Snake Dancing

My new "thing" this Spring is to go jogging through these Blueberry Farms / Natural Slough by my work every day at lunch. Well every day its not raining that is. So about once a month. And Ive been doing this for a few weeks now feeling real proud of myself for actually sticking it out, and fortunate to have this beautiful natural slough so close by that I can literally run to it on a lunch break. So all is going just hunky dory and I'm getting into the routine, propelling like the wind, rockin' to a kick-ass workout play list all sorted out in my iPod and then TODAY - well I fear it may have all come to an abrupt end. Much to my horror, I learned that the Blueberry Farms/ Slough is SNAKE ridden!!! Real, live, slippery slimy, scaly, ugly, frickin terrifying beastly snakes!! I saw not one, but TWO of them today, one of which stopped me dead in my tracks for at least 10 minutes while I pondered what the hell to do about this situation. You see its a fairly narrow trail that unless you're a bush walker, you can't exactly detour around, and this HUUUUUUUUUUUGGGGGGGEEEEEE snake was like RIGHT there blocking this little bridge thing that I had to get past. My first thought, once I relocated my heart beat, was to just wait it out and either the snake will move or some other brave jogger will come by and wrangle it off the bridge and save me from my plight. But I'm not a patient person, and at least 60-90 seconds went by and the f_cker still didnt move! At this point, as I stood trembling in my fashionable Velour track suit complete with racing stripes, I thought about having a good cry, but I seemed to have scared the tears away, so instead I came to the conclusion that I would stand where I was (a good ways away from striking distance but close enough for the snake to see me if it looked up) and start dancing frantically, hoping that my shadows would be cast in the snakes direction and would scare it away. And you know what? It worked! I mean not even 10 seconds into my frantic, yet graceful and astonishingly technical hip hop and disco moves, the snake bolted. It actually slithered down into the cracks of the bridge, which wasnt ideal because it forced me into a situation where I had to leap for dear life to clear the entire distance of the bridge. I had visions of this damn snake springing up out from the planks of the bridge and biting me in the unmentionables, so man did I JUMP! At that moment, I could have been mistaken for an Olympic long jumper; I was one motivated SOB.

So the moral of this story is when faced with a life threatening situation (yes people, it was a Gardner snake so I was told through fits of laughter and a healthy dosage of finger pointing after I raced back to relay my ordeal), and pizza is NOT available to gorge yourself on and relieve the stress, just dance! I mean really really dance your ass off, and the scary things will go away.

I assert that this entire story is completely true (with the exception of the Velour track suit - I'm not nearly that cool). So don't go all James Frey on my action.