Reverend and rattlesnakes invade the Treehouse


Southern Baptist minister Reverend Walter assures me he is not one of those Pentecostal preachers who handles rattlesnakes to prove God’s protection. He handles them for a different reason.

This week the Treehouse was honored with a visit from the pastor of a Baptist church in Georgia. Walter, as he asked me to call him, and his wife Wanna were taking their granddaughter Lily on an East Coast odyssey. Lily is home-schooled, and Walter thought they could enhance her learning with visits to the Shenandoah Valley, where many of the Civil War skirmishes took place, and Gettysburg, where Robert E. Lee was defeated in the conflict that took more lives than any other battle of the war.

Lily got to see a little of Boston, where the Yankees claim to have been America’s first settlers. We southerners know, of course, that Virginia’s Jamestown colony was established eleven years before the pilgrims set foot on Plymouth Rock. But the Baptists’ GPS was set for farther north, and on Monday evening they arrived at Fern Forest.

Lily is ten, a quiet and polite girl with long, snowy-blonde hair. She didn’t seem to mind cozying into the tiny treehouse with grandparents. Walter and Wanna have nine grandkids, and Lily must have soaked up the rare opportunity for some one-on-two time with them.

When I was Lily’s age, my family attended a Southern Baptist church in Northern Virginia, and I’ve always regarded ministers with respectful reverence. At the breakfast table the morning after their first night’s stay, H and I joined hands with them as the reverend blessed the food and the Treehouse as well as H and me for hosting them. It was an impressive grace that made me believe the minister is in the right line of business.

But Walter wasn’t always a pastor. In the early years of their marriage, he and Wanna opened a country store in rural Georgia. One of their best-selling items was rattlesnake, which Walter says is a delicacy in the south.

“Tastes like chicken,” he said.

Walter sold them by the foot, having blown off their heads with a shotgun. In his preacher voice, he recounted some tall tales about dealing in snakes. In one case, he cut off the snake’s head before picking it up. When the headless stump struck his forearm as if lunging for a bite, he quickly learned that a headless snake can still be a live snake with snake-like instincts.

On another occasion a fellow brought in a limp rattler to sell to Walter, who would buy them cheap and sell them for a profit to someone else. He was busy that day and after paying the man, he quickly put the serpent in the chest freezer. Later, when a customer came in to purchase a snake for his supper, Walter lifted open the freezer lid to find the rattler stretched vertical, its ghastly head reaching up for Walter’s hand. He jerked back before he realized that the snake had only been stunned when the man had brought it in and had frozen solid as it tried to push open the freezer lid. 

Lily said she has never tasted rattlesnake. Neither have I. I wonder, however, if Southern Baptists say grace before digging into a tasty meal of fried rattler.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Sex and the Treehouse

Image
When Hana asked to book Fern Forest Treehouse for herself and three friends, H said there wasn’t room, the treehouse is only ninety square feet, he didn’t know how they’d sleep. “Oh, we’ll bring sleeping bags,” she wrote. “Don’t worry—we’ll fit in.” H is a pushover, especially for such youthful enthusiasm. And he thought it sounded like a good time. When the four gals pulled in from Boston around eleven Friday night, H was waiting up for them, the path to the treehouse lit by solar lamps, the treehouse itself all aglitter with colored lights. From upstairs, I heard excited giggles as he showed them around, more giggles as they climbed into the spa under a sky studded with a million stars. As happens in water at 102 degrees, the giggles calmed to whispers, and eventually all was quiet. The sun rose clear Saturday morning, warming the treehouse so that the girls were up a little after 7:00 a.m. We were still in bed when I heard water running in the downstairs bathroom, and H and ...
Read more

Octopus Fishing in Portugal

Image
Ann was studying in Spain for a semester, living with a Spanish family. When the university had a break, Portugal called. It’s an old country, remains of the first settlements dating back to the Neolithic period, five thousand years before Christ. The Visigoths invaded in the sixth century. In 1986, the hills were covered in wildflowers, and horses grazed in fields crimsoned with red geraniums. On the southern coast of Portugal, the area of Algarve is dotted with small fishing villages. Santa Luzia, Tavira, Lisboa, Faro, Cape Sagres, Salema. From the gold dust beaches, one can look across the sea to the shores of Morocco. Bathers swim topless—young women, old women, bathing tops cast aside, breasts bared to the sun. Ann felt strange covering herself. She was just nineteen and modest, but she wanted to fit in, to be accepted, even among these strangers on the beach. She’d worn a one-piece tank suit but slipped the straps off her shoulders, rolled down the suit’s upper half, lay...
Read more

A Treehouse guest discovers his roots in an old millstone

Image
In spring 1794, a group of men set their shoulders to clearing land in what is now Lincoln, Vermont. The footpath they blazed into the forest eventually became a road named for the Quakers who came to settle with ox carts holding all their belongings. They were young, strong, and healthy. Once they pried rocks from the fields, they found the soil rich enough to support their crops. A year later, nearly one hundred residents, mostly from New York and Connecticut, scattered over 24,000 acres of wilderness, most living in tiny one-room cabins made from logs they hewed by hand from trees they had cut on their property. They cooked meals in stick-and-mud fireplaces, spun wool from their sheep, wove fabrics to make their own clothing, and cobbled shoes for their families. They hunted game in the forests and guarded their livestock from wolves that prowled the land. When the crops failed and game was sparse, they went hungry. Quaker services were held in homes until they built a m...
Read more