A Snake Hunt in God’s Country

The middle of nowhere, a hole-in-the-wall, flyover counties—even the U.S. Census Bureau defines rurality as a type of absence: “all areas not classified as urban.”

An anarchist friend recently told me that a place is only called rural if people don’t give a shit about it. (You’ll never hear Aspen or the Napa Valley described as “rural.”) Much of my life as a writer is spent seeking a better definition, one more devoted to fullness than negation, which is what sent me recently to a rattlesnake hunt, which was also a craft fair, gun sale, horseshoe tournament, and chicken BBQ designed to raise funds for the volunteer fire department of the unincorporated village of Cross Fork, Pennsylvania, near where I grew up.

For the nonhunter, like myself, the snake hunt is more pageant than sport. Eastern timber rattlesnakes—distant, misunderstood, definitely not a metaphor—are rounded up in the mountains and brought down so that people can safely look at them. After the weekend, the snakes are released unharmed. To view them, or so I’ve assumed, is to reset one’s sense of wonder, to deepen one’s sense of what, exactly, is so often flown over. It’s also a great excuse for day drinking.

Cross Fork lies in Potter County (motto: GOD’S COUNTRY) in North Central Pennsylvania, hemmed in on all sides by state forest, which covers almost half the county and much of the counties to the south and west. In late June the foliage in the folded hills is many shades of green—Kelly, pine, pickle, kelp, even the green of nuclear ooze. My wife, Noelle, and I took the drive from Pittsburgh on shoestring roads, the temperature dropping. We passed the turn for my hometown, a little to the west, and kept going.

Cross Fork has neither the Christian propriety of the Midwest nor the belly-up exploitation of Appalachia. It’s a third type of country life: a camp town, ragged and self-referential, where generations of mostly white, mostly working-class people go for a weekend, or for their lives, to exist rurally. (In Pennsylvania, a “camp” is a cabin.) With the state land impeding the sprawl, the camps are so close together that, in the evening, the smoke from the campfires rises and converges until it resembles an enormous centipede marching down the creek.

At the turnout into town, a narrow-paved road that becomes gravel, we saw the sign for the snake hunt, followed by one that listed the types of fun we weren’t allowed to have:

NO TAILGATING
NO TRUCK PULLS
NO TENTS – TABLES
NO COOLERS
NO FIREWORKS
NO NUDITY
NO BROADCAST MUSIC

Noelle had found a similar Facebook post, by Deb’s Cross Fork Inn, from a year prior, announcing that the community had decided to ban “tailgating, burning of fires, any explosives.”

We crossed the narrow bridge over the creek, where families were pointing out fish below, and pulled our Subaru, the only one in town, into Kinney’s, the gas station/deli/gift shop/bar. There was a run on ice cream and snake-hunt shirts. “I gotta ask,” I said to the lady at the checkout, “about the NO NUDITY sign.”

I think the lady was Mrs. Kinney. She said, “Girls getting in the backs of trucks … for money.”

Outside, Noelle said, “So, like stripping?”

“Or maybe hooking.”

Noelle said, “Sex work,” but agreed, maybe.

The road outside was busy with four-wheelers and side-by-sides—pricey, off-road go-carts dragging comet tails of dust. We crossed the road to Deb’s, a dim, low-ceilinged bar/restaurant with mismatched furniture and a prominent sign reading NEXT TIME BRING YOUR WIFE. A golden retriever lives in the bar or at least spends a lot of time there. I surveyed the crowd. No one had taken the wife advice but me. Camp guys had cleaner shoes than locals. Snake hunters already wore their knee-high leather boots. I’d forgotten my camo hat. Noelle said she had to find the bathroom and asked me to order her a white wine. I told her I wouldn’t do that—men were already staring at me. Only in Pittsburgh am I redneck-adjacent. I thought of Gary Snyder at the Maverick Bar in Farmington, New Mexico, tucking his ponytail under his hat. He writes:

That short-haired joy and roughness—
____________America—your stupidity.
I could almost love you again.

Authenticity might not be real, but the feeling of it is, and every time I leave the city and head north, I get to brooding about identity and pretense and my place in the world. Plus, on the drive in, I killed a fawn. We were heading up a narrow road with a roadcut on one side and a cliff down to a river on the other, and we rounded the curve to find it flopping near the centerline. I turned around. I had a hammer and a tire iron. The fawn was still alive, its spine twisted, blood in the nose. I saw its big doe eyes blinking (or did I? It was becoming hard to tell) and tried to find a safe place to stop. There was none. I wasn’t about to be the dumbfuck who gets myself run over trying to kill a dead deer. I said, “Close your eyes,” lined up the tires, and drove over its neck.

We turned around again. The fawn was: Very Dead. I pulled my camera from the car, thinking about you—the omnipresent, urbane reader in my mind—but another voice from inside said: Nobody wants to fucking see that. Which is funny because at Deb’s there’s a wall of Polaroids of dead animals. Fish, deer, elk, bears, coyotes, foxes, minks, fishers, bobcats, and rattlesnakes, which have become a sort of symbol for the town.

The bartender brought us drinks. “Hey,” I said. “I gotta ask about the NO NUDITY sign.”

She was the youngest woman in the bar. She said, “Some girls would go around with a hat collecting twenties. Then they’d get into the back of the truck with a spotlight. But last year they had to shut it down because someone blew up a porta-potty.”

She added, “Not, like, with their butt. Like really blew it up!”

The explosives killed the party; the strip show was collateral damage. She said, “It definitely took the fun down a few notches. But the same lady can only win so many times anyway!” We looked around the bar. There were hardly enough women to field a contest.

Outside, Noelle said, “If you pay a woman twenty dollars to show you their tits, it had better be your wife.”

***

I wanted to write about the Cross Fork Snake Hunt without too much hand-wringing about rural conservatism. My logic:

1. The Gadsden flag/snake hunt/Christianity juxtaposition is a little too obvious.

2. Snakes can’t vote.

3. There are far more interesting things to say about the history and culture of Potter County, such as the failed utopian community started in the wilderness by Norwegian violinist Ole Bull in 1852; the failed Austin Dam, which broke free in 1911, killing seventy-eight of the town’s three thousand residents and making a hero of the local brothel madam, Cora Brooks, who called downstream to warn the locals; the failed business empire of John Rigas, founder of Adelphia Communications, one of the largest cable companies in the U.S., centered in the county seat of Coudersport, which went bust after Rigas was convicted of two billion dollars’ worth of fraud in the wake of the Enron scandal, leading, locally, to major job loss and an empty marble-columned office building in the middle of the county; a fascinating three-way divide, where rain from a single cloud might end up in the Atlantic, the Gulf of Mexico, or the Saint Lawrence Seaway; and Cherry Springs State Park, a mountaintop meadow surrounded by deep woods, above which are some of the darkest skies in the Eastern U.S. On a clear night, with the ocean of the hills on the periphery, the sky resembles the acne on God’s broad back.

But—there was a mobile Trump store among the craft vendors at the snake hunt. A shining tractor trailer from New Jersey with a side that opened to reveal a wall of T-shirts printed with the past five years of right-wing memes. The only people I saw wearing these shirts were two boys, about ten years old. One was volunteering at the chicken BBQ in a shirt that said, FUCK YOU TRUMP WON.

The snake pit was tucked into the shade of two maples next to the live band and the gun sale. I’d wanted to visit the snake hunt for years and was embarrassed to see that it didn’t have any of the gladiatorial aura I’d imagined. Just two aluminum bleachers framing the ten-by-ten sandbox, roofed with a plastic canopy and fenced in by waist-high chicken wire. I’d been imagining something unlikely. A literal pit, something sunken and dark. Mattie Ross, King Aelle, Hell. But we needed them on the surface, in the open, to see. If not, why catch them at all?

A familiar story: even as early Americans made the rattlesnake their symbol, they sought to wipe it out. Snakes, coyotes, wolves, crows, salamanders—settlers turned group hunts of unpopular creatures into festivals, celebrations of conquest with prizes for the largest catch. The eradication of rattlesnakes was rooted more in religious fervor and hindbrain fear than in any actual threat. The eastern timber rattlesnake is as chill as it is venomous. “Don’t tread on me” is the base requirement for avoiding being bitten, and experts speculate that most bites stem from handling. Nevertheless, I found two fantastical early-twentieth-century newspaper articles in about as many minutes from upstate Pennsylvania, one about a snake attacking a girl under a tree and another about a rattler slithering into a baby’s pram in the night to swallow it whole. In other states (hello, Texas), rattlesnakes are still rounded up and killed under the guise of public safety. But by the time the Cross Fork Snake Hunt was established, the pendulum in Appalachia had swung. Wanton killing combined with resource extraction had almost extirpated the animal.

The Pennsylvania state game commission issued a protection for rattlesnakes in 1972, allowing only a short, controlled hunting season. Soon the roundups were catch-and-release.

There are supposedly two thousand timber rattlesnakes in the state, four of which were already in the pit by that Saturday morning. One was stretched out across the sand, four feet long and wrist thick. The rest were coiled against the fence, the rattles rising and falling like the night song of bugs. Alongside them in the pit, the snake master lounged in his tall leather boots and camo hat. (“Snake master” is my term, not his.) Sometimes a snake would crawl over his foot as he leaned on the fencepost and made small talk with the onlookers. He said they were like people, some more aggressive than others. They didn’t seem like people at all.

Growing up with the name Jake meant that as a kid I felt a deep, cosmic connection with snakes. I spent summers catching garter and rat snakes and saving them from my grandmother, a woman with such ophidiophobia that she had nightmares about them several nights a week. She demanded they be killed on the spot and carried around an ice chopper to do the job. Since then, I’ve spotted rattlesnakes along hiking trails and spent time in their presence, watching their tongues tasting the air for life. I’m no noob, but standing over the pit, the snakes’ most obvious, most snakelike features were once again novel. They really, totally had no legs. They really rattled with their tails. The black and forked tongues, the black and slitted pupils, the infinite repetition of black and tan, the deadly coil, head hovering in tension.

They were beautiful. So beautiful, in fact, that each year an award was granted for prettiest snake. I asked the snake master about the criteria, and he said: “Women choose.”

By noon, more hunters had come down from the hills, queueing near the entrance to the pit. They were easy to tell by the fact that they were carrying buckets with rattlesnakes inside. One bucket said WARNING: VENOMOUS SNAKE. Another said HOME DEPOT. The older hunters kept their snakes in canvas sacks knotted shut, the snakes curled inside like enormous bagged dog turds. I saw one hunter standing off from the rest. He was predictably big and leathery. “How d’you do?” I asked.

He pointed to the snake being measured on the table. “I got one, about fifty inches.”

I asked, “Where’d you find him?”

He said, “Up on the mountain,” pointing to the green ridge past the creek. I felt a delicious thrill.

When a snake arrives, the snake master dumps it from its container into the sand. He takes it by the tail and encourages it to slither into a clear plastic tube. (You can drink beer anywhere at the festival; behind us, two drunk bros were chanting, “Tube that snake, tube that snake!”) Then, he lifts the snake, pinching the tube around its body with one hand and cupping it so that it flows in two low arches between his hands. The snakes are then weighed and measured with their head—and fangs—safely stuck in the tube. After that, the petting begins.

“They’re a very clean snake,” he said. “They don’t stink.”

Children were crowding the stanchions as if waiting for an autograph. I stood from my seat, hurried to the edge of the pit, and reached over them as he brought the snake by. What had I expected? Something fishier, maybe—cool to the touch, slippery, gross. But the skin was soft and worn, like an heirloom stuffed toy, with scales that weren’t any sharper than the petals of a marigold.

“They used to call them velvet-tail rattlers,” he said.

The belly was even softer (the constant exfoliation?), velvety and warm to the touch, the blood hot and hyperactive in the summer weather. The weight of the belly drooped over my hand. Each striation of muscle was distinct, its own. I thought of “Indigo,” Padgett Powell’s essay about seeking the endangered eastern indigo snake. When he finally finds one, he looks at the biologist and says: “Can I have sex with it?” It’s imperative to say that I did not want to fuck the snake, exactly, but I get the sensory appeal. I just kept touching it, reaching over children and women, until the snake master carried it past.

I looked around and noticed something else. It was all women and kids around me. Each man at the stanchions had taken a half step back, arms folded, watching with a performed aloofness. It made me sad for them, and embarrassed for myself. I thought: Fellas, is it gay to touch a snake?

The snake master’s name was William Wheeler Junior, president of the Keystone Reptile Club and the man responsible for all five of upper Pennsylvania’s snake hunts. His father had started the Cross Fork Snake Hunt fifty-three years ago. “My dad was bit twenty-eight times,” he said to the crowd. Mostly before he’d quit drinking. “I’ve been bit eight times that required antivenom.”

He held up a mangled finger to the crowd and said, “Today’s the thirtieth anniversary of my crooked finger. Nineteen ninety-five, they hauled me out of here in a meat wagon.”

Around the pit he’d displayed photos of his wounds. Swollen, elephantine hands with deep, necrotic pits at the center. He said his assistant Cody got bit two years ago, and the antivenom cost him four hundred and twenty thousand dollars. “That’s Obamacare for you!” he said.

I learned later that it wasn’t always gay to touch a snake. The keystone event of the weekend had once been the sacking contest, in which a team of two (drunk?) men entered the pit with five live rattlesnakes and raced to put them in a sack. The state was concerned for the snakes’ well-being and eventually shut it down. Wheeler told us, “They used to have sacking contests with black snakes, too. They’d get two women on a team, and they’d be trying to sack them, and you know how big them things are, and they’d be biting them, blood running down their arms.”

He was doing all of this—the storytelling, the weighing and measuring, bullshitting with the snake hunters—while high-stepping over rattlers and eating a soft pretzel from a plate on the table where he measured the snakes. I watched this man tube a snake, measure it, drop it, rip a hunk from the pretzel, cram it in his mouth, answer a question while chewing, and lift another serpent with his bare hands.

Then, he said—and I still can’t believe this is true: “When you’re up here in God’s country, you’re truly in the territory of the snake.”

***

No party planner could coordinate the ease with which the snake festival slipped into its after-party. People just hit a natural angle of repose, at which point the crowd began to tumble, slowly, from the festival grounds into the road and parking lot and bars. We made our way to Jeff’s Bar, where, near the door, in what used to be a closet, is a diorama of taxidermied wildlife encased in Plexiglas. Snakes coiled, fawns bedding in Styrofoam moss. They’d hung paper snakes from the ceiling, and the same country band from the festival was playing another set.

Among the crowd were three notable drunks. One was short and old and wearing a leather vest covered in patches from previous snake hunts. He was trying to light cigarettes backward and staring through his dirty glasses, seemingly unable to recognize anyone’s face. People kept trying to check on him, but no one took away his beer. The next day, he apparently woke up, drove into the mountains, and caught the winning snake: a fifty-seven-inch black phase rattler, a monster by Pennsylvania standards, earning him a wooden plaque.

The second notable drunk was the largest man at the festival, dancing alone and yelling at no one with the type of belligerence that size permits. The other large men (this was a bar full of large men) kept checking him over their shoulders. There were definitely some guns in the room, and the singer from the band was making things worse by razzing the guy, saying, “I didn’t know that Coors Light could even do that to a man. Someone hurry and get him another fifteen.” We were all relieved when he stumbled outside with a group of sunburned friends.

The third was the man renting the cabin next to ours. He was from the Pittsburgh suburbs. So was the guy at the end of the bar, and the one in the camo buying rounds of shots. Our neighbor said he’d been coming up to the snake hunt with his son-in-law for seventeen years. He worked as a Pittsburgh city bus driver.

I asked if he he’d ever hit anybody.

He said, “You mean like cars, or individuals?”

“People.”

“One time,” he said, “I pulled up to a stop and right when I did, one of the tires just fucking blew, man. Whoooosh! It sent a trash can screaming into this old lady and knocked her over and her legs were all bloody and she was crying and everyone was acting like it was my fault, you know? Like I blew out the tire on purpose, or something.”

And he said, “Hey man. You guys smoke?” and went outside to his buddy’s van.

The son-in-law had a fade and a thick gold chain. I asked him about the nudity signs. He looked at Noelle for a second. Then for a few more. He said, “They used to have … a titty contest. There’d be like three hundred people in Deb’s parking lot, doing truck pulls and shit.”

“The bartender at Deb’s told me somebody blew up a porta-potty.”

“That happened a bunch of times.”

Somehow, time passed, and by the time we made it to Deb’s, the old heads were done for the night. The bus driver was dancing around the bar in a raccoon-skin cap, and two people were passed out at tables. Now the youth were out, and they were remarkably coded: square-toe pull-up boots, Zyn rings in their jean pockets, new boxy Carhartt tees, gold chains, mullets, retro nineties shades sitting backward on their heads, like a prey species camouflaged with a set of false eyes. Some of them could not be more than seventeen years old. You could tell by the way they cradled their beers. They stood in circles in Deb’s with a clear resignation on their faces. There would be no huge party, no pallet fires, and probably no tits. I found something sad about it. They’d grown up hearing these stories from their uncles, and now, the people of Cross Fork had moved on.

One kid rushed in to Deb’s, started whispering to his friends, and soon they were all outside. We followed and found, on the road, in the half dark under the only streetlight in town, the big drunk from Jeff’s Bar. He had a silvery snake in each hand, whipping them back and forth across the gravel so that they hissed and rattled, their tongues popping at the end of each snap.

Not really. He was actually wielding two towing chains. But I was several beers deep, and each action seemed meaningful and linked. The guy was screaming, “Let’s goooo!” He was hulking at the shoulders, enormous and animalistic, conducting the chains back and forth with a terrifying sort of ease.

He kept yelling, “Come on, you pansies. Come on, you fucking pansies.” His voice was howling and pained. Everyone drinking in the parking lot was committed to ignoring him, their backs turned, heads lowered. Tradition is forged by change, and I thought, This here is a man against time. But it turns out he didn’t want to pull trucks but rather shiny new side-by-sides.

It turns out he was from New Jersey.

Jake Maynard is the author of the novel Slime Line. He works at a plant nursery in Pittsburgh.