Europe 2014 - Lucerne Hike, Tree with Sign / The Skull and the Gila Monster

When my son was a Cub Scout we planned all kinds of outings to see all kinds of things, in both the natural and urban worlds.  There were camping trips, nature hikes, and church services in the great outdoors.  There also were trips to museums, and one time we convoyed to the studios of Fox Channel 26 here in Houston to see how they did the news and weather.

But one trip that I'll never forget was much closer to home.  I discovered that the father of one of the scouts, who lived just a few blocks from our house, was a herpetologist.  Upon learning that fact I latched on, asking many questions and swapping stories.  This fellow did some serious research on rattlesnakes, and was one of very few in the state with a license to possess a captured gila monster, the only known poisonous species of lizard.  We soon made plans to go to his house to see firsthand.

The members of the pack arrived at his house on the appointed day and were ushered upstairs where he kept the gila monster as well as a few other items of interest.  One of those items was a human skull, which I asked about.  He said that one day he was walking down the street in the Rice Village area and saw a store catering to Wiccans, satanists and devil worshipers in general.  One thing he saw in the display case was a row of human skulls.  One of them was in pretty good shape, and he was oddly drawn to it, guessing that this individual's parents, whoever they were, would not want their child's remains used in ritual practices.

He went in and made an offer on the spot.  The price was $600.  Since he couldn't afford it at the time, he put in on layaway (yes, a human skull on layaway) and made payments until he was finally able to bring it home to rest on a shelf above his desk.  And there it sat, staring at us on our Cub Scout field trip.

Then there was the gila monster, in a terrarium off to one side.  After lifting the top he instructed me to take it out of the cage so the kids could feel the texture of its beady skin.  Evidently, having described my experience with snakes, he'd concluded that I was used to handling even poisonous reptiles, which wasn't the case.  In fact, I was just thinking of an article recently read where a graduate student at a university was bitten by one and wrote an hour-by-hour account of the agony he experience over the next two days.

I didn't even give myself a chance to get nervous about it.  I'd read enough to know how to grab the thing and just went for it, placing two fingers just behind its neck, the other two fingers behind the forelimbs, and, lifting it out as it struggled, used the other hand to stabilize the back end.  It was a big guy - about eleven inches long, but I kept a solid grip as the kids reached over one by one to stroke its back and tail.  After a minute or so the monster was placed back into his home.