Last night I got home from a quick ride and went around to the back of my house to put my bike in the shed. Its just a little garden shed and like everything else where I live its made of asbestos (cheers James Hardie). Its really just a outdoor laundry with a normal house type door and is maybe 2m x1.5 meters in size.
As I cant fit through the door beside my bike, I have to wheel it through in front of me and then slip through beside it. As I completed the first part of the process and now had a bike leaning on the doorframe halfway through, I looked down and my feet as I went to squeeze through, and thought “oh, there’s a snake about 6 inches from my foot”. Then I composed myself and thought “Jezuz, THERES A F_____G SNAKE 6 INCHES FROM MY F_______G FOOT”. At this point I did what most people would do and jumped sharpish in the opposite direction to the snake. This now positioned me inside the shed looking directly at a 6ft copperhead laying with its head now directly under my bikes chainwheel in the middle of the doorway.
I quickly had a look around and all I had at my disposal to deal with the situation was a long handled window cleaning sponge. Now this would not normally be my weapon of choice in dealing with a situation such as this, but I was in a low option type of predicament here. I was also in cycling shoes on a cement floor in full cycling clobber including helmet and fogged up rudy projects. The betting was running at about 3 to 1 in favor of the snake at this point
The snake initially did not seem that stressed about things. That is until I started to try and persuade him to leave the scene with my window cleaner. At this point he became a little surly. However rather than just pissing off and living to fight another day, Mr Snake, or Steve Earle as I have started to refer to him, decides that he is going to start coming into the shed. My bloody bike is in the way so I cant pin him with the window cleaner, so I try to just create a barrier to push him back out.
Steve is not having a bar of that. He comes in pretty fast, heading for me. Just as he is in far enough that I can now pin him with my weapon, he does a hard right and heads into the corner via a passage along the wall.
This allows me to vacate the shed, but now leaves me with another issue. I have a snake in my small shed, nestled in amongst a pile of old tubes and vittoria rubino pro’s.
My preferred implement for this type of work is an old fashioned rake. I called the boss and asked her to find me one of these pronto. Of course of the 5 rakes that should be around none of them can be found, but she returns with about 4 different styles of shovels – at least they are better than the window cleaner.
20min stuffing around leads to no improvement in the situation until the umpires call end of play for bad light. Steve is still in the shed and I am on a 24 hour watch out the back window on the shed door.
At this point its anyone’s game.
Now Daddy ran the whiskey in a big block Dodge
Bought it at an auction at the Mason's Lodge
Johnson County Sheriff painted on the side
Just shot a coat of primer then he looked inside
Well him and my uncle tore that engine down
I still remember that rumblin' sound
Then the sheriff came around in the middle of the night
Saw mamma crying, knew something wasn't right
Was headed down to Knoxville with the weekly load
You could smell the whiskey burning down Copperhead Rd
Steve Earle "Copperhead Road"
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