Europe 2014 - Lucerne Hike, Barkless Tree / Pretzel's Fate

A few posts ago I related the story of how we acquired our first boa constrictor, Pretzel, and how the tale ended with my decision to give him away.  The question from that point was, "How do you give away a boa constrictor, especially one that has bitten its owner?"  Since Pretzel was almost recovered but still a little sick, Dad decided that the Houston Zoo would be the best place to get the care he needed while perhaps being of use as an exhibit animal.  He made the call and one Saturday we packed him up in a pillow case and made the two-hour drive to the zoo from our home in Orange, Texas.

Going to the zoo was always special for us, and we'd been many times before as a family, but this time was different, as we were going for "business" purposes.  I knew we were making the right decision and looked forward to speaking to a curator who actually took care of the snakes in the reptile house, our favorite part of the zoo.

We arrived and walked in with the rest of the visitors, conspicuous in that I was carrying a good-size snake which could be seen moving in that pillow case.  Once we arrived at the reptile house (which, incidentally - for better or worse - looks exactly the same today, almost 50 years later, as it did back then) the head curator met and ushered us straight into an area marked for Authorized Personnel Only.

Once inside we found ourselves surrounded by stacks and stacks of cages, each with snakes, lizards, turtles and amphibians not on current display.  The curator took time to give us an extensive behind-the-scenes tour, explaining this or that about what we saw, patiently answering the questions of a herpetologist wannabe.  It was a very special time, not least because it was shared between just me and Dad.

Our tour concluded, and Pretzel appropriately handed off to a better home, Dad and I headed back to Orange with something special in the memory bank, and for a boy of eleven a little wiser about biting off more that you can chew when it comes to pets. (unintended pun)

FAST FORWARD - NINE YEARS LATER...

I was twenty years old and in college.  Pursuing the childhood dream of becoming a herpetologist, I settled into biology major studies at Steven F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches.  To get a head start on working with snakes I joined the Texas Herpetological Society.  One of its regular activities was camping out in the reptile-rich woods of Deep East Texas to capture and catalogue everything heard and/or caught over a two-day period.  One of those nights, around midnight, I was walking with a small group on a hunt and learned that one of the group had driven up from Houston and was actually an assistant curator at the zoo.  He was a bit older, so I told him the tale of Pretzel and how we'd donated him some years back.

Incredibly, this guy remembered Pretzel and was able to tell me how he spent the rest of his life!  And just as incredible - to me - was the fact that, after Dad and I donated him and once he recovered completely from his mouth rot, they put him in the petting zoo!  After several years he got sick with a brain parasite and died, not too long before this chap and I ran into each other in the deep woods of East Texas.

Just one of those things that reminds us of how small this world is, and how at times life comes around full circle...