that this beast demanded. I don’t recall for certain, but I think my heart skipped three beats. I fired before I could be scared to death.
I did not hear the sound of the rifle as the bullet attacked the snake and reset the situation. My mental video goes to fast-forward from that point on, and I only remember flying uphill and backwards, landing at least five feet from a slowly slithering hunk of flesh on the brown and bloody ground. I recall seeing a large broken snake, with one head weakly raised and a rattle still barely shaking under the cedar.
Under any other circumstance, I have no doubt that I would have unloaded every bullet I had until any sign of movement abated and the slithering devil rested as peacefully dead as the dirt itself, but my memory only has me walking as fast as I could, almost running at times, across the mile of grassy fields and dirt roads back to camp. A little later, my cousin, uncle, a couple of friends and I went back and found not one two-headed snake but two one-headed monsters. They measured 5’6” and 5’9,” and each had a dozen or so buttons on its tail.
Under any other circumstance, I have no doubt that I would have unloaded every bullet I had until any sign of movement abated and the slithering devil rested as peacefully dead as the dirt itself, but my memory only has me walking as fast as I could, almost running at times, across the mile of grassy fields and dirt roads back to camp. A little later, my cousin, uncle, a couple of friends and I went back and found not one two-headed snake but two one-headed monsters. They measured 5’6” and 5’9,” and each had a dozen or so buttons on its tail.
Looking back, the rattlesnakes were an important trigger in the creation of GOOOH. I have lived in Texas my entire life, but have only had two face-to-face encounters with rattlesnakes. The second encounter happened just a few years ago.
While telling the story of the second encounter I made the comparison between snakes and politicians. The snake in the second story led me to tell the mating snake story, and the thought that Democrats and Republicans are nothing more than the male and female gender of the political species (you can decide which is which).
When I thought about how I had put an end to the mating snakes with one shot, and commented that I wished we could get rid of every poisonous snake in America, I was on the trail that led to the creation of GOOOH, the plan that will allow us to get rid of the politicians (not shoot them, but remove them); the plan to replace them with true representatives of the people, just as our founders intended. All of them. At the same time. The idea continued to evolve and eventually became the GOOOH system.
While telling the story of the second encounter I made the comparison between snakes and politicians. The snake in the second story led me to tell the mating snake story, and the thought that Democrats and Republicans are nothing more than the male and female gender of the political species (you can decide which is which).
When I thought about how I had put an end to the mating snakes with one shot, and commented that I wished we could get rid of every poisonous snake in America, I was on the trail that led to the creation of GOOOH, the plan that will allow us to get rid of the politicians (not shoot them, but remove them); the plan to replace them with true representatives of the people, just as our founders intended. All of them. At the same time. The idea continued to evolve and eventually became the GOOOH system.
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