It was quite the scene to say the least. My next door neighbor knocked on my front door to tell me that there was a snake in our front yard. I went outside to find 4 neighbors standing in my front yard watching it crawl up towards the wall separating my front and back yards. Neighbors standing around complicates redneck yard aeration with the 12 guage.
I was contemplating between the long handled hoe and a headshot with a .22. With one neighbor shrieking and going into hysterics about how her daughter rides her bike up and down the sidewalk in front of my house everyday, I made the announcement that if no one had any issues I was going to take care of it.
Then my neighbor who knocked on my door asked rather incredulously if I was going to kill it. I told her that was the general idea since it wasn't safe having it in the neighborhood and I really didn't want to take any chances with trying to capture and handle it.
Then the shrieking neighbor goes into a dialing frenzy on her iPhone. Her hysterics become even more high pitched after calling 911 and being told the police do not respond to snake calls, neither does the fire department and animal control doesn't work on Sundays.
Now my next door neighbor's husband launches into a diatribe about being guilt ridden for buying a house and displacing a snake, how it shouldn't be made to suffer for our irresponsible development of the desert. I asked the neighbor if he had any kids or pets. He said they had a dog when they lived in Tucson, it died, it may have been bitten by a snake.
I'm about to go back inside and load up some .22 hollow points since the snake is now tightly coiled making a clean blow to the head with the hoe a little more complicated. Besides, it's a 5' long Mojave, I really don't want to get close enough to it with the hoe. Just then the hysteric neighbor screams that she's found someone, throws her iPhone to my guilt ridden neighbor and tells him to give them dierections and runs back down the street screaming to her daughter to get inside the house. Guilt ridden neighbor gives directions then explains to us that the Phoenix Herpetological Society is coming to capture and relocate the snake for a donation which he wil gladly pay.
I waited outside with my next door neighbor for about 1/2 an hour waiting for the Herpetological Society to show up. We wanted to make sure that we knew where the snake was and that no kids or animals tried to investigate. The kid from the Herpetological Society shows up and puts the snake in a bucket. I asked where it would be relocated to really hoping it wasn't the desert preserve across the road from our development. He said they relocate them off of a hiking trail at Lake Pleasant. Remind me not to go fishing there...
So in summary, my enlightened next door neighbors think I'm a primitive redneck, I don't have a new belt, my next door neighbor has a new iPhone and I'm never going fishing at Lake Pleasant again.
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