[Critique Group 2] Leonards submission for group 2

[Tuchyner5 at aol.com]

Where to Find Small  Rattlesnakes 
by 
Leonard Tuchyner 

Walking barefoot in Florida may be hazardous to your health. I  discovered 
that when I was seventeen years old.  Having been raised in Irvington, New  
Jersey, the only times I ever walked around barefooted  was when I was at a 
lake, river, seashore or pool. Sand was always an  opportunity to experience 
the freedom of shoeless toes, all-in-all a wonderful  sensation. So when I 
moved to St.  Petersburg, Florida, in  1958 and was confronted with a 
plethora of sand, I was in barefoot  heaven. 
No matter where I lived, it was always an opportunity for  exploration. I 
didn’t know I was slowly going blind when I was seventeen, except  that when 
I drove a car at night, I noticed I wasn’t seeing a lot of things I  should 
have been seeing. So I told people I was night blind, but I really didn’t  
mean it. It just helped me to explain to my father why the front bumper of 
the  family car was a little closer to the chassis than it used to be. “I’m 
night  blind, you know. I didn’t notice the concrete marker in front of the 
parking  space.” 
He didn’t believe me, of course. But what could he say?  He had his heart 
set on buying a new used car and needed me to be the inheritor  of the old 
Plymouth. If he told my Mom that I was blind,  she certainly wouldn’t allow 
him to allow me to drive a car, and then he  wouldn’t be able to buy the Ford 
he had all ready purchased in his mind. So it  all worked out in my favor.  
Since I was not (really) blind, it didn’t occur to me  that I might not see 
things in the daylight that maybe it would be better if I  did see. I 
might, for instance, step on things with my bare feet I oughtn’t to  have stepped 
on. That would include dog scat, broken glass, sharp stones, fire  ant 
colonies and poison jellyfish lying just above the surf line. 
I had a lot of time to myself in the first summer of my  arrival at St.  
Petersburg, because having just arrived there and knowing  no one, I had a 
limited number of friends. Limited translates to none. With all  that time to 
myself, I was free to pursue my hobbies of exploration. St. Pete, in 1958, 
was nothing like it is today.  It was undeveloped, relative to where I  came 
from. One of the things it did have was pathways into open spaces that  
stretched beyond my visual horizons. So off I would go, taking my unclad feet  
with me, into the wilderness. I made some wonderful discoveries. For example, 
I  found the wreckage of an entire wooden boat, about sixteen feet long. 
Those were  the days of wooden vessels. I never ran into plastic ones like they 
have today.  It was the kind of boat upon which you attached a motor on the 
very end.  That’s called the stern. Unsurprisingly,  the motor was missing, 
and the transom was rotted out. But it had a wonderful  ornament on its 
front. It looked a lot like the hood ornament of a  car. 
I discovered that it is best to stick to a pathway when  walking unshod. We 
didn’t have cacti in New Jersey, so I wasn’t prepared for low-lying  
spikes that messed up naked feet when given the opportunity.  
In Irvington, I never ran across any snakes except  garter snakes which we 
found under rocks. It never occurred to me or any other  boy I knew that 
they were capable of biting. It’s not unexpected then that I  wasn’t looking 
out for snakes when on my excursions. That’s perfectly  reasonable, is it 
not?  
In any case, I learned about venomous snakes on one  particular day while 
waltzing around the out-back. On that occasion I heard an  interesting sound. 
It was a sound resembling the noise that dry seeds make when  shaken in a 
dried up bean-pod.   It was a muted rattle.   
I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking I was in the  close proximity 
of a snake that rattles its tail. Well, you are wrong. I was  smack dab in 
the middle of a whole mess of these little fellers, many of them  within a 
foot or two of my vulnerable feet, not to mention unprotected shins. It  didn’
t take me long to recognize what they were. They were very small  
rattlesnakes. I think they call them pygmy rattlesnakes. I’d seen enough Western  
movies to know that you did not want to be fanged by one of those things.  
There was no way out. I was surrounded by what seemed at  the time to be a 
galaxy of writhing death. I didn’t have time to think, thank  goodness. If I 
did, my feet would have remained frozen to the ground and those  little 
guys would have had no choice but to strike, just to prove they  could.  I didn’
t have time to  consider that my chances of picking my way through that 
mess without stepping on  most of them were highly improbable. I wouldn’t have 
told myself ‘you cannot  walk on air’. Suddenly, my unreliable eyes saw the 
world with clarity worthy of  an eagle, and I took off like a bat out of 
hell, finding spaces where they did  not exist, and doing so with a mind that 
had gone to another dimension. Somehow,  I transported to a place of safety, 
beyond striking distance of those pygmy  rattlers.  
It happened so fast I didn’t even have time to be  frightened.  I stood 
there near the  edge of their nest, wondering how it came to be that I was 
standing at the edge  of a swarm of rattlesnakes with whom I’d been in intimate 
proximity a moment  earlier. 
You might think this ended my career as a wilderness  scout. It did not. I 
just did it with high-top sneakers from that day forward.  
This was just another story I never told my  parents.
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