Indigo, p.16
Indigo, page 16
For fifty years I have thought only occasionally about James Gregory (he was handsome), sturdy Mike Wilkerson (he wore those bottom-rimless glasses they put on ’50s scientists and FBI agents in the movies), or Shirley Brown (Shirley, I’ll explain). I have written no plays except the deliberately distorted Tennessee Williams snippet. I have had no outsized breakdowns, just the steady march unto desuetude. But more than occasionally I have thought about that giant, purple, friendly snake, and I have walked the woods looking for one. At first everywhere, anywhere, because they were alleged to be everywhere, and later in rarefied, special terrain, because they were supposed to be there, I walked the woods looking for an indigo, the gentleman snake.
Many parks in Florida have information kiosks with colorful enamel signs showing the special flora and fauna in the park. The gopher tortoise, the scrub jay, the indigo snake. At no park with an indigo snake on its kiosk signs could I find an indigo. If I asked rangers if anyone had seen one, no one had, or maybe someone had, some time ago, and where is that fellow, well he’s not here anymore. I finally realized that the thing had gotten so rare that professional help was necessary. If I was to see one of these snakes in the wild, alive, while I was alive, I was going to need professional help. (It is not easy to see one not in the wild. The Jacksonville Zoo still has one, and I wonder if it is related to the 1964 snake; I was recently surprised to see one in the Nashville Zoo.)
How a Friendly Old Redneck Becomes a Fool for the Indigo
About the time of the snake play in Jacksonville, Fred Sulley was working construction in an early development of Orlando called Bay Hill and began noticing indigo snakes and realizing they were being displaced by the habitat destruction. “They had nowhere to go,” Fred told me. He began taking some home and turning them loose in his house. One, a male he captured at three feet who grew to eight feet, whom he named Big Guy, took up behind the sofa. “That was his place,” Fred said.
When friends came over and sat on the sofa, scooching it into the wall, Big Guy would “get mad” according to Fred and could expand and inch the sofa back out away from the wall with the people sitting on it. “They thought it was mechanical and I would say oh no, I got a big snake back there, and they would laugh. Then Big Guy would smell their shoes and pants to see where they had been, like a dog, and come out and raise up about four feet to look at them. Whenever that happened I never saw those people again!” Fred says, laughing.
He credits Big Guy with exceptional intelligence. “Once I came in and put a bucket of KFC down and went to change clothes and when I came back the chicken was all over the floor. My lady friend at the time—Doug’s sister—said we should throw him some chicken to see if he would catch it. We had been throwing him mice and rats. He caught them and he caught the chicken too.
“When I would come in he would smell my boots and pants to see where I had been—I had been in the woods all day.
“A friend brought over a husky puppy and I told him to keep it away from the sofa. It went over to the sofa and Big Guy clamped down on its foot and we had to pry him off. They took the puppy to the vet and his foot was broken. They can bite hard.”
It’s been fifty years and Fred Sulley, whom a friend of ladyfriend-at-the-time-Doug’s-sister calls “just a friendly old redneck,” still misses Big Guy, who came to an end at the other end of the spectrum from the perils at Bay Hill. “Indigos,” Fred says, “are affected by insecticide. All the snakes I had died of colon cancer. I had a roommate that had the place treated for bugs every month. Big Guy was smarter than any cat I ever had.”
Doug and Phyllis, who visited Fred and Doug’s sister in those days at Fred Sulley’s, report having still very specific memories of sitting on the moving couch. They are among the friends who did not run away.
How a Snake-nut Becomes a Fool for the Indigo
A snake enthusiast calling herself snakemama posts this on PetTalk!:
I held an Indigo snake at a reptile expo about . . . nine years ago, and that twenty seconds changed my life . . . I HAD to have one.
They’re very unlike any other snake. First, they are unable to unhinge their jaws in order to engulf large prey, so they have to eat smaller prey items. Second, they have a FAST metabolism, so they eat (and poop!) frequently. He eats three or four small prey items a week. Third, they are smart. Grendel clearly recognizes me from any other person, and whenever I am in the room with him he keeps his head out, watching me. He doesn’t watch my husband or anyone else.
He’s incredibly docile, until he senses food. Then he becomes a maniac! He’s also beautiful, as you will see, with big glossy black scales and an enchanting red face. He’s very expressive too. He makes little “huff” sounds of disapproval when I’m not taking him out of his tub fast enough or when I won’t let him go climb out of my reach.
It took me nine years to get an Indigo snake for a few reasons. They are protected. There are several states where you can’t have them at all without a permit, and if you want to get one from any state aside from the one you live in you need a permit. They are harder to care for than the average snake. I clean up after him more than I clean up after my other snakes all combined. They get large. He has almost outgrown the enclosure he is in, and as soon as I’m moved in a few weeks’ time I will be purchasing a much larger enclosure for him. Mostly though, they are EXPENSIVE. A newly hatched baby may easily run over $1,000. I got very lucky, and an online friend of mine was putting out feelers trying to find a good home for this guy. I got an incredible deal on him.
Here he is [photographs not available] on the day I received him. I try to leave snakes alone for at least a week after they have been shipped to me, but he came out of the shipping box and crawled straight into my arms, so I allowed myself a few minutes to adore him before I put him away.
Here he is a week later, during his first “real” handling session.
We got used to each other quite quickly. I DO have to let him know that I’m coming, if I surprise him by taking him out too quickly he’ll strike at me, but if I take it slow he’s completely fine. Soon, I started taking him out to climb trees!
In the wild, male Indigo Snakes may patrol quite a large territory, so I make an effort to get him out for lots of stimulation and exercise every day.
These snakes will eat ANYTHING they can get their mouths around. In the wild they eat a lot of rattlers and other snakes, but they also eat fish, birds, rodents, lizards, and anything else they can! This has caused me some problems . . . like the day I tried to wipe some spots off the side of his tub with a paper towel . . .
It can also be funny, like last week when I decided to offer him a bite of my pork chop and see if he liked it.
I have let snakemama go on because, as dubious as what she says may look to the non-snake-nut, everything she says is accurate and true. She can be called a snake-nut if we may concede that the term is not always pejorative. It isn’t.
How a Child Who Becomes a Doctor Becomes a Fool for the Indigo
Linda Perangelo, a retired physician who grew up in Kershaw, South Carolina, not a snake-nut and not a friendly old redneck but a person of sound Duke Medical mind, as a child was handed an indigo snake at a reptile farm in North Carolina. “It was the first snake I had ever held that I did not drop.” She had dropped the garter snakes and blacksnakes handed her in Kershaw by her father. “They had just been too frightening. They wiggled and blacksnakes will bite you.” The indigo, also black, and easily ten times the size of the lesser snakes, entranced her. She recounts this to me fifty years later, having held the one specimen the one time. “It was my gateway snake.”
Strippers Were Fools for the Indigo
Before international trade made the python and the boa constrictor available, if you were a woman in the United States who wanted to remove your clothes and move suggestively for entertainment purposes, and you wanted a snake in your act, you wanted an indigo. It was huge, agreeable to your business, provocatively mobile, and its indigo iridescence, next to your white flesh, in the case of Kathryn “Zorita” Boyd, was striking.
I Had Better Define Snake-nut
It would behoove were I to define the term snake-nut. At bottom, a snake-nut is a person who has the chase gene, defined here by Jennie Smith in Stolen World, her book about illicit reptile trade: “Levy, like Molt and the rest, possessed the gene that had caused him to chase after reptiles since he could walk . . .” The person with this gene may chase all reptiles, some reptiles, or be a hard-core snakeman only. He, or she, may have the gene only recessively; she may be a botanist, say, with a casual delight taken in the reptiles in the bushes. There are good snake-nuts and bad snake-nuts. Here is a bad snake-nut, again from Jennie Smith: “Bob Udell was a free agent now, roaming back and forth to Florida, returning with trash cans full of indigo snakes that he kept in his apartment.”
A bad snake-nut trading in indigo snakes is one of the historical forces that has depleted the indigo to the edge of extinction. They were beautiful, they were friendly, and they were money. In scientific parlance, “Collection of Eastern Indigo Snakes for exhibition purposes and the pet trade probably contributed to population declines in some areas in the past, and although illegal collecting still occurs, its impacts on populations are probably minimal compared to those of habitat destruction and fragmentation.” Note the two probablies. A man in pursuit of the indigo today, seeking professional help, must be careful what kind of snake-nut he appears to be.
As a boy I was a member of a club run by the famous reptile showman Ross Allen, and the club sent its members pseudo-scientific papers mimeoed on construction paper with a three-hole punch. When I read that efforts to force a rainbow snake to regurgitate in order to study its diet killed the rainbow snake, I realized a herpetologist, if that’s what it took, I would not be. So my chase gene came to override my study gene, if I’d had one. I merely wanted then, and want now, to hold a snake, not make it throw up, or cut it open, or sell it. I am a good snake-nut.
Turning Oneself In to Professionals
I began by running into an old friend working in herpetology and telling him that I was on my see-an-indigo-before-I-die quest. He told me there were two beautiful women doing indigo research in south Georgia and that I should hook up with them. Indubitably, I said, I want to hook up with two beautiful women who will to boot put me on an indigo. The friend was to send me a contact email. I waited.
After a year I ran into him again. Waiting on the— I said. It’s coming, he said. Again it did not, and it dawned on me that this was all just possibly a bit too Odyssey to be true—two beautiful women, in the woods, were going to show one an extinct, purple, snake.
I wrote to a writer I know, John Lane, with whom I once hunted snakes in the rock quarry near Spartanburg, South Carolina, where the marble for the South Carolina State House was quarried, and who had introduced me on that trip to David Scott, the most prominent reptile photographer for the state of Georgia. If John knew David Scott, he might know enough to hand me on. John wrote to a Chuck Smith at Wofford College; Chuck Smith wrote to me: I should contact Chris Jenkins, boss of an outfit called the Orianne Society, which, incredibly, is dedicated to preserving the indigo snake. As improbable an idea as an organization dedicated to saving a snake is, that it is, in this case, a society is perfect: a gentleman snake belongs in society. This is a society snake if there ever was one.
I wrote to Chris Jenkins from within the Orianne website and heard nothing. I waited. The note I sent was lost, the way those intra-website notes seem to always be, or maybe I had not managed to come off as a good snake-nut. An organization saving the virtually extinct indigo snake might have a significant problem with, and be hypervigilant for, the bad snake-nut. How to let them know I had held one snake in 1964 and was still haunted by it, and that I had no experience with trash cans full of indigo snakes?
I essayed one last go. Just in case they had received the letter from the website to the website, as it were, and it had spooked them, I trod lightly:
Dear Chris Jenkins:
I’ve been referred to you via John Lane and Chuck Smith. I asked them where might I best stand a chance to see an indigo in the wild.
I wrote you earlier, to the Orianne site, perhaps going astray, and thought I’d try again. I am pondering, have been for years, doing a piece, possibly long, about the indigo snake as it perhaps symbolizes the peril of all things good in the world we have ruined. . . .
Perhaps itself a bit spooky.
But Dr. Jenkins responds:
Padgett,
I apologize if I missed your last email. I have ccd Heidi Hall and she can coordinate with you on the best way to get into the field with our staff to see an indigo. . . . [W]e would potentially welcome someone writing an article about the snake or our organization and again Heidi would be the best person to discuss that with.
Heidi Hall! Does that not sound like a beautiful woman? And she is in fact in Georgia working with the indigo. I am back in the Odyssey.
And Heidi writes:
If you could give me a range of dates you would be willing to come out in the field I can start coordinating with our staff. I noticed you are in Florida. . . .
And I write to Heidi:
I am indeed in Florida. I will be anywhere anytime there is a particle of indigo in the area. . . . I am also just finally determined to see an indigo again outside of a zoo. Orianne might be interested, if you keep an archive of this sort of thing, of a photo of me holding indigo in a book called A WORLD UNSUSPECTED that Duke put out about twenty years ago. I was twelve, then a young fool for the indigo. Now I’m an old fool for indigo.
And Heidi writes:
Everybody should be a fool for indigos! We can do this several ways. We can get you into our facility in Florida . . .
And I am not only in the Odyssey, I am in the door. I have presented the credentials of a good snake-nut. I do not miss Dr. Jenkins’s note of caution: “We would potentially welcome someone writing an article . . .” I’ll be on probation.
Captive Propagation of the Extinct
It should be noted that I am about to witness animals that I deep-down have believed extinct for nigh on fifty years. In my empirical view, they are extinct. I know that they are not, but they still are.
Before I go outdoors to see them, I go indoors. The facility in Florida that Heidi has invited me to is the Orianne’s breeding compound outside Eustis. The kennelman as it were is Fred Antonio, with whom I talk for a bit, again presenting some credentials. I show him a photo of me with the Jacksonville snake. The photo is forty-eight years old when I show it to him. I have nothing else as a bona fide. Fred is not demanding. We enter a building marked Quarantine. It is for ascertaining that animals introduced into the breeding program are pathogen-free. It is fair to say that I lose my bearings even before I begin seeing the snakes. The floors are concrete with a spectral speckled epoxy paint on them that squeaks of clean; the balance of the room is stainless steel and good lighting. It’s the kind of place you want to live in and you would if you had serious money. We approach a steel rack of plastic drawers and Fred opens the top drawer and removes from it an indigo snake about eighteen inches long, a hatchling, and hands it to me. Into the silence I proffer, he says, “Isn’t that cool?” For several reasons, some of which can be articulated, later, it is. I manage to say “Yes.” The snake is, for one thing, a homunculus, a scale model of an adult. Some snakes have the cuteness in the young that characterizes mammalian young—large eyes, delicate body, undeveloped features. Not these. Full-on adult snake in miniature, a bold, strong, confident little purple thing. Secondly, it represents extinction that quite clearly is somehow making little ones of itself. It rocks my world. Fred shows me two-year-olds, four-year-olds. We migrate to a breeding building. He shows me yellow rattlesnakes in drawers, bred from albino stock—“The correct terminology is ‘amelanistic partial albino,’” Fred tells me, “but most call these color morphs albinos”—calm, beautiful, canary-yellow snakes. (Orianne also is protecting the diamondback, which does not enjoy federal protection but is probably as imperiled.) He shows me large indigos, one confiscated from a trailer in Ocala with no surrounding habitat for the game wardens to release it in. A pine snake, also protected and rare. More indigos; we go out in the sun and photograph them; I try to reproduce the photo of me at the Jax Zoo. We go back in. At a cage a gravid indigo is in her laying box with her head just out of its hole watching the room.
