OUR MOTORCYCLE ESCAPADE WAS one instance of many typical days in the desert. Then there were days that were less typical but very memorable, like our multiple escapades with poisonous snakes.

I can’t say why the desert had so many of these creatures crawling across every inch of its parched ground. Looking and acting like sticks while sunning themselves. Coiled and uncoiled. Their coloring ranging from off-white to brown, save for a beautiful, red-on-yellow, coiled coral snake I accidentally stepped on one day while walking home from my last baseball game. It was a long game and I was whipped, otherwise I might have been inclined to find a way to bring the deadly viper home to show my friends.

The sun had just set behind the mountains, giving me some relief after standing in left field for hours. After the game, I set out on the two mile trail through the desert to my house. It wasn’t an actual trail, per se, but a circuitous path around creosotes that got me from point A to point B in a minimum number of steps. I doubt if any kid ever walked exactly that same path given the many small obstacles like cacti to gopher holes.

I was happy, though. It was September, and I knew the hot summer was about to come to an end. Our team had done well, despite my predictable strike-out performance as the ninth batter in the lineup. Though my second-base fielding performance was fair, I had never quite grasped the physical, love-hate relationship between a baseball and bat.

My dad both lived and loved the game. Most of his pictures from World War II show him stationed in some extreme climate with a baseball glove in his hand. Had he lived longer to teach me what he knew, I may have been a contender in the game, at least at the Little League level. My ego rescue came, however, on the final day of my last suited game. In cruel irony, some guy in a baseball cap fully restored my sense of baseball net worth.

“You need to watch the ball hit the bat,” the man advised.

I had just left the field to grab a drink of water. I didn’t recognize the guy or the team cap on his head, though it was likely the Angels since what he told me came straight from heaven.

“What? What do you mean?” I stuttered, walking toward the fountain.

He stopped me in my tracks. Holding his arms outward as if grasping a bat, he took a long, slow, pretend swing.

“See how I turn my head the opposite direction of the bat?” he demonstrated. “That’s the first step. In the second step, you force your eyes to watch the ball hit the bat. You witness how the two connect with each other. Head, eyes, ball, bat.”

In my dozen years of playing baseball, no coach or teammate had ever explained it that simply to me. I was understandably skeptical.

“It won’t matter,” I countered as if I had tried all the ropes and failed. “My batting average is the worst in the league for the fourth straight year. My team hates it when I’m up, and everyone tells me to crouch down to make the strike zone smaller and get a walk.”

“It will matter,” he countered. “Your brain sees the ball connect with the bat, even though you think it can’t process something happening that fast. But it can and does. Trust me. Try it when you’re up to bat next time. Turn your head the opposite direction of the bat, and give your eyes and brain the chance to see the ball connect with it. Make an effort to watch the ball hit the bat.”

My batting average was in the mid double digits at that time, and I had two more tries that night.

The first time up, I looked over at my coach. He was giving the only signal he ever needed to give me: ‘Don’t swing, take a walk.’

I decided to ignore the coach and take the baseball cap guy’s advice.

A double the first time up, then a single.

On that day, I realized that I don’t know everything, most especially when I think I do.

Spirited with a glorious feeling of invincibility that evening, I avoided my usual desert due diligence and failed to scan the desert ground as I walked. Luckily for the coral snake and me, we were both equally surprised at the event. The snake? Wondering why this cleats-bottomed shoe was trouncing upon it. Me? Wondering why the desert ground was suddenly squishy.

Snakes were deadly. Girls were wonderful. But I understood little about each of them.

Before girls entered our lives, Tommy and I were best buddies and the desert was ours, along with everything in it – including the snakes.

One innocently stupid day, we decided to head out to hunt rattlesnakes. We determined that a good capture target would be twelve, a clear dozen. We understood that some might eat the others, so we needed to overdo the count to exceed bragging rights from other friends.

To us, capturing these vipers was simply the right thing to do. We knew the open desert would be transformed in the subsequent years into the ubiquitous, brown granite ‘desert landscaping’ of residential boredom. We felt we’d be doing society a great service – eliminating snakes in the nearby desert so they wouldn’t bite or kill unsuspecting babies playing in the backyards in some future housing development.

While riding through the desert on bikes or motorcycle, the legless creatures were always slithering out of our way and scurrying into a hole. To our credit, we understood enough not to go sticking our hands into just any hole in the ground, given that snake holes looked no different from gopher holes.

So we grabbed an empty five-gallon bucket from Tommy’s carport closet and set out on our adventure. After walking for hours and miles, we came up with nothing and agreed to call it a day and head back home.

Just then, we located a telltale snake track. With idiotic juvenile naivete, we found a couple yard-long branches from a nearby creosote bush skeleton and began sticking them in the few holes in the vicinity, wiggling and wriggling them around. This, we thought, might cause enough commotion to piss-off any snake hiding underground.

Or two. At a time.

Both Tommy and I jumped backwards, startled as two brown rattlers emerged simultaneously from two different holes. Tails were lifted high in the air and their rattles were screaming: ‘Why the hell are you bothering us? Did we violently bust into your home and smash your record collection to bits?”

“Grab the bucket!” Tommy screamed.

The snake nearest to me was slithering a yard from my exposed leg, and I was glad to have something to place between the snake’s fangs and my exposed shins. I snatched the bucket we had thrown aside and began to scrape it against the ground toward the rattler, stupidly assuming I could easily scoop it up from the ground.

“No, Greg!” Tommy cried. “This other one is too close to me, and it’s a bigger prize.”

That rattler was inches from his bare and now stiff legs, and they were staring each other down.

“Put the bucket over the snake,” he whispered, daring not to move anything else on his body.

I had no idea what he meant. The rattler was three feet at full length while the white plastic bucket was a foot in diameter at best.

He was scared out of his wits. “Put the bucket over the snake,” he repeated, “and press down hard on it.”

“How do I do that?”

“Go behind it,” he pleaded, through his clenched jaw. “It won’t bite you. It wants me.”

I glanced to my left. The smaller rattler that emerged from the hole nearest me was now facing the other direction and had stopped in place, confused by the disturbance.

I gingerly paced a few steps toward the larger rattler, approaching from its backside. It wriggled toward Tommy then began to pull backward slightly, coiling its upper half inward for enough lunge power to connect its fangs with his leg.

This was my only chance to save the poor boy from a vicious bite in the middle of a desolate desert, so I slammed the bucket down hard on its body.

Its head lunged forward but the back half was immobilized. It wasn’t going anywhere.

Tommy had jumped a few yards backward in the air. After the near miss, he was at maximum adrenalin. “Wrong end!” he yelled at me, his hands thrashing above his head. “Don’t take your weight off that bucket!”

“What do you mean ‘wrong end?’”

“Stupid, dude! You put the bottom of the bucket on top of him, not the open top. How are we supposed to get him in there?”

“I don’t know,” I shrugged.

There I was, looking down at one very angry rattlesnake, held down only by the plastic bucket bottom and my ninety pound frame. The poor reptile tried to move but I held the better part of its slithering body at bay.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

Tommy was hunting around the area in a very agitated way. “Searching for better sticks,” he screamed, as if screaming would somehow dampen the fear we felt.

“You don’t really mean to keep this one, do you?” I replied nonchalantly, not grasping that I was sitting atop death.

“Of course! Why do you think we came all the way out here and took the bucket? It wasn’t to catch lizards. We’re past that age and on to bigger things.”

I had known Tommy for a year. He seemed level-headed, destined for a great future, and he had that great athletic ability. I assumed his vote outweighed my own.

“Okay. Whatever. This guy’s strong and trying to wriggle away, though. Plus, I feel like my hands are falling asleep having to press so hard.”

“Just wait. Aha. Found one!” he exclaimed, raising a large ocotillo skeleton branch in the air.

Tommy approached the immobilized snake cautiously after glancing to his right at the other snake five yards away. Despite the nearby ruckus, that serpent remained motionless. Tommy then broke the branch at a fork, creating a v-shaped end.

“I saw an expert do this on TV,” he beamed with confidence. “You have to be smarter than the snake. First, keep its head down. Second, pick it up by the tail to move it.”

Tommy quickly embedded the snake’s neck in the forked end of his stick. “Got it. He’s not going anywhere now. Greg, you can pick it up from the tail and put it in the bucket. Do you see its tail?”

I could see the tail sticking out from under its bucket anchor, but I wasn’t about to grasp a rattler that was half my body length.

“Tommy,” I pleaded in an unusually sensible fear for my life, “you watched the TV show, not me. I’ll hold the stick, and you pick the rattler up from behind.”

I don’t believe he intended for me to take the biggest risk, he only wanted to get the snake into the bucket most efficiently. “Here,” he said, grabbing my hand to clutch the stick.

At that point, I was forced to take my weight off the bucket. The force of the snake’s writhing backend overturned it, and Tommy jumped to plant his shoe on the snake’s back. He then snatched it by the tail.

There was Tommy, holding the snake’s tail in one hand, his shoe on its back to mitigate the writhing, and I was holding down its head with the fragile ocotillo stick. We assumed this is the way these things were done by the pros, and we were following in their footsteps.

I handed the stick to Tommy then ran to grab the bucket which had rolled away. The rattler’s tongue was flicking outward wildly, trying to sense what meal was in store for it once this minor trauma was over.

“Out of the way,” Tommy warned in just enough time for me to jump back. He removed his foot from its back and let go of the stick around its neck.

He now held the rattler upside down in his hand. It was angrily twisting its body back and forth, swinging to and fro like clothesline linen flapping in a tornado. Quickly, he guided it into the white plastic prison.

“Got it!” we cried.

We both danced around for a moment, oblivious to the other venomous menace a few yards away.

Staring at our prize, the unhappy occupant of the bucket, we came to the same conclusion.

“If it was that easy, let’s get the other one!” we shouted in unison.

By this time, the smaller rattler had begun a slow descent into a hole. Oblivious to the risk, Tommy sprang over to extract the viper by its tail from the intended refuge.

He tugged hard. “I can’t fully pull it out all the way!” he screamed, its tail rattling in his hands. “Like it’s stuck in there. Can you get the stick or your shoes and poke at the ground to collapse this hole?”

And stupidly, I did just that.

My foot crushed the dirt above and landed within an inch of its nose. “There it is!” I exclaimed in sheer delight as its hiding place was exposed.

Tommy held its tail tightly. “I see its upper body,” I claimed. “You should be able to pull it out now.”

With one powerful tug, Tommy forced the snake from its collapsed lair. The angry serpent swept across the desert ground and flew into the air like a large pendulum, its body grazing Tommy’s exposed leg along the way. As it swung back, he casually stepped aside and gracefully dropped the enraged viper into the bucket.

Alas, we had captured our prizes. Two rattlers. Two kids. Two tales to tell friends – especially the females.

I peered into the bucket, watching as the two snakes writhed, rattled, and attempted to use each other’s bodies to gain enough elevation to lift their heads over the edge and escape or strike in retribution.

Scratching my head, I asked a question we had not considered. We didn’t realistically anticipate catching a poisonous snake that day, much less two, so a next phase of plan execution didn’t exist.

“Tommy, what the heck do we do now?”

“Let’s take them back to my house,” he replied assuredly, as if that was what we had agreed upon.

“Yeah, great,” I agreed. “But they won’t crawl out?”

“Naw. They’re not sidewinders. I hear those guys can climb anything. These are plain old rattlers. Stupid rattlers.”

Concerned about carrying the bucket so close to his leg, Tommy dropped the bucket’s handle and placed our makeshift viper den atop his head. However, only fifteen paces toward home and safety, we halted in our tracks while another snake, a dusty brown one, scurried quickly past us.

“What the hell was that?”

“Sidewinder!” Tommy exclaimed. “That’s how they move. They don’t need to coil to strike you. They can do it while in motion. Very efficient. Did you see its coloring? Beautiful. We have to catch that one, too.”

If two rattlers were not enough of a prize for our presumed show and tell to an unsuspecting audience, a sidewinder certainly would be.

He carefully took the bucket off his head and asked me to take it. I pushed my hands outward, indicating I wanted no part in carrying that dungeon of death. So he placed it gently on the ground and ran back to fetch the fashioned catch stick.

“Look, it’s hiding in the crack of this rock,” he discovered, crouching down to get a good take on its position. “I can see its eyes looking at me. Since we can’t use the bucket to hold it down this time, just grab a boulder to put weight on its back half that’s hanging out there.”

I spied a head-sized desert boulder buried in the dirt and tried to dislodge it. Not a budge. Then I found an inch-thick, basketball-sized, sliver of flat gray shale, perfect for pinning the back of a sidewinder. I dropped the rock down atop its exposed hind section, ever-conscious of the warning rattle. The desert shale was lightweight, however, and the snake began to wriggle out beneath it.

Tommy was quick to react. He grabbed his v-shaped implement of torture and jostled the end over its wriggling head, placing it firmly upon the sidewinder’s neck.

“Okay,” he instructed, “I’ve got its head down so see if you can budge that rock hiding the rest of the body. Then I’ll grab its tail and put it in the bucket, just like the last one.”

Confirming he had adequately locked the head down, I pushed as hard as I could, finally moving the rock aside to fully expose its hiding place.

Until that moment, we didn’t understand that a sidewinder is a reptilian trapeze artist, capable of all sorts of bodily gyrations. Though its head was now fully subdued, its body flailed back and forth with far more energy than the other two vipers displayed. Since the wriggling, rattling tail scared me more than its venomous head, I volunteered once again to hold the stick.

“Got this one!” Tommy exclaimed with glee, up on his tiptoes and holding it outward an extra-long distance, so much that I thought he’d topple over it. “Bring the bucket!”

After checking to ensure the bucket’s two rattlers had not escaped, I picked up the dungeon and held it in front of me as far as my arms could extend, then placed it down near Tommy.

“Greg, this guy is strong, so you should back off when I let his tail go. If he bites me, run to my house and call an ambulance.”

His comment gave me little confidence that he possessed great confidence. I watched as he slowly removed the implement of torture from its head while grasping its tail securely.

Once its head was freed, the snake went ballistic, writhing wildly. But it was only for a moment. With due haste, the dangerous brown beauty joined its tubmates in the white, plastic prison. Another deadly rattler; another close call.

We were both sweating profusely, and my heart was bursting from my chest. Not only was it a scalding hot afternoon, but we twelve-year-olds had just captured three poisonous vipers in fifteen minutes. That had to be some kind of record, and we expected to gain bragging rights for years to come. It was a grand moment of inane, idiotic kidhood glory.

The ending to the day and the snakes, however, was not so glorious. Similar to the way the United States has handled its last few military ventures, we employed an effective entry strategy but failed to devise a viable exit strategy.

Carrying the dangerous cache for miles, we finally reached his house. We both stared at the bucket of three rattlers and were at a loss. Should we release them back in the desert near his house? That didn’t sound like a good idea. We were concerned they would end up in somebody’s back yard, maybe even someone we knew. After all, they were poisonous snakes that could kill humans in a matter of minutes or hours without proper aid. So we determined the best course was to end their lives then and there.

First, using no gray matter whatsoever, we attempted to drown them by partially filling the bucket with water. Almost too late, we noticed the water elevated their bodies towards the edge of the bucket. Concerned they could slither out, especially our brown trapeze artist, Tommy dared to grab the topside of the bucket and carefully pour out some water. We next tried to hold their heads down using a baseball bat. No effect.

It was getting late, and the traumatized snakes were having a bad end of day, as were we.

“I have to get going, Tommy,” I admitted. “Home by five.”

He knew what that meant. ‘Home by five’ implied that if you were home a half hour after that, someone would tell Mother and you’d get scolded.

“What will you do with the snakes?”

Tommy was pretty dejected at this point. We had gotten into a mess by not considering the consequences of our actions.

“I don’t know,” he muttered. “It’ll get dark soon, and maybe I’ll just let them out in the desert.”

The event passed, and I never asked him what happened to the snakes. I do feel bad, however. When it comes to harming or killing things out of stupidity or ignorance, I guess you learn lessons with experiences like this. Sure, I feel bad when squishing a spider, but not so bad that I won’t do it again, especially given the many spider bites I’ve had in my life. Same is true for ants. That little Buddhist part of my conscience goes into hiding in those cases.

But snakes in their own desert? We didn’t need them for food. They weren’t any immediate danger to the neighborhood, though their cousins’ cousins’ cousins might be. I was young then, but at this point in life, I’m just not into harming things stupidly. I’m not a meat eater for health reasons, but have no issues with taking the life of a plant or animal when used for food. As the Upanishads says, ‘we are all food for each other.’

It was a lesson, though, in not anticipating outcomes, in doing what you feel like in the moment without regard to subsequent actions on the mental chessboard.