There are few situations more frightening than sitting comfortably with your back against a smooth rock on a gloriously hot, dry, and sunny day breathing pristine mountain air without a worry until hearing an agitated buzzing and realizing you are face to face and within striking distance of a rattlesnake. A rattlesnake with a body thicker than your flexed bicep. A rattlesnake in a tight coil, neck cocked in a tense ’S’ where the slightest breeze would release the hair trigger, and the only escape route is through or over the snake. One should be afraid. One should be terrified. But I was not. Perhaps it is because I, a self-avowed Desert Rat, have a strange affinity for snakes. Perhaps the flicking black tongue hypnotized me. I’m not sure. All I remember from the moment at Petroglyph National Monument was feeling mesmerized.
Midday in the summer at White Sands National…
View original post 8,064 more words
Musings of a Middle Aged Man 