By 
Spitting cobras, emus, and a Gila monster were just a few of my life companions in the 1970s. Ironically, I’m not that much of an animal lover, it’s more than I tolerate animals. If you had told me that one day I would live among exotic animals within the confines of my own home, I would have run the other way. For four years I endured cohabitation with a strange husband and his strange business at home. I put my ex-husband in Tennessee. We dated for a short time and during a crazy moment, I agreed to leave my family and friends and run away to Florida with him. We packed all our belongings in my Datsun truck and off we went. Our destination was unknown. For a week our home was in a tent on the Okefenokee swamp. Our neighbors were raccoons who devastated our meager food supply every night. Mosquitoes the size of hummingbirds buzzed at us relentlessly. Of course, there were alligators galore lurking at the water’s edge. Once, we rented a sixteen-foot flat-bottomed boat and rode a good few miles through the murky waters of the Okefenokee swamp. In places it was like walking through a jungle with the occasional eyes of alligators peering at us above the water’s surface. Everything seemed fine and almost relaxed until we ran out of gas and were upriver from base camp. The sun was setting and there were no other ships in sight. All we could do was row. Me with the oar in the back rowing on one side, then the other. My ex was in the front paddling to drive. My rowing job was the more strenuous of the two, but there was no way I was putting my arm in the water as alligator bait. Fortunately, after about an hour a loaner boater was returning to camp and seeing our dilemma he cast us a line and towed us back to shore.
With no regrets on my part, we made our way out of the swamp in search of a more stable home environment. The next stop was a small town called Lake City, Florida and a job offer for my spouse as an alligator wrestler in a place appropriately named Alligator Town. It was a paycheck that provided us with our first roof over our heads, a travel trailer at a nearby trailer park. The trailer was so small that if someone came to visit us, we all had to sit outside. The belongings that we had packed in my truck stayed in the truck. The trailer’s bathroom wasn’t much more than a peg in a small closet. One week was all I could bear. After that, we continue down the road to a larger trailer… Wow! At least this place had a toilet and bathtub in the same room. The guest bedroom was used to house our ferret, named Freddie. The living room was quite spacious, therefore my husband set up a large aquarium for his python (or maybe it was a boa constrictor), I forgot. Whatever large snake it was, it escaped during the night. Can you imagine having to tell your neighbors that if they find a fairly large nine foot snake, please return it to us? It brought us notoriety. The local newspaper found out and published an article. Fortunately, the snake was found and returned to its aquarium with additional cinder blocks on top to keep it in. My neighbors did not visit me.
To supplement our meager income, I got a job and we were able to locate a house in the country in which to move ourselves and our growing menagerie of wild animals. The house was horrible, but beggars can’t choose. It was in the house that my husband decided to become an entrepreneur. He formed the Suwanee Zoological Society and the guest bedroom became home to rattlesnakes, pythons, cobras, copperheads, lizards and anything else he could get his hands on. If I try really hard, I can conjure up memories in that house that nightmares are made of. One in particular was when I was sleeping and heard an unusual noise. I got out of bed and headed down the hall to the guest bedroom door that housed all the bugs. Like hundreds of other times, I opened the door, reached in, and flipped on the light switch. The first thing that caught my eye were the overturned cages on the bedroom floor. My next move made my heart stop and all the blood drained from my head. I looked up from the ground, turned my head a bit, and came face to face (probably within two inches) with a boa constrictor. Apparently, it had escaped from its cage and in doing so knocked over anything that slipped out. Backing up slowly and closing the door, I went back to bed and slowly pulled the covers off my husband and then with a hard slap to the middle of the back, I woke him up. Over the next few days, I found baby snakes all over the house, some harmless, some venomous.
My best friend was not put off by our strange habitat and visited frequently. On a whim, we decided to cook dinner for the gang. Flustered by the kitchen, we gather our ingredients and cookware to make dinner. She was unable to locate a particular size pot in a lower cabinet. I told him I would find it and searched the cabinet and again experienced another heart attack moment when I realized my arm was floating over the head of a coiled rattlesnake. Knowing well enough not to make a sudden move, I backed away slowly and when I knew I was out of range I started yelling at my husband. Hearing the panic in my voice, he hurried into the kitchen and focused his attention on where I was pointing. With a sigh of relief, he said, “So that’s where she’s been hiding.”
The house we lived in needed a lot of work. The kitchen was probably the worst room as it needed new linoleum, new wallpaper as what was in it was occupied and horrible, and the ceiling had a hole leading to the attic. The hole was covered with a thick piece of brown paper. It was from this point that a six inch baby cobra dangled and I was the one who noticed this anomaly. Again calling for immediate help, my husband entered the room and carefully removed the small poisonous snake from the ceiling. Looking at me with the utmost sincerity he said, “I was going to tell you about the loss of this snake.”
Snake hunting expeditions took my husband and his friends for days. For the most part, he was only home a few hours each night because he worked two jobs. All he wanted was a shower and a few hours of sleep before the next shift started. The times when I was alone in the house usually didn’t bother me, except for one. A recently acquired addition to the animal inventory was a Gila monster, which is a very dangerous reptile. I gave instructions to feed the animal… carefully. Honestly, I tried, but he pounced and scared me to death. The Gila monster didn’t have dinner that night and was apparently upset with me. Although he was in a cage in a locked bedroom, he was making a terrible noise by banging against the cage and making threatening guttural noises. I couldn’t afford to go to a motel and had nowhere to go, but I was determined not to stay in the same house with this creature; so I took my blanket and pillow and slept in the car for the next two nights.
One day a package arrived at the home of a fellow reptile lover. Tokay geckos were supposed to be in the box, but we weren’t sure how many. The tape was carefully cut and the outer packaging was peeled off. The lid of the box was lifted and in a split second, hundreds of Tokay geckos escaped and ran at the speed of light in all directions. They are fast little lizards. For the duration of our stay in that house, we found Tokay geckos everywhere. Our neighbors, who didn’t particularly like us being there, also reported geckos in their houses. It wasn’t all bad because they loved to eat cockroaches and palmetto bugs (which were plentiful) and spiders, which I despise. However, it was disconcerting to lie in bed and feel the lizard scurry across the sheets or be woken from a deep sleep by its croaking. The reason they are called Tokay geckos is because that is what they actually say, ‘Toe-Kay’, over and over again.
My most memorable moment of self-awareness living in an asylum was one of those days when my husband was on a reptile hunting expedition. He was home alone and it was pouring with rain, a real gully washer. A van pulled up and a man with a large plastic trash can stood at my door. I opened the door and he asked if this is where anyone bought snakes. I said, “yes, but you’ll have to come back later.” He said he couldn’t, that he had a big rattlesnake and if we didn’t want it, he would go somewhere else. Well, I had seen my husband carrying a sack containing snakes hundreds of times. I didn’t see the harm in giving the guy money and putting the snake, still in the bag, in the “snake room” until my husband got home. Well, this particular snake was not in a bag. The man wanted me to put the snake in a bag. When he took the lid off the trash can, all I saw was a huge body of the biggest rattlesnake he had ever seen. “No way, man,” I told him. In fact, he was angry that he wouldn’t take the snake off his hands and pay him money. He said a few choice words and walked off with his snake. When my husband returned, I told him about the event. His response was: “Are you crazy? … Do you know how much money that snake would bring?” Did I feel foolish because my priorities weren’t clear? No. This was the beginning of the end of our four-year marriage.
I realize that all creatures are put on this earth for a reason. Everyone has their place in this world and my guest bedroom is not one of them.