St. Patrick’s Day with Alice

Tags

1990, alice, college, missouri, mizzou, my life, rolla, st. patrick's day, University of Missouri-Rolla

St. Patrick’s Day at the University of Missouri at Rolla, we were told, was a really big deal. The town celebrated with a massive parade. There were keg parties all over campus. For one wild weekend in March, we were told, everyone in the state descended upon tiny Rolla for a raucous green-beer celebration.

“And you won’t believe the women,” said our friend Bennett, who had studied a semester at UM-Rolla before transferring to Mizzou. “There’ll be beautiful women everywhere.”

It didn’t dawn on our college freshmen minds that there were plenty of parties and beautiful (read: unattainable) women where we currently studied in Columbia. St. Patrick’s Day in Rolla, we believed after weeks of hearing about it from Bennett, was on a whole different level. The 1990 celebration would be the biggest one yet. So we made arrangements to spend two nights at the Sigma Nu house in Rolla. Six of us loaded our gear and crammed into a buddy’s 1977 Gran Torino. Since I was the shortest, I had to lie across my friends’ laps in the back seat for the four-hour journey. The car filled up with cigarette smoke while the tape deck blasted tunes from The Cult’s Sonic Temple. Every now and then, I could lift my head and breathe in some fresh air through the partially lowered side window. It was freezing and miserable in the back of that gas-guzzling Ford, but I happily put up with the inconvenience for the wide-open prospects that awaited us in the swinging town of Rolla, Missouri.

Looking back, we should have known better. UM-Rolla, we already knew, was an engineering school with at least a four-to-one ratio of men versus women. Mathematically speaking, it would have required a huge influx of college-age women to even out those percentages. And Rolla hardly had the local market cornered on St. Paddy’s Day celebrations—there were big parades and festivals in Kansas City and St. Louis as well. Looking back, we should have pressed our friend Bennett for more information. If Rolla was so awesome, we should have asked, why did he leave the place after just two semesters?

We arrived at the Sigma Nu house the evening of March 16. The house was filled with nerdish engineering students scurrying about, preparing for the next night’s keg party. After dinner, everyone gathered in the basement to watch the NCAA tournament and, afterward, a couple of adult movies. We were beginning to have some doubts, but Bennett assured us that the next day’s celebration would be completely off the hook.

“And wait ‘til you meet Alice,” he said, a mischievous grin crossing his face. “You’re not gonna believe Alice.”

“Who’s Alice?” I asked. Bennett was coy, saying we would have to find out for ourselves. Lying in my upper bunk that night, the walls of the tiny room spinning around me, I imagined Alice to be an older, wiser, seductive woman who might buy us import beer from the local Schnucks supermarket.

The next morning, we awoke early to a green-eggs-and-bacon breakfast in the Sigma Nu dining hall (the brothers were actually quite good to us that weekend). Then we walked a few blocks to downtown Rolla for the St. Patrick’s Day parade. It was a bit of a let-down, consisting mostly of fire trucks, high school bands, and Shriners riding around on Go Carts. It was a typical small-town parade, which was fine but not necessarily the kind of thing you drive four hours to go see. My friend Bill, clad in ripped blue jeans and a Soundgarden T-shirt, walked up to one of the elderly Shriners and said, “You guys are doing a great job!” The Shriner nodded gratefully. We stood on the curb, snickering at our friend’s boldness.

“Now we’re gonna go see Alice,” Bennett announced. We dutifully followed him a few blocks from downtown, each of us joking nervously about what this mysterious Alice might look like or say to us.

The first thing I remember was the smell, a combination of all sorts of vile aromas that hit us as we walked down the hill toward the football stadium. The stench grew stronger as we each paid $5 admission, walked into the stadium, and found places to sit on the visitors’ side. The stands were jammed with all sorts of people: college students, high school kids, senior citizens, and young families with small children. All of them wore green, and many donned the official T-shirt of the 1990 Rolla celebration (“The Best St. Patrick’s Day EVER”). Everyone on both sides of the field had their eyes fixed on “Alice,” which was an above-ground pool at the 50-yard-line filled to its rim with a putrid green mix of beer, food coloring, and God knows what kind of garbage and bodily fluids that had been collected by the fraternities in the week prior to the celebration. Several students wearing goggles, ponchos, rubber gloves, and other sanitary gear lined up next to the pool. They took turns being tossed into Alice, where they swam a few strokes, climbed out and were immediately hosed down by a brigade from the Rolla Fire Department. The crowd cheered when someone went into the pool, and the roar grew louder the longer they bobbed around in green sludge. This went on for about an hour until Alice ran out of volunteer swimmers and the crowd disbursed. We ran onto the field and kicked around a hacky sack for a while. By then, I guess we were used to the smell.

I don’t remember much about the party that night at the Sigma Nu house, other than to recall it didn’t have very many of the beautiful, available women Bennett promised. Maybe we had picked the wrong fraternity house to party in. I went to bed late and woke up early. My friend in the Gran Torino dropped me off at a bus stop, where I would take a Greyhound to the St. Louis airport on my way home to Georgia for the spring break holiday.

I’ve thought about that visit to Rolla many times, mostly about the bizarre ritual of Alice. Did people really pay admission to see that? What did the money go toward? Did I dream the whole thing up? Do they still do it today? There is very little information about Alice on the Internet, other than to say that she was a St. Patrick’s Day tradition in Rolla that was discontinued many years ago for public health reasons. That is probably a good thing.

Rolla apparently still advertises its St. Patrick’s Day celebration as “the best one ever.” I’m not so sure I believe that. But the memory of that March weekend in 1990, and the time we spent with Alice, is forever etched in my mind.

All Hail the Class Smart Ass

Tags

1993, college, humor, industrial revolution, london, my life, poetry, verse, writing

I was going through some old papers a few nights ago and came across a little poem I wrote 21 years ago to amuse my classmates. Unlike most of my writing from that period, this piece doesn’t make me cringe when I read it. It makes me smile.

When I was studying in London for a semester in 1993, we had a profoundly boring class about social change during England’s Industrial Revolution. The professor, like us, was abroad for four months and probably not all that excited about teaching a class. Three afternoons a week, he trudged into our tiny classroom at the Royal School of Economics, wearing a rumpled tweed jacket and a hang-dog expression. He would put his hands over his face and gently massage it as fighting off the lingering effects of a day-long hangover. Then he would stare out the window at the grey London sky. Then he would fiddle with his cufflinks. Then, if it was a good day, he would utter a few words before his hands returned to his face, massaging out whatever demons lurked inside.

I don’t know if this professor was going through some personal problems or if this was his regular teaching style. I do know that I got a couple of funny poems out of it. Writing clever little stuff doesn’t get you good grades, and it doesn’t get you girls. But you can sometimes get girls to laugh at your funny writing, which is at least something. I’m sure that was my motivation when I wrote this:

Comparative Institutions

Trembling hands rub his furrowed brow
as he contemplates the Then and Now.
Through his hollowed eyes the visions explode
of Victorian England and the steam railroad.
And the Ragged Boys’ School,
and legislation for the poor,
and don’t forget the Corn Law of 1834!
As the ideas form in his tired, grey brain,
he massages his temples and he tries to explain…
“You see folks,” he begins,
and he pauses for effect.
The students clutch their pens,
not sure what to expect.
“It’s like this, folks,” he stammers,
then a smile comes to his face.
“The world is not some Pollyanna,
goody-two-shoes type of place!”
Then he stands there for a moment
with a miserable kind of smirk.
And the students start to wonder
why they signed up for this jerk?

Exciting Job Opportunity Right Here!

Tags

e-mail, insurance, job market, job search, my life, personal essay, sales, unemployed

One of the neat things about being unemployed is that you get a lot of e-mails. Just sign up for CareerBuilder.com or any other job search site, and all of a sudden everyone wants to help you land a gig. Just yesterday, I received e-mails from Career Alerter, Jobungo, JobSerious, and something called Wullo. Unfortunately, most of the job postings are not exactly the result of what you would call a targeted search. Nursing Assistant, Truck Driver, Cook and Information Technology Specialist are some of the more common recommendations. As soon as I learn how to not burn waffles in my toaster oven, I will probably apply for that cooking gig.

Even more discouraging are the unsolicited e-mails from actual people you don’t know, usually with promising titles like: “You Future Starts Today,” “Be in Control,” and the cleverly deceptive “Following Up on Your Interview Request.” A lot of these have to do with realizing my lifelong dream of starting my own agency for an insurance company. These intimate-sounding e-mails usually read something like this:

Hey Stephen,

We need to talk. As you already know, Greatest American Hero Insurance Corp. is in the process of a massive, nationwide expansion. In the Midwest alone, we expect to open more than 2,000 offices in the next year.

Here’s where you come in: we are searching for enterprising, entrepreneurial, innovative and motivated self-starters to open agency offices for Greatest American Hero. I’ve seen your experience and I know you have the people skills and passion to become an outstanding agent. We at Greatest American Hero would give you to tools you need to start your office, market our menu of policies and build up a loyal customer base. Get on board, because opportunities like these don’t come around very often. Please call me today at 1-877-OUR-HERO. Don’t be afraid to achieve excellence!

Sincerely,
Forest Berrington
Director of North America Sales

Not to look a gift horse in the mouth, but I don’t think I would be an ideal candidate to start an insurance office. I can’t even get through a 30-minute policy review with my State Farm agent without my eyes glazing over and the need to take a little nap. I have not done sales since high school, when the Greenville News-Piedmont would drop me off in the poorest neighborhoods to hawk newspaper subscriptions. That job lasted about six weeks.

So I haven’t yet responded to Forest’s e-mail about the Greatest American Hero opportunity, but I’m saving his contact information. You never know where a job search might take you.

Good Songs for When You Feel Bad

Tags

1970s, adult contemporary, bread, depression, easy listening, glen campbell, harry chapin, humor, jackson browne, jimmy webb, music, my life, radio, Stephen Roth

I am not fishing for sympathy here, but the last few weeks have been pretty hard on me. My father passed away in early October after a long battle with cancer. Then, two weeks ago, I learned that I would lose my job at the end of the year. I know that most people endure the loss of a parent or a job, so there is nothing special about my predicament. Still, 2013 has been a shitty year and, when things get shitty, I often find myself turning to an unlikely source for commiseration: easy-listening rock from the 1970s.

I’m not proud of this fact. Normally, I hold my nose when one of those syrupy, emotion-filled ballads from the Me Decade finds its way on my radio. I quickly switch the dial to something a little less sentimental, like Soundgarden or Guns & Roses, or maybe Sublime, even though I’m pretty much sick of all three of them. I will do anything to ward off the spot-on harmonies, woodwind accompaniments and minor key progressions of adult contemporary pop.

It was the worst of times, but the Best of Bread.

But, when I find myself in times of trouble, I actually seek out this kind of music. A few years ago, when I was struggling through an especially tough time, I started listening to songs on YouTube by the early 1970s hit machine, Bread. I then took the next step, actually purchasing Bread’s Anthology on CD. Once my depression passed, the Bread disc was safely tucked away in my office closet, stacked somewhere between Bad Company and the Beatles. But last week, I pulled it out, popped it into my car’s CD player, and drove down the highway listening to the heart-wrenching strains of “If,” the majestic autumn colors whizzing past me like golden-hued clouds floating through a Zoloft-induced haze.

Again, I am not proud of this. But maybe it’s proof that there is a place in the world for slickly produced, emotionally manipulative and shamelessly unsubtle songs. Maybe it’s nice to know that, somewhere out there, there once was a millionaire pop star who felt just as miserable then as you do now.

In celebration of this service provided by the music industry, I have come up with my unofficial Top Five Songs to Be Depressed To. Maybe you’ll find something in here that can help you through your own bad times.

Not a member of the Jackson Five.

5.) Jackson Browne, “Here Come Those Tears Again.” Browne was a big piano-playing troubadour during the Sensitive Seventies, but his vocals were about as versatile and interesting as Velveeta cheese. In this song, he gets some much-needed help from back-up singers Bonnie Raitt and Rosemary Butler, whose searing harmonies pack all the emotional punch of the jilted lover Jackson Browne is trying to portray. A good song for the post-break-up blues.

4.) Bread, “Diary.” I found her diary underneath a tree/And started reading about me, sings frontman David Gates. Which begs the question, what kind of person leaves her diary lying around under some tree? Only a woman who intends for it to be found and read by David Gates, apparently. The song’s protagonist quickly learns that the lover his wife is fawning over in her journal isn’t him. Somehow, he finds the inner strength to wish his lady and her new flame well, which must make him some kind of a saint. Either, that, or he’s sleeping around with someone else, too. It was the Free Love Age, after all.

3.) Glen Campbell, “The Wichita Lineman.” Jimmy Webb wrote some amazing songs in the late 1960s and ’70s, and “Wichita Lineman” is one of his best. It’s also very depressing and patently uncool, the kind of song you turn the volume down on when pulling next to another car at an intersection. The Wichita lineman in this song likes to listen in on the phone conversations of his main crush. Nowadays, he could just stalk her on Facebook, but back then you had to climb up a telephone pole on some freezing Kansas blacktop to get your creep on. A haunting, lonely song with some strange effects that, I guess, are supposed to sound like live telephone wires.

Harry Chapin made a career out of depressing people.

2.) Harry Chapin, “W.O.L.D.” I could have put “Cat’s in the Cradle” on this list, but that would be too obvious. And, to be honest, it is only the most famous of a whole career of hard-luck songs Chapin recorded before his untimely death in 1981. “W.O.L.D.” tells the story of a morning radio DJ who is past his prime, and may even be a metaphor for rock music itself. Anyway, this DJ is calling his ex-wife and asking her to take him back, even though he’s overweight and got a spot on the top of my head, just beggin’ for a new toupee. Naturally, the ex wants nothing to do with him, so the DJ goes back on the air, pretending to be a happy guy. Fake it until you make it, I guess.

1.) Bread, “Guitar Man.” This song starts out innocently enough. There’s this great guitar player who draws big crowds and makes the girls swoon. Perfectly standard rock star stuff, really. But, this being Bread, you know things will take a bad turn by the third stanza. The Guitar Man gets old, people no longer flock to his shows, but he keeps on playing, because that is what defines his detached, lonely, wandering life. Fade away, are the last words you hear on the fade-out of this song, which further entrenches Bread as The Most Depressing Band Ever.

Nine Things You May or May Not Know About Me

Tags

Facebook, humor, my life, observations, satire, social media, Stephen Roth

Okay, my number is nine. So here goes…

9.) I once dressed up as Twinkie the Kid and wandered around downtown Chicago in an effort to promote the crème-filled snack cake’s 70th birthday party.

8.) At age 16, I landed my first job at Dairy Queen despite listing “Soda Jerk” as one of my preferred positions on the application.

Twinkie the Kid

7.) The best greeting card I ever planned at Hallmark featured a grinning donkey locked behind bars who says, “If loving you is a crime, then throw my happy ass in jail!”

6.) As a reporter in Florida, I was attacked by an umbrella-wielding escapee from a state hospital, interviewed a man who tried to sell both of his kidneys in a personal ad, and covered the capture of a 600-pound alligator wandering the streets of Ft. Myers. This all happened over the course of a week.

5.) It took me more than 10 years to write and find a publisher for my novel, A Plot for Pridemore, which will be released as a paperback and eBook next year!

4.) I quit my high school job at Blockbuster Video because my manager wanted me to work late instead of attending my own “surprise” birthday party. I understand that company has been going downhill ever since.

3.) My scariest reporting assignment was riding a C-47 transport plane with retired pilots who hadn’t flown that kind of aircraft since the Berlin Airlift.

2.) I once asked P.J. O’Rourke if he had any advice for an aspiring newspaper journalist, and he shrugged his shoulders and said, “Just try to get through it.”

1.) My best reporting assignment was covering an international business group called “Compass” in a nondescript bank building at 7:30 on a Tuesday morning in 1998. That’s where I met my future wife.

I Sure Am Going to Miss My Dad

Tags

dads, family, fatherhood, my life, Stephen Roth, tribute

Dad talking business; me playing with my stuffed giraffe.

Some time in the summer of 1977, when I was a six-year-old happily growing up in LaGrange, Georgia, my mom took me to a fish and chips place for lunch. She ordered me a basket of hush puppies and explained that my dad’s job was going to be transferred to the headquarters of Milliken & Co., and that he would be moving to Spartanburg, South Carolina.

“Well,” I said after some thought. “I sure am going to miss him!”

My mother then went on to explain that she and I would also be moving with him to Spartanburg, and the strange reality of an impending uprooting, away from all my friends and everything else I had ever known, slowly set into my six-year-old mind. There would be other moves, all of them between South Carolina and Georgia, in my growing-up years as my father’s career evolved. It was nothing compared with Dad’s own Army childhood, which took his family from Washington, D.C., to Germany to Seattle to San Francisco, as well as some other places in between that escape my memory now. My dad, like me, was an only child.

Today, I’m reminded of my naïve reaction to my mom’s big news of so long ago. “I sure am going to miss him!” I had said in the carefree, confident tone of a kid whose dad was smart and strong and probably going to be around forever. Today, I say the same thing, but in a different tone. Art Roth Jr. passed away early Monday morning, October 14, after more than a year battling bladder cancer in the same tenacious way he took on everything. This foe, however, proved even more persistent and formidable than Dad, who had survived two tours in Vietnam and later three firings in his long career as a brilliant turnaround artist for several different companies. Each time he experienced a setback, my dad came back stronger and more successful than before. Nothing, it seemed, could keep him down. It would be the same way with cancer, we all felt, until the last two months, when tests showed it had expanded to other parts of his body. “Like an unstoppable rebel force,” as Robert De Niro’s character described his late mother’s cancer in Meet the Parents. It was an uncomfortably funny line in the movie, perhaps because the description is so very true.

My dad traveled a lot when I was growing up. I used to entertain my friends and their parents with a Ricky Nelson song I had heard on television (“He’s a traveling man and he’s made a lot of stops all over the world.”) My friends could relate – most of their dads worked for the same company and also traveled frequently. Still, my dad was around for almost every big moment of my childhood. He was at every birthday, every school event. He helped me learn how to swim, helped me craft a Pinewood Derby racer from a block of pine, and taught me how to throw a football with a tight spiral. When I jumped into the corner of the Country Club pool and busted open my chin at age 3, my dad was just arriving from work to have lunch with us. He drove me and Mom to the hospital, all the while insisting to me that the cut wasn’t all that bad, and how tough I was being about it. Years later, when I went to retrieve a ball underneath my aunt and uncle’s deck and was stung by about nine wasps, my dad marveled at how fast I shot out from under the deck and into the swimming pool a few feet away. “Butch, that was probably the most perfect dive you’ve ever made,” he told me, and that made me feel proud.

He was a fun dad, but he could intimidate when necessary. I feared him a little, knowing he’d survived West Point and Vietnam, and now had an important job with one of the largest companies in the South. He did not need to scream or yell, because he possessed a cold, withering stare. I remember being trapped in that gaze for several long minutes after being caught lying about my grades. It was worse than any spanking or grounding I could have ever received, and I retreated as soon as I could to our living room piano, where I was more than happy to do my mandatory 30 minutes of practice. “Very nice playing,” Dad said when I was done, and my fear subsided.

As it is with a lot of fathers and sons, we grew closer as I got older. My dad never pushed me to get into sports, but I know he was pleased when I began taking an interest in football, tennis and golf. Some of my favorite memories involve watching sports with Dad, and I have ticket stubs to football and baseball games from Atlanta to San Francisco because of him. In 2009, he took me to the Augusta National for the Masters, and it was like getting to visit heaven for three days. Not just golf heaven, but actual heaven, with almost every blade of grass pristinely manicured. I opened a box of Dad’s things last night and there, atop all his Masters tickets dating back to 1975, was a spectator guide to the 2009 tournament. I’d like to think he saved it because it was the only tournament he and I attended together.

Perhaps my dad’s greatest gifts to me were always letting me know that I was loved and supporting my dreams, even if they weren’t what he would have envisioned. Every phone conversation we had ended with an “I love you.” He had a great way of building me up and making me feel good about myself even in the worst moments. He was always optimistic and excited about what I was doing, whether it was taking a $16,000 job as a reporter in Mexico, Mo., or getting to work for Hallmark Cards. “Butch,” he told me when I took the low-paying reporter job, “I’ll bet you’re going to be making $36,000 a year within five years.” He was wrong, but it was a nice thing to say.

He wasn’t a hugger. His way of affection was tossing the football, or playing “mercy,” or rubbing my back as we watched a game together, usually with a bowl of popcorn nearby. I miss those times most of all, feeling his hand giving the back of my neck a tight squeeze, and me trying not to let on that it hurt a little. I’m going to miss that. I’m going to miss my dad.

I Can’t Quit You, Mizzou

Tags

college, college football, fifth down game, football, gamecocks, missouri, my life, south carolina, tigers

It was a happy night for Carolina.

Immediately after Missouri’s horrific, deplorable 27-24 loss last night to South Carolina, in which the Tigers blew a 17-point fourth quarter lead, then gave up a touchdown on 4th down and 15, then botched a chip-shot field goal that would have tied the game in overtime, I received a text message from one of my best friends from college.

“I quit,” my friend wrote. “I’m serious. I’m not watching, listening, or caring ever again.”

I wish I could say the same, as last night’s debacle will surely join many other infamous, heartbreaking defeats in Mizzou sports history. Unfortunately, I am hooked on the Tigers permanently, and there’s a part of me that feels strangely proud to have survived so many ridiculously devastating defeats (for a rundown on some of the bigger ones, see my post here from last spring). I imagine that fans of the Chicago Cubs, the Cleveland Browns and other star-crossed sports teams feel much the same way. Even the followers of the victorious South Carolina Gamecocks can relate to our pain – their team has only won one conference football championship in its 100-plus year history.

Being a Mizzou fan is tough. It’s like falling in love with a woman who wears a lot of glitter and knows the name of every bartender in the metro area. It’s fun for a while, but you know she’s going to eventually break your heart.

“I liked it better when we were regularly getting thumped by Iowa State,” my friend went on to text. “At least I didn’t get my hopes up.”

Defeats like the one last night take me back to one of my first experiences with Missouri’s version of Lady Luck. It was the notorious Fifth Down Game of 1990, and I would like to say that I was there in the Faurot Field stands that sunny October afternoon, screaming at the officials. I would like to say that, but the fact is that I chose that weekend to attend a church conference in Overland Park, Kansas, with a group called Campus Crusaders for Christ. Me and my devout friends had taken a couple of cars from the DoubleTree Hotel to dinner that Saturday afternoon. When we arrived at the parking lot of Fuddruckers, two guys got out of the other car and asked if we were listening to the Colorado game.

We huddled around one of the car radios and listened breathlessly as Tiger announcer Bill Wilkerson called the game’s final, frenzied minute. When Colorado quarterback Charles Johnson surged toward the end zone on the last play, Wilkerson screamed, “They stopped him! They stopped him!… Wait! They’re signaling touchdown! No! No! No! No! No!”

If Christian boys had been prone to cussing, there would have been a lot of expletives flying around Overland Park that night. Some of the words might have sounded a lot like “Fuddruckers.” Instead, we sadly filed into the restaurant and lined up for the burger buffet. “Man, if we had won that game, we would have been three-and-two,” one of my friends said. “Can you imagine that? Three-and-two!”

We didn’t know about the fifth down controversy until the next morning (here’s an excellent article about the whole thing from ESPN.com). We drove past Faurot Field on our way back to campus that Sunday afternoon and saw that the stadium had been trashed – both sets of goalposts were torn down. For weeks afterward, Missouri students wore T-shirts defiantly proclaiming Tigers 31, Buffaloes 27, the “real” score of the game. I quit Campus Crusaders later on that fall. Maybe it was because nothing seemed to make sense anymore. Maybe it was because my involvement in the group caused me to miss the most historic sports moment of my college career.

I’m a lot older now, and the games don’t affect me nearly as much. I’m only depressed for about a 24-hour period after one of the Tigers’ signature defeats. Still, as I watched that last field goal attempt sail into the black night and bounce off of the left upright, I jumped up and down and channeled Bill Wilkerson from that Colorado game:

No! No! No! No! No!

Why’d It Have to Be Snakes?

Tags

garter snakes, my life, snakes, yard work

We have a fenced-in yard that backs up against a sliver of forest and a creek that serve as a dividing line between the two main parts of our neighborhood subdivision. It’s nice to sit on our deck and stare out into the woods, as opposed to looking into somebody else’s backyard. However, I do sometimes worry about the wildlife – especially the snakes. I have never come across a copperhead or water moccasin while working in the yard or tramping through the forest (knock on wood!), but I know they’re out there. Last summer, someone a few blocks from us reported on the neighborhood message board that they had found a small rattlesnake in their yard. A rattlesnake! I didn’t even know they had those in Kansas City!

This time of year, it’s pretty common for me to find garter snakes or black snakes in our backyard. I saw one yesterday slithering through the grass while I was mowing the lawn. I still get that initial, primal chill up my spine whenever I see a snake, then I relax just a tiny bit when I realize it’s a little garter snake that can do me no ill. I steeled myself and calmly positioned the lawnmower in front of the snake, preparing to run it over. Then I paused. The snake was small and harmless. Plus, it was probably helping to keep field mice away from the house, or something like that. It was no direct threat to my family, and was possibly even an ally, just doing its part in the great Circle of Life.

I felt a the slightest twitch of guilt as I pushed the lawnmower forward, expecting to hack the snake into several scaly pieces that I would have to retrieve later with a shovel. But the snake escaped the blade and slithered into a nearby garden bed and, beyond that, the forest. I didn’t feel too bad about letting it go. Perhaps it would tell its friends and cousins about the near-death experience with the spinning blade, and warn them to avoid our property at all costs.

Should I be nervous about non-poisonous snakes in my backyard? Or should I just keep the lawn cut short and hope for no more surprise intruders?