Storm Cellars & Snakes

This past weekend Coach and I took the camper out to our farm.  The farm is about 15 miles north of the town we live in but is a world away from where we spend most of our time.  The farm is his parents homestead and has been in his family since statehood.  It is in a family trust so it actually belongs to his mother until her death.  At that time, each of the four boys will inherit an acreage.  There are two tracts of land that are owned jointly by the four boys since their oldest brothers death.  It is on this part of the land that we have run electricity, dug a water well, put in a septic tank and poured a concrete slab for our camper.  We, Coach & I, have got it all in bermuda grass and we work hard all summer keeping it mowed, fertilized and weed-free.  Only one other brother, the youngest one, even comes to the farm.  He and Coach take care of everything out there.  Don’t get me started on that or it will be another post entirely.

Friday night we went to the football homecoming and then one of our grandson’s, Kader, went with us to the farm.  He spent the night with us and we all got up Saturday morning and hit the fishing pond.  We fished for a couple of hours and then went back to the camper for some breakfast.  Then Kader and I rode the 4-wheeler for a while and hunted for arrowheads on the Indian Hill.  This is just a patch of ground that my father-in-law always kept bladed off so that he could hunt for Indian artifacts.  Over the 93 years he lived on the farm he had found some amazing things.  In the 32 years I have been in the family I have found a few arrowheads, some grinding stones and one scraper.  The grandkids absolutely love going out there and “hunting”.  They pick up every rock they see and exclaim over their finds.  It is a source of great enjoyment for all of us to just walk that hill and look.  Well, on saturday Kader and I were walking around looking when he suddenly yelled for me to come see what he had found.  I looked and he was pointing to the ground.  Upon closer inspection I saw that he was pointing to some deer tracks.  When I asked him what they were he remarked “They are camel tracks, of course.”  Camel tracks……I looked a little closer and they kind of look like a very small version of a camel track.

Deer                                                   Camel

Now I see why he would get confused, don’t you?  But I had to assure him that there are no camels running around loose on our farm.

He then decided that since the likelihood of us seeing a camel was pretty slim then we should go explore the old farm house.  My in-laws lived in this old house for most of the 59 years they were married.  I used to love to go there because it reminded me of my grandparents farm house.  They moved to town in 1988 and the house has been vacant since then, with the exception of a few “treasures” my mother-in-law left behind.  By treasures I mean there are closets full of junk, old clothes and rats. Yikes!  We used to go out there and just rummage through stuff but last summer my husband and brother -in-law found a huge snake skin shed in there and that was enough for me to decide that I didn’t want to go into the house again.  The rats were bad enough but being surprised by a snake was just not going to happen.  This spring my brother-in-law told Coach that he saw a huge snake crawling under the door going into the house.  Now NO ONE will go into the house.
I told Kader about the snake and told him we just couldn’t go into the old house anymore.  We looked in the barns and the old grain bins though.  He found a couple of old beer bottles and some baling twine that he thought were neat and he loaded the back of the 4-wheeler up with old metal parts and tricycle wheels he found.  He was in hog heaven.  Then he asked about the old storm cellar.   Out here in tornado country every farm had a storm cellar that also served as a cellar to put your canned goods in.   My grandparents even had a bed down in their cellar so they could just go down there and sleep if the weather looked bad.  I played in their cellar a lot because I was too dump to think about snakes and rats they used their cellar often for storage and there weren’t any critters down there.  The last time I was in this particular cellar was about 20 years ago and it creeped me out then.  I told him we wouldn’t go down there but I would open the door and let him look down there.  This is what the cellar looks like.

An old dirt hole with some concrete walls poured in.  The door is wood frame with corrugated metal on top.  These old doors also had a counter weight to help hold the door open when you went down there.  I told Kader to stand back so he wouldn’t fall in and I reached down and pulled the door up about waist high on me.  I was looking down the steps to see if there were any critters on the steps when suddenly Kader screamed at the top of his lungs.  I looked at his face and he was looking at the under side of the door I was holding. Just as I turned to look at the door a HUGE snake fell off one of the wood  cross braces of the door.  It fell into the cellar onto the steps and proceeded to wiggle up the steps.  I found my voice and screamed bloody murder and jumped backwards right in front of Coach who was mowing the yard.  Kader had already made it the 30 feet to the 4-wheeler (in about 3 huge steps) and was climbing up on the 4-wheeler.  I guess my eyes were huge because Coach stopped the mower and asked what was wrong.  When I was able to say snake he laughed and asked why I was not shutting the cellar door on him.  I finally got my wits back and shut the cellar door and as far as I am concerned I will NEVER, EVER open that door again.  I don’t care if a tornado is barreling down on me, I will not ever go down those steps.  Besides I think the walls have collapsed down there and it wouldn’t be safe anyway.

After that little adventure I didn’t have any trouble getting Kader to watch where he was stepping and playing and I certainly didn’t go venturing out into the weeds.   ~~~~~shiver~~~~~~~ Those kinds of things can just spoil your whole adventure.

Now I am trying to get Coach to consider one of those new little cellars – I think they call them storm shelters these days – to put next to the concrete slab next to the camper.  Other than the well house there is nowhere to escape a storm when we are out there.  The well house is underground and is concrete with a concrete top but only big enough for two people to stand up in.  I’ve never seen much more than some spiders in it.   I think we really need a shelter.   Maybe just a little one that you dig a hole and drop the metal or concrete box into.  They have nice steps and doors that will keep out the critters.

Although this one resembles my dumpster out in my ally, I think it would do nicely.  Except that the stairs seem to be on the outside of the shelter….what the heck is that all about?  It’s made of fiberglass.  We could use it for a boat if the flood waters got up and washed it out of the ground.  As long as it is snake proof I’m good.  Oh well, all in all the weekend was a really good one – sans the snake – and I am ready to go back.  I wish we could afford to buy out the others and have that farm for ourselves.  I would build a little house on  it and stay there most of the time.  Ahhhhh..dreams!

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