syndicate559
Sweet Trajectory
Got a somewhat crazy story for you guys. Saturday morning, my wife and I take off from the house on our road bikes to get a little ride in the foothills in. Just a 25-miler that we've literally hundreds of times. We see snakes and all kinds of wildlife all the time, but this ride almost concluded with an ambulance trip and a long, painful recovery.
So, we're headed back home, on a moderate downhill and doing about 24 mph. We come around a little bend and there's a car going the same direction and going past me at the same time. Maybe 20 yards up the road, I see what I think is a pretty large, dead snake in the road. As the car gets closer, I realize he's moving toward our bike lane. My first reaction is to slow down a little bit and let him get across the road before we get there. I yelled something to my wife, but found out afterward that she hadn't heard me. It's hard to hear with the wind in your ears if you're riding very fast.
This is all happening within a matter of a couple seconds. Just as the snake is getting close to the bike lane, that car runs over his tail. The snake flipped up in the air, landed and coiled right on the white line of the bike lane. At this point, I'm thinking/hoping it's just a gopher snake, because you see them more often than rattlers. At that point, I'm also wishing I hadn't slowed down, because it kind of backfired on me. I was too close to do anything else and didn't want to veer out into traffic, so I got as far to his right as possible when going by, but it was maybe 18" away from him. As I passed, I looked at him and it was one of those weird times where it seemed like slow motion. I looked right at his head, because that's the only way to know for sure when a snake is coiled like that and I saw very clearly that it was a rattlesnake. At the same time, he hisses and strikes right at my leg. I thought it was going to connect for sure, but somehow it didn't. I was plenty close enough. What happened was that, my wife, who hadn't heard me yell "Snake!" pulled out to my left to avoid running into me when I slowed down. She ran right over his coiled body, which is the only thing that kept him from extending on the strike. She didn't even realize what was happening until the last second, but she heard the hiss and had a front row view of it striking at me.
It was one of those things where I didn't even have time to get scared until afterward, but then came the massive adrenaline dump for both of us. With wobbly legs, we re-counted what happened, thanked the Lord and talked about what we would have done had things gone badly. It would have sucked really bad. My heart rate was right around 160 bpm when it happened and getting envenomated at that time would have been a bad deal. We probably would have flagged the next car down and asked them to book it to the closest hospital, which was about a 10 minute drive and called 911 on the way. I'm sure it wouldn't have been fatal, but would have been extremely painful and caused a lot of tissue damage. I have a golfing friend who got bit a couple years ago in a remote foothill area and almost lost his leg because it took so long to get him to medical help and antivenom.
Anyway, that was my adventure for the weekend.
So, we're headed back home, on a moderate downhill and doing about 24 mph. We come around a little bend and there's a car going the same direction and going past me at the same time. Maybe 20 yards up the road, I see what I think is a pretty large, dead snake in the road. As the car gets closer, I realize he's moving toward our bike lane. My first reaction is to slow down a little bit and let him get across the road before we get there. I yelled something to my wife, but found out afterward that she hadn't heard me. It's hard to hear with the wind in your ears if you're riding very fast.
This is all happening within a matter of a couple seconds. Just as the snake is getting close to the bike lane, that car runs over his tail. The snake flipped up in the air, landed and coiled right on the white line of the bike lane. At this point, I'm thinking/hoping it's just a gopher snake, because you see them more often than rattlers. At that point, I'm also wishing I hadn't slowed down, because it kind of backfired on me. I was too close to do anything else and didn't want to veer out into traffic, so I got as far to his right as possible when going by, but it was maybe 18" away from him. As I passed, I looked at him and it was one of those weird times where it seemed like slow motion. I looked right at his head, because that's the only way to know for sure when a snake is coiled like that and I saw very clearly that it was a rattlesnake. At the same time, he hisses and strikes right at my leg. I thought it was going to connect for sure, but somehow it didn't. I was plenty close enough. What happened was that, my wife, who hadn't heard me yell "Snake!" pulled out to my left to avoid running into me when I slowed down. She ran right over his coiled body, which is the only thing that kept him from extending on the strike. She didn't even realize what was happening until the last second, but she heard the hiss and had a front row view of it striking at me.
It was one of those things where I didn't even have time to get scared until afterward, but then came the massive adrenaline dump for both of us. With wobbly legs, we re-counted what happened, thanked the Lord and talked about what we would have done had things gone badly. It would have sucked really bad. My heart rate was right around 160 bpm when it happened and getting envenomated at that time would have been a bad deal. We probably would have flagged the next car down and asked them to book it to the closest hospital, which was about a 10 minute drive and called 911 on the way. I'm sure it wouldn't have been fatal, but would have been extremely painful and caused a lot of tissue damage. I have a golfing friend who got bit a couple years ago in a remote foothill area and almost lost his leg because it took so long to get him to medical help and antivenom.
Anyway, that was my adventure for the weekend.