The Winnie the Pooh of Snakes

Last summer I had a job cleaning vacation rentals by Wallowa Lake at the base of the mountains in Joseph, Oregon. One day I finished a house in early afternoon, so I looked at one of the peaks on Chief Joseph Mountain and thought, "Yeah, I'm gonna climb that. Today." The only shoes I had with me were clogs so I went barefoot.

Well, after I had been hiking the mountain for a couple hours, I realized that it might take more than one afternoon to get to the top so I turned around and started loping down a hill covered in tall grass.

And I landed right on a snake. I put my foot smack dab in the center of a squishy, live snake. 

I screamed and waited for death, convinced it was a rattler. But when I looked down, it was this enchanting fellow that I saw- 

(Image from petsgallery.info)                                                    

                                                                      

It seemed like he didn't notice that I stepped on him. He was trying to crawl into a hole, but taking his sweet time about it. His scales were like nothing I'd seen before - a bit shimmery, falling in almost loose folds. Instead of a thin, tapering tail, he had a blunt and pudgy one. I thought it might have been bitten off.

I showed the picture to Rick Zollman, a manager for the Nez Perce fish hatchery in Lostine. He chewed me out for not picking up the snake and taking it home!

"That's a rubber boa!" He said, jabbing his finger at the picture. "We used to catch and sell these to the girls at school when I was a kid."

Zollman said the scales of the rubber boa are very soft. The girls he went to school with would let the snakes wrap around their arms and hang out there. Rubber boas are chill, that way. They're considered one of the best snakes to use with children and people with a fear of snakes because not only are they soft and easy-going, they also don't have the instinct to strike. If you make one REALLY mad, it might musk you. Which means you'll smell bad. Pretty scary, right? Scientists think that the reason why rubber boas have blunt tails is to confuse predators about which end is the head. 

Get this. If a rubber boa feels threatened, it will curl into a ball and stick its head in a hole. It leaves its tail exposed to look like the head. Hmm, I can't see anything going wrong with that method.

Oh, oh, help and bother! I'm stuck.

                                                     

But the best defense that rubber boas have is that they're so dang hard to find if you're actually looking for one. People used to think that they were a rare creature, but now we think they're very common, just shy. 

This, by the way, is one of my arguments for why Bigfoot could exist. Just because something hasn't been seen doesn't mean it's not there. 

In our modern, advanced, technologically superior,  wow-don't-we-think-highly-of-ourselves world, it's hard to imagine that there could be lands that haven't been discovered, creatures who haven't been documented, secrets that haven't been revealed.

But there are.

And I'm not just talking about the bottom of the ocean as far as land goes. As one example, the Amazon jungle still hasn't been fully explored. Not that no one has tried...but no one has returned. Dun dun dun dun. This book was a fascinating read about the explorers who have disappeared into the Amazon in search for a fabled city.

And I'm not just talking about new species of bugs as far as animals go. The obvious example that comes to my mind is the coelacanth, a fish that we only knew about from fossils until 1938, when a deep sea fisherman caught one.

Coelacanth is all happy to be alive and stuff.

And then we realized that pretty much everything we had concluded about the fish from the fossil was wrong. Which just goes to show that science is not infallible. (And it never was meant to be.)

And so Bigfoot could be real.

I'm just sayin'.

What's This Blog About?

"There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person."
-G.K. Chesterton

I once pulled over on the side of a highway to watch a cow give birth. I don't have a vested interest in cows, I've never been part of the FFA or taken pre-veterinarian classes, but it looked like the cow was just minutes from delivering the baby and I was curious and excited to see what the calf would look like and how it would take its first step.

My friend in the passenger seat was not so thrilled.

"I've seen tons of cows give birth," She said, rolling her eyes. "This is stupid. Can we please get back on the road?"

For some reason, she was embarrassed that I found it interesting, and embarrassed that everyone driving by on the highway thought we were interested - thought that this would be a new experience for us. It's the same kind of embarrassment that keeps me from taking pictures of my hometown. I don't want to look like a tourist: as though I've never seen these things before.

"Passion is the genesis of genius."
-Galileo

One-on-one, most people are willing to admit that they don't know everything, but many of us still cater to a large and imaginary audience that laughs at our naivety when we press the fireman's hat-shaped-button on the elevator to see what it will do or when we stare slack-jawed at a sunset.

And you know what? It's just silly to let go of that wonder and curiosity and delight.

It's that same wonder and curiosity and delight in the world that children have. It's a lack of it that makes us old.

It was that curiosity which drove Galileo to watch the stars and question contemporary views of the universe.

It's the passion that caused George Washington Carver to unlock the chemical secrets of plants.

 "I wanted to know the name of every stone and flower and insect and bird and beast. I wanted to know where it got its color, where it got its life - but there was no one to tell me." 
-Carver

The world is so big and fascinating and we know very little of it individually, or even collectively. So what is this blog about? Discovering the world. I want to present you with the interesting things that I find, and I would love to see the interesting things that you find. Things such as lizards with chemical factories up their noses, and trees whose bark can purify water, ancient cities gone missing in the jungle or found in the desert as well as the people who discover these things.

Because isn't it all amazing?