Growing Up at the Lake
Most children fondly remember a dog or a cat from their youth. I remember snakes. Not that I haven't had more ordinary animals, but my choice of pets has run to the exotic. Growing up at Lake Lotawana, there were many opportunities to acquire some rather unusual pets.
At about age ten, I developed a fascination with snakes, and they were plentiful at the lake. Most were harmless. I collected king snakes, garter snakes, salt-and-pepper snakes, and at one time I had a six-foot black snake. I was always alert since my father had killed at least a dozen poisonous copperheads while building our house.
By this time, my parents had built a second house on our property. The original house, which they built entirely with their own hands, was over the water with a boat slip underneath. The new house, which had three bedrooms, was built above it, and I was given the little house as my "room." I kept my snake collection down there in cages, and it wasn't unusual for one of the snakes to stage an escape. It only took my mother one time running across an escapee to refuse to do any more cleaning in the little house. I was on my own.
When I was thirteen, my parents decided that I should spend the bulk of the summer at camp. First, they sent me to the Boy Scout camp at Osceola, Missouri, an area that was alive with snakes. I came home with a pillowslip holding six or seven, including a fairly good-sized black snake. My parents met the bus and took me home, where Mom did the laundry and packed me up to leave that night on the overnight train for Camp SoSo on the upper peninsula of Michigan.
At the train station I hooked up with my counselor, Pud Hamilton, who was busy saying goodbye to his love of the moment, Barbara Thorne. Pud and I were to share a lower berth. We'd just pulled out of the station and he was engrossed in writing a letter to Barbara.
“Hey Pud, would you like to see my snake collection?” I casually asked.
He muttered something that I took for yes, and I opened my pillowslip to show him the snakes. A wide-eyed, open-mouthed Pud leaped out of the bed, spilling the pillowslip, and letting the snakes loose and slithering all over the compartment. A snake could hide in a million places in a Pullman car, and I was only able to recover about half of the collection. Pud didn't sleep a wink that night.
One pet that I particularly remember was a mole. We kept Davey in a cage with about 6-8 inches of dirt on the bottom. He would burrow in the dirt as moles are prone to do, and every morning I would pat down what Davey had dug up the previous day. He loved peanuts so I would push two or three into the dirt to give him something to work for every night. Moles don't like daylight, so once the novelty of watching him make the burrows from above wore off, he wasn't much fun, and we returned him to the wild—not our lawn.
A baby racoon’s mother had been hit by a car. One of the employees at the lake brought the orphaned racoon, Bandit, to me to raise. Raccoons are extremely intelligent and very clean. While Bandit was young, he was easy to handle and made an excellent pet. Bandit would take a morsel of food in his front paws, wash it and then daintily eat it. As Bandit grew older, he apparently tired of the cage and tried to take a chunk out of me anytime I got too close or tried to handle him. Unfortunately, Bandit was also returned to the wild.
Then there was this cute little goat I saw on a neighbor’s farm and bought as a Mother's Day present for my mom. Billy was great fun and very friendly except you did have to be very careful bending over near him as he loved to give you a butt on your hindside. As Billy got older, he took a great liking for Mom's flowers and that distressed her to no end. His fondness for flowers led him to banishment back to the farm from whence he came.