Spitting cobras, emus, and a Gila monster were just a few of my living companions in the seventies. Ironically, I am not an animal lover, I just tolerate them. If you had told me that one day I would live among exotic animals within the confines of my own home, I would have run to the other side. For four years, I endured living with a strange husband and his strange home business. I left my ex-husband in Tennessee. We dated for a short time and during a crazy moment, I agreed to leave my family and friends and flee to Florida with him. All of our belongings were packed into my Datsun truck and we left. Our destination was unknown. For a week our house was in a tent in the Okefenokee swamp. Our neighbors were raccoons who devastated our meager food supply every night. Hummingbird-sized mosquitoes buzzed relentlessly. Of course, there were a large number of alligators lurking at the water’s edge. Once, we rented a sixteen-foot flat-bottomed boat and drove a few miles through the murky waters of the Okefenokee Swamp. In some places it was like walking through a jungle with the occasional crocodile eyes staring at us above the surface of the water. Everything seemed fine and almost relaxed until we ran out of gas and were upriver from base camp. The sun was setting and there were no other boats in sight. All we could do was row. I with the oar in the rear, rowing to one side, then to the other. My ex was in the lead to direct. My paddling job was the more strenuous of the two, but there was no way I would stick my arm in the water as alligator bait. Fortunately, after about an hour, a loaner boater was returning to camp and seeing our dilemma, he threw us a line and towed us back to shore.

With no regrets on my part, we left the swamp in search of a more stable home environment. The next stop was a small town called Lake City, Florida, and a job offer for my spouse as an alligator fighter at a place appropriately called Alligator Town. It was a paycheck that got us our first roof over our heads, an RV in a nearby RV park. The trailer was so small that if someone came to visit us, we all had to sit outside. The belongings that we had packed in my truck stayed in the truck. The bathroom in the trailer was not much more than a small closet. One week was all I could bear. After that, we headed down the road towards a bigger trailer … Oops! At least this place had a bathroom and a bathtub in the same room. The guest bedroom was used to house our ferret, named Freddie. The living room was quite spacious therefore my husband installed a large aquarium for his python (or maybe it was a boa constrictor), I forget. Whatever the great snake was, it got away during the night. Can you imagine having to tell your neighbors that if they find a fairly large nine foot snake, please return it to us? It brought us notoriety. The local newspaper found out and published an article. Fortunately, the snake was found and returned to its aquarium with additional cinder blocks on top to keep it inside. My neighbors did not visit me.

To supplement our meager income, I got a job and we were able to locate a house in the country to move in for ourselves and our growing collection of animals. The house was horrible, but beggars have no choice. It was in the house that my husband decided to become an entrepreneur. He formed the Suwanee Zoological Society and the guest bedroom became home to rattlesnakes, pythons, cobras, copperheads, lizards, and whatever else he could get his hands on. If I try too hard, I can conjure up memories in that house that nightmares are made of. One in particular was when I was sleeping and I heard an unusual noise. I got out of bed and went out into the hall to the guest bedroom door that housed all the critters. Like hundreds of other times, I opened the door, reached in, and flipped the light switch. The first thing that caught my eye were the overturned cages on the bedroom floor. My next move made my heart stop and all the blood drained from my head. I looked up from the ground, turned my head slightly, and came face to face (probably about two inches away) with a boa constrictor. Apparently it had escaped from its cage and in doing so it knocked down everything that slipped. Backing up slowly and closing the door, I went back to bed and slowly removed the covers from my husband and then with a strong slap in the middle of the back woke him up. Over the next few days, I found baby snakes all over the house, some were harmless, some were poisonous.

My best friend was unaffected by our strange habitat and visited it frequently. On a whim, we decided to cook dinner for the gang. Busy through the kitchen, we gather our ingredients and kitchen utensils to prepare dinner. He was unable to locate a pot of particular size in a lower cabinet. I told him I would find it and reached into the cabinet and again experienced another poignant moment when I realized that my arm was floating above the head of a coiled rattlesnake. Knowing well enough not to make a sudden move, I slowly backed away and when I knew I was out of reach I started yelling for my husband. Hearing the panic in my voice, she hurried to the kitchen and focused her attention on where she was pointing a finger. With a sigh of relief, he said, “So that’s where he’s been hiding.”

The house we lived in needed a lot of work. The kitchen was probably the worst room as it needed new linoleum, new wallpaper as what was inside was busy and horrible, and the ceiling had a hole leading to the attic. The hole was covered with a heavy piece of brown paper. It was from this point that a six-inch cobra calf hung up and it was I who noticed this anomaly. Again, calling for immediate help, my husband entered the room and carefully pulled the small poisonous snake from the ceiling. Looking at me with the utmost sincerity, he said, “I was going to tell you about the loss of this snake.”

Snake hunting expeditions took my husband and his friends away for days. For the most part, I was only home for a few hours each night because I had two jobs. All he wanted was a shower and a few hours of sleep before the next shift started. The times when I was alone in the house didn’t bother me, except for one. A recently acquired addition to the animal inventory was a Gila monster, which is a very dangerous reptile. I gave him instructions to feed the animal … carefully. Honestly, I tried, but it attacked me and scared me to death. The Gila monster didn’t eat dinner that night and was apparently upset with me. Although he was in a cage in a closed bedroom, he was making a terrible racket by banging against the cage and making threatening guttural noises. I couldn’t afford to go to a motel and had nowhere else to go, but I was determined not to stay in the same house with this child; so I took my blanket and pillow and slept in the car for the next two nights.

One day a package came to the house from a fellow reptile lover. Tokay geckos were supposed to be in the box, but we weren’t sure how many. The tape was carefully cut and the outer packaging removed. The lid was lifted off the box and in a split second, hundreds of Tokay geckos escaped and ran at the speed of light in all directions. They are fast little lizards. During our stay in that house, we found Tokay geckos everywhere. Our neighbors, who were not very fond of us being there, also reported that there were geckos in their homes. It wasn’t all bad because they loved to eat cockroaches and palmetto bugs (which were in abundance) and spiders, which I despise. However, it was disconcerting to lie in bed and feel the lizard run running on the blankets or wake up from a deep sleep with its croaking. The reason they are called Tokay geckos is because that is what they actually say, ‘Toe-Kay’, over and over again.

My most memorable moment of self-awareness, living in a madhouse, was one of those days when my husband was on a reptile hunting expedition. He was home alone and it was pouring rain, a real ravine washer. A pickup truck arrived and a man with a large plastic trash can stopped at my door. I opened the door and he asked if this is where someone bought snakes. I said, “yes, but you’ll have to come back later.” He said he couldn’t, he had a big rattlesnake and if we didn’t want it he would go somewhere else. Well, I had witnessed my husband carry a sack of snakes hundreds of times. I didn’t see the harm in giving the guy money and me putting the snake, still in the bag, in the “snake room” until my husband got home. Well, this particular snake was not in a bag. The man wanted me to put the snake in a bag. When he took the lid off the trash can, all I saw was a hulking body of the largest rattlesnake I’d ever seen. “No way, man,” I told him. In reality, he was angry that he would not take the snake off his hands and pay him money. He said a few chosen words and left with his snake. When my husband returned, I told him what happened. His answer was: “Are you crazy? … Do you know how much money that snake would bring?” Did I feel foolish because my priorities weren’t clear? No. This was the beginning of the end of our four-year marriage.

I realize that all creatures are put on this earth for a reason. Everyone has their place in this world and my guest room is not one of them.