Halloween centers around the ancient, solemn Celtic rite of taking candy from strangers. I spent Halloween in Ireland once and celebrated by getting too drunk to verify how they observe the holiday in the modern era. But in America, I know for a proven fact that the tradition had not changed in hundreds, or perhaps dozens, of years.
My parent’s generation brought Halloween to our shores in what historians refer to as “pilgrim times.” Abduction had yet to be perfected as an art form, which meant kids could go trick-or-treating after dark, with all the eggs their homemade costumes could carry. Meanwhile, their parents stayed home with the porch lights off, inventing the concept of “sexy Halloween costumes.”
In other words, Halloween was so safe it could actually be dangerous. But then some kids walked in on their pirate-clad parents swashing each other’s buckles, which traumatized them into cracking down on the holiday. My parents, for instance, not only made me say “thank you” to the strangers who gave me candy, but they forced me to wait to actually EAT any of the candy until approximately February. This gave them the time to visually inspect every piece of candy for concealed razor blades, or poison, or invisibly poisoned razor blades. My mother confiscated so many Heath bars that I’m still afraid to eat one.
Now that Halloween is ruined, we celebrate with the increased paranoia that our youngest, most impressionable citizens will experience actual fun. Reflective tape diminishes the fearsomeness of paper plate masks. Families gather in shopping malls or parking lots before sundown. And I get strange looks and questions about my age that I sure didn’t get when I went trick-or-treating back in the day.
Yet while parents today still check candy for poison, they don’t check ANYWHERE for silent rattlesnakes.
You better beware, gentle readers. Rattlesnakes are evolving under our feet into silent hunters. This is no mere hyperbole, the likes of which this column strives to avoid. Like the Who without Keith Moon, like Led Zeppelin without John Bonham, like me banging on a guitar in my living room by myself, rattlesnakes are performing sans percussion. Herpetologists in South Dakota are observing an increase in rattlers with atrophied tail muscles, which sure takes the shimmy out of their shake.
This shift is supposedly not the fault of drugs or excessive lifestyles, but of humans. As if we are capable of creating such monsters! These scientists expect us to believe that human beings with shovels and cars and traps and .22 caliber pistols have killed so many fully functional rattlesnakes as to increase the breeding success of their gimpy counterparts.
But the so-called “experts” are sticking to their snakes. So I did some follow-up speculation of my own. I discovered that even if you don’t count yourself among South Dakota’s seventeen residents, this national crisis could still bite you.
We all ought to know that car dealerships are crawling with venomous, cold-blooded hunters, as well as snakes. But even places like Ohio have their infestations. Or at least they used to; rattlesnakes there are increasingly really hard to find. Is this scarcity due to their endangered status? Or are the snakes hiding in survivalist-style enclaves among the cornstalks and pumpkins, waiting to inundate unsuspecting lawns on Halloween night? You be the judge, because I have no idea.
And you can hiss California goodbye. Thanks to Ralph Nader’s vigilance, probably, the state was hip to the silent rattlesnake epidemic THIRTEEN WHOLE YEARS AGO. Yet when some hippie environmentalists captured a bunch of Bay Area rattlesnakes, they did not wisely sell the rattlers to a boot factory. Instead, they released the snakes INTO the wild!
It gets even scarier, because there is now such a thing as outer space robot snakes. NASA has taken a long look at sidewinder rattlesnakes to design new devices that can move where lesser machines have to call AAA Emergency Roadside Assistance. One research director notes, with a complete lack of ever having seen a horror movie, that “we have this self-informing system that has really opened up new parameters within snake biology and robotics.”
This is hard science, people, and therefore absolutely bound to turn against us. If there’s one thing more chilling than alien android rattlesnakes, it’s real-world rattlesnakes which are even more aggressive because they can’t fend off intruders with their rattles. And if there’s one thing more frightening than silent rattlesnakes, it’s someone stuffing a silent rattlesnake into your child’s candy sack. Fortunately, you can just leave it there. It ought to suffocate by Easter.
(Photo by Jason Wilson / CC)
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