One man’s fear is another man’s career.
By Tom Poland
TomPoland.net
Come the cold, dormant months, few snakes, if any, are out and about. Perhaps winter makes a good time to read about the critters many fear. You know, the only good snake is a dead snake. The irrational fear of snakes makes me think of a fellow who may have set a record for snakebites: Tim McLaurin, an ex-Marine, who ran a traveling snake show. He also became an assistant professor at North Carolina State based on his love of books. For that he gives snakes the credit.
In snakes, McLaurin found wisdom and power. “With a rattler or a copperhead in my hand, a path between people opened before me like the Red Sea rolling back.”
Back to the beginning . . . When McLaurin was eight he spotted a snake the color of wheat. He grabbed the snake and put it in a mason jar. Two good things happened. Curiosity led him to check out a book on snakes. That began a lifelong love for reading, which revealed that not everything you’re taught is true.
“Whenever I held a snake in my hand, I was defeating ignorance,” said McLaurin.
He would pay his dues. Snakes bit him so many times he developed blood cancer from the antivenoms he had to take. That led to an unbelievable thing. A black snake bit him during one of his shows. All the antivenoms in McLaurin’s blood killed the snake. Imagine a headline, “Snake bites man and dies.”
Then there was an evening engagement with disaster. Stopping to catch a copperhead crossing a backroad one evening, Tim wrangled the snake. As its musky cucumber scent poured forth, quick as a wink, the copperhead sunk a fang into his index finger, delivering a powerful dose of venom.
McLaurin spent three days in the hospital. Unfazed, he would carry on to suffer bites and escapades aplenty. Take the snake he added to his collection, an Indian cobra. Sipping beers in a Miami hotel room one night he took his cobra from its cage to play with his new toy. “Like water unplugged” the cobra slid into an air conditioning vent. While barely holding onto the snake’s tail, he reached with his toes to pull his jeans off the bed and get his Swiss Army knife from a pocket. He loosened the screws to the vent and got the snake back into its cage.
Thirty-four years after he captured his first snake, Tim was still writing snake stories about “people who live within fear and wonderment, and how they try to find a balance in their lives between when to walk away and when to run forward.”
Tim kept running forward even as folks advised him to “quit playing with snakes.”
“I just smiled and said no. I look at the scar on my finger and see the reflection of a man and the miles he’s walked, and all the knowledge he gathered along the way. I think of serpents and the beginning of time, of clocks and years allotted, of days spent and what is to come.”
Death was to come. The Great Snakeman died at 48 of esophageal cancer.
We can learn something from the Last Great Snake Man. When you see a snake, don’t grab the hoe and chop it up. Just let it go about its business in the great cycle of life.
One gutsy thing, McLaurin drank snake venom. Perhaps he thought it would be an antidote to all those bites, but what if snake venom had proven to cure esophageal cancer? Of all things, a cure for man’s nemesis would have come from the only good critter that is a dead critter—a snake. Imagine that.
