Snakes Alive!

When I was a kid growing up in rural New Jersey, we convinced ourselves that the local lakes and streams were inhabited by water moccasins.  All the books said cottonmouths didn’t live that far north, but we had seen them (or so we thought).  I even caught one in a pond on a fishing lure…I saw it sitting on a rock, I dangled the lure in front of it, and the snake went for it.  That scared the hell out of me:  I was the classic case of the dog that finally caught the bus he always chased.  What do I do now?  I ended up cutting the line to let the snake (and my lure) get away.  It was, after all, a water moccasin (or so I thought).

And then, of course, many years later there was that rather unsettling scene in my favorite movie, Lonesome Dove:

Last week Sue and I were back in Sopranoland for a wedding, and the next day we rode around so I could show her my old haunts.  One was the Old Mill in Deans (not to be confused with the Old Mill Hotel in Baja).  It was behind where my grandma lived and it was basically a dam that created a huge lake where we used to play back in the day.  So we’re walking around and I snapped a photo or two when this woman said “there’s a snake down there!”

I checked and what do you know, she was right.  The snake was on a log downstream of the dam where a bridge carried traffic over the spillway.  The snake was almost directly beneath the bridge.  As usual, I didn’t have the perfect lens on my Nikon (that would have been the 70-300 Nikkor), but what I had on the camera (Old Faithful, my 24-120 Nikon lens) worked a lot better than a cell phone.  I zoomed all the way and grabbed some awesome photos.  Then I looked around and I saw another snake on the same log.  And then another slithering through the water.  And then two more that might have been making even more snakes.  Snakes alive, I was in the middle of a moccasin orgy!

I was so intrigued by the above photos that I Googled “water moccasin” to get photos of the real McCoy.  After spending decades believing there were indeed moccasins in New Jersey, I convinced myself that what I was seeing in my photos were common New Jersey water snakes.  Moccasins have a more triangular head and a slightly different pattern.  Still, these snakes are pretty big (the big one on the log in the photo above was about 5 feet long) and I would not want to tangle with any of them.  You never know…I might be wrong and maybe they are moccasins.

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