Bedroom zoos: Give it up for all the slimy, slithery creatures

Kayaking the Little Manistee the other day put me eye to eye with a black snake hanging in a branch overhanging the river.
I threw my arms up.
I shrieked.
I almost fell in the river.
Finally, I straightened out my kayak and hightailed it away from the branch as quickly as I could.
My wimpiness discouraged me. After all, I had been around all sorts of reptiles and snakes when I was a kid.
My two best friends growing up, Junior Buck and Smitty (nicknames, of course), were budding herpetologists. They had a literal menagerie of lizards and snakes. According to Webster’s, a menagerie is a collection of wild or foreign animals kept especially for exhibition.
Both of their bedrooms, basements and garages were veritable zoos. They had chuckwallas, caimans and flying geckos in aquariums. They had Nile monitors, real chamelons (not to be confused with the cheap, tiny anoles) and bearded dragons in terrariums.
Smitty had a ball python named Llyod we’d feed a baby mouse to each week.
My buddies had a lot of emotional and financial investment wrapped up in their lizards. They should have charged admission.
Instead, we’d sit for hours watching the creatures. Wherever they were being kept was hot and damp from the heat lamps and water. And, yes, there was always a slightly funky smell.
Junior Buck and Smitty would pore through field guides trying to get their young American tongues to speak the Latin names of their creatures.
By the time he was 12, Junior Buck had so many lizards he took all the clothes out of his closet, ripped the door off of it and put a piece of Plexiglass over it.
It was his biggest terrarium yet.
He filled it with a waterfall, heat rocks and logs for the dozen or so lizards he kept in there.
Of course, they always got loose. Ruffio, his beloved Tokay gecko, was never caged. He had free run of the house. Whenever I walked into Junior Buck’s house from the front door, it wasn’t uncommon to see Ruffio hanging out on the ceiling above the television his parents were watching.
But the other lizards got loose too, making sleep-overs potentially terrifying. You never knew when you’d look down and find a little friend in your sleeping bag.
During the summers, Junior Buck slept in a rusted out pop-up camper in his backyard. The yard always flooded when it rained really hard.
All day, we’d be off at Hines Park, through which the Rogue River flowed, the same river Henry Ford built his infamous Rouge Plant on in the 1920s.
It wasn’t the cleanest river, but whatever wildlife that was in there, Junior Buck, Smitty and I would try to catch it.
There were box turtles, softshell turtles and snapping turtles. We’d grab them by their tails and pull them up from the muck and the mire and yell, “Got me a Swamp Dog!”
Whatever we caught, Junior Buck would keep in his flooded backyard. He’d tried to build pens around them, but they all always got away.
One time, he caught a black snake that looked suspiciously like the one that gave me an apoplectic fit the other day on the Little Manistee.
He kept it in an aquarium right outside his pop-up camper.
“He’s a mean bastard,” Junior Buck said as I pulled up on my bike. I looked at Junior’s arms, which were red and swollen with bite marks.
“He do that?” I asked.
Junior Buck, always fearless around his creatures, whether they were from exotic pet shops or captured from Hines, reached into the aquarium. The black snake’s mouth widened and he instantly struck, once again biting Buck on his forearm. He cursed at it.
“I’m taking it back tomorrow,” he said.
The next day, we rode out to the same place in the park where he’d caught it and set it free.
It took me another hour kayaking on the river the other day to remember Junior Buck’s black snake that wouldn’t stop biting him.
The subconscious memory is what made me recoil, I suppose.
Still, from that first one in the garden to those on a plane with Samuel L. Jackson, snakes have gotten a bad rap for too long.
All slimy, slithery things that creep through our forests and nightmares deserve just as much love as puppies and kitties.
But, unlike cats and dogs, maybe we should just give snakes their space.
Maybe they see us and shriek.
They can most definitely bite.