Wit Stop

Snakes Don't Wear Girdles And Have Other Enviable Traits

Not too long ago, during a tour of several Arizona cities, my wife and I visited the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum outside of Tucson, an interesting and educational outdoor display of the flora and fauna native to the Sonoran Desert of Arizona, the Mexican state of Sonora, and the Sea of Cortes region. The temperature nudged 118° F. that day, which cut the time of the tour in half. Apparently the flora and fauna had all melted together. The tour guides feared we might join them.

With the time we had left from the abbreviated tour, I wanted to visit the Reptile Exhibit Hall. Eleven distinct species of poisonous snakes inhabit the Sonoran Desert, and this museum had live specimens of all of them. The Reptile Exhibit Hall attracted me for three reasons:

I had hoped that my wife would join me because it's always nice to have someone there to share your "oohs" and "ahhs," and it's an opportunity to point out little-known facts about these animals and show your spouse that you know even more about them than the people who have devoted their lives to the study of reptiles and who paint the little signs that are placed in front of their enclosed terrariums.

But it was not to be. My wife said, "Snakes are disgusting.

We should go to the gift shop." That was a fourth reason why I preferred the Reptile Exhibit Hall it would be cheaper. It was included in the price of admission, and none of the vipers were for sale.

We compromised. I went to the snake display; my wife went to the gift shop.

At the first display case, I came face to face, separated by unbreakable glass of course, with a diamondback rattlesnake. He stared at me while I stared at him. We appeared to be studying each other.

Probably he was wishing that his wife were there in the diorama with him to share the "oohs" and "aahs" and to point out interesting little-known facts about me. But he was alone. Perhaps his wife was in the gift shop. Who knows.

I tapped on the glass, which is de rigueur at snake displays. We hope that the viper will strike at us and bang it's little snout against the unbreakableglass. That's amusing to us. And we call snakes pernicious. The tapping didn't faze him. We just stared. Neither of us moved except that the snake continually lashed his tongue out and in, out and in. I had never before had any creature stick his tongue out at me so frequently, except for this girl I tried to flirt with back in the third grade.

I moved on.

Homo sapiens has much to envy about and learn from Reptilia. Snakes keep their figures. You never see a rattler with a grotesque pot belly or with thighs curdled with cellulite. Vipers don't wear bikinis because they have nothing on their bodies to hold them up and also nothing particularly seductive to hide; but if they did wear them, they would fit all their lives. Don't we wish we knew how they did it?

They're intelligent and resourceful. The horned rattlesnake, for instance, must crawl over desert surfaces that can reach 150° F., so it devised "sidewinding." That's a form of locomotion that enables the snake to move while allowing only three points of its body to touch the hot sand at any one time. Anyone in Arizona who has ever worn shorts on a hot July day and sat down in a car with vinyl seatcovers wishes that certain parts of their anatomies could be so resourceful. They project an enviable nononsense, "don't tread on me" image. Basically they're a sausage with fangs, and yet they have most of us terrified and intimidated.

I enjoyed my morning with the venomous vipers.

My wife apparently enjoyed her gift shop excursion, too.

"I got some great gifts," she said.

"How much did you spend?"

"Oh, about $68."

It was very fortunate at that moment that I was nonvenomous.