Snakes in the Basement

From the basement came a blood-curdling scream. "Oh my god! Oh my god!" shrieked my sister, Colleen.

I was upstairs in the kitchen at Dad's old house, and Colleen was in the laundry room sweeping up the lint from under the dryer. We'd found a few mouse droppings in the storage room, but no recent signs of any mice, so I figured that she had finally seen a live one. But the screaming didn't stop, and it sounded more serious than a mouse. Maybe a nest of them, I thought.

"Colleen," I hollered. "What's wrong?"

She replied with the unthinkable..."THERE'S A SNAKE IN THE BASEMENT!" and she bounded up the stairs and into the kitchen.

"What? NO WAY!" I replied. "Where?"

"Under the dryer in the laundry room. I almost put my hand under there!!!" And she had. It was at the last minute that she'd decided to use a broom instead.

I asked how big it was without considering that it really didn't matter. There was a SNAKE...ALIVE...IN THE BASEMENT.

If there is anyone on earth more terrified of snakes than me, it is Colleen. She doesn't even like to go in her backyard for fear of them.

"Holy crap!" I replied. "What are we going to do? I'm not going back down there!"

"But we have to," she said. "We have to get the basement cleaned out. Can you kill it because I can't."

Okay, I thought. I can do this. I HAVE to do this. Kirk is in Frankfort. John is downtown. Kyle is at school. It was Colleen and me versus the snake, and by God, we were going to win.

"I'll try," I replied. "Let me get a weapon out of the garage."

I went into the garage to get the shovel only to be reminded that we had taken all of Dad's tools to his new house yesterday. The only thing with a long handle was a sponge mop and a push broom. I grabbed the mop, and we headed back downstairs.

We tiptoed gingerly to the laundry room, both of us standing in the doorway waiting for the other to go first. Colleen spotted a plastic milk crate.

"I'll get on the milk crate, and you look under the dryer," she said.

Just then, Dad came in the back door, and we hollered up at him, "There's a snake in the basement!" He came down with the push broom and walked into the laundry room.

"It's under the dryer," Colleen said.

She was standing on the milk crate and had started lifting the dryer up when it occurred to me that she was raising the side facing me. If there was a snake still under there, it would slither out in my direction.

"Wait!" I yelled. "Let me get the other milk crate first." So Dad slid the other milk crate over to me, and the two of us, armed with a mop and a broom, lifted up the dryer to see a black snake, about 18 inches long, crawling along the wall behind the dryer.

"There it is!" we yelled. I wondered how we were going to kill it with a mop and a broom, but I figured I would just bash it with the back of the mop head. Then Colleen got the idea to go in the garage and get the tree loppers off the wall. It is about an 8 foot long pole with a curved saw at the top. We figured it would at least be something metal to hit it with.

I stood there on the crate with the mop in my hand watching the snake watch me. It crawled one way down the wall and then the other. It stopped between the wall and a dusty can just as Colleen came down with the loppers. I reached back to get the tool, not taking my eyes off the snake. "How am I going to kill this thing?" I thought. The loppers were too tall and got caught in the rafters. I looked up to untangle them, and when I looked back down, the snake was GONE!

"It's gone!" I yelled.

"WHERE?" said Colleen.

"I don't know!!!" I replied.

I thought maybe it had crawled into the can, so I took the loppers and pushed it around. It was a can of WD-40, so there was no way the snake could have gotten into it. Then I thought maybe there was a crack in the wall and the snake was in there. I took the broom and swept along the floor/wall area. Nothing. We looked under the dryer again. Nope. Under the upright freezer. Not there either.

Mind you, we were standing on milk crates this whole time, lifting up old pie tins and dryer sheets with our broom and mop, with a snake loose in the basement and no way to find it or really kill it once we did.

We looked for that damn thing for an hour and did not find it. We both refused to take any boxes home in our vans today in case it slithered into one of them. That's all we'd need is to be driving 65 miles an hour down the Snyder Freeway and have a snake crawl across the brakes!

Tomorrow we go back, armed this time with a rake and a shovel. I'll let you know how it goes...