Snake Road is closed.

Water moccasins is the devil.

Hey kids, guess what?

There’s a road inside Shawnee National Forest in Illinois they close twice a year so the multitude of serpents living in the area can have a ‘movement’ from one part of hell to the other. The closure is ‘to mitigate car collisions with snakes,’ because apparently, their lack of hands to hold the steering wheel and feet to mash the brake pedal makes them exceptionally bad drivers.

Follow the dotted red line straight to Jesus hisself.

I think this article was supposed to encourage people to take trips to Shawnee National Forest so they can experience the outdoors while highly agitated snakes slither to and fro. If they’re really lucky, they can step on one of the eleventy-million writhing danger noodles and experience the outdoors while their appendages swell up and turn black at an alarming rate. So fun! Who knew a trip to Snake Road could end up with a visit to Jesus hisself?

I DID.

Especially when I read further and got to the part where a large number of the crossing snakes are of the cottonmouth variety.

I don’t think I can describe fully the complete terror cottonmouth snakes caused in my childhood. We moved entire forts because someone saw a snake close to whatever trash pile we were playing in and calling it our ‘fort.’

I miss building forts. We had some magnificent forts, complete with discarded Igloo coolers we used as our outdoor hidey-hole for things we ripped off from our momma’s kitchens. Every great once in a while someone would steal a can of Coke from the adult stash - that was a big freakin’ deal. We’d sit in our fort, passing the can with care and reverence like we were drinking something pissed directly from Satan’s bladder. I still remember savoring the warm fizz and close camaraderie we had as urchins of the neighborhood.

It’s probably how we all got chicken pox, too, but it was worth it.

Anyway, back to the snakes.

I grew up in south Georgia, cottonmouths are called ‘water moccasins’ there and they are the bane of life if you live near water, or even have a large puddle close to your house. Water moccasins aren’t like regular snakes in that they would rather run and hide than have to bite you.

“Is that weird kid over there making fake dog poop? She deserves a bitey-bite.”

Water moccasins will square up with a grown man and I’ve witnessed more than one encounter my daddy had with them that didn’t end well for the snake. They will chase you and bite you repeatedly, until you die of a stroke from fear or all your blood pours out the gazillion holes the bastard just put in you. They’re also very poisonous, so there’s that, too.

On my eyes, and no one believes this story but it is true - I was on the back porch of our house one evening with daddy. He was casting bullets, so I wasn’t supposed to get close to him, but I also wasn’t supposed to go near the (ditch) creek at dusk because the snakes would be moving around good from laying in the sun all day.

I know exactly what I was doing because it was devilment - I was making fake dog poop with the mud from a little puddle by the back patio. (This was a phase I’ll write about later, I can’t explain it and I don’t intend to, but I went through some shit about making fake piles of shit when I was little. I told you I was weird as hell.)

Daddy yelled at me to be still, and daddy didn’t yell unless he meant it so I froze with my fake dog turd in one hand and a spoon in the other. A huge, fat, water moccasin had slithered up on the warm patio between me and daddy. And to this day I have no idea if it was magic or just skill, but daddy whipped out his Buck knife and threw it. He hit that damn snake dead center right behind its head and had his foot on it about a half a millisecond later.

Daddy was not a small man. To see him do something so super-hero and then move like lightning was so shocking to me I couldn’t move when he told me to run into the house. By the time I finally did move, he had whacked that snake’s head off and thrown it in the yard for the buzzards.

So when I read an article about people making trips in their car to go see snakes in the wild on purpose, I was a little put off by it. I personally used the information to store in my mental Rolodex under, ‘places I will never go, ever, on purpose.’ Also noted in, ‘possible places in which hell originates.’

Mark it on your calendar, folks. Snake road is closed until October 1^st, to all through traffic. It’s closed for me forever. But you do you. And watch out for damn snakes.

We’re going to set this one free into the interwebs with some Billy Squire, because The Stroke is what’s going to kill me if I ever step on a snake. Be safe out there, be cool, and be kind. Don’t forget to turn it up.