It
was a sunny day in the first week of July on Dale Hollow Lake. My family and I
had taken a vacation with the speedboat for a week, just to relax and get away.
It’s basically a family tradition; we go there almost every year. You can jump
in the water and see a span of fifteen feet under you; the water is like a bath
tube reaching temperatures of seventy degrees. The landscape is beautiful, with
huge cliff sides caused by the dynamite used to make the man made lake; a
mixture of beauty and power at its finest. On this particular day my family and
I were just doing a day of floating. We would go into a cove of the lake and
just throw the anchor in and sit out in the water. With a cooler packed with
drinks and food we could stay there all day. My parents are really laid back
people; they always enjoy being in the speedboat or cruising in the pontoon,
anything in the water interests them. My sister is a fish, not literally, but
she could be in the water all day and never get tired. We are a boating family
and do a lot of it. On one of the last days I was swimming and thought it would
be a good idea to swim over to the bank. As I was swimming I could here my dad
yell “watch out for snakes!” I just put it in the back of my mind and said it
would never happen to me. I kept getting closer and closer to the bank and then
heard my mom yell “your going to get bit!” I just thought, “that’s reassuring
mom, thanks for making me feel so much better about this situation” but I
carried on determined to get to the bank. I had to jump off the side of the cliff;
it’s just what men do! I finally reached the bank and started climbing up. Who
would have guessed it; I lifted my self-up a bit and then suddenly was face to
face with a giant snake! I didn’t stay around long but noticed the snake had a
white mouth like a Cottonmouth. The Cottonmouth snake (or water moccasin) is
the only poisonous snake in Tennessee that swims, and I’m pretty sure I was
face to face with one. I jumped off the ledge into the water and swam as fast
as I could back to the boat yelling, “Snake! Snake!” the whole way there. I’m
not going to lie, I was freaked out, I can deal with snakes normally, just not
when they are right in my face. When I finally reached the boat after swimming
vigorously and erratic in a single uncoordinated motion in an effort to quickly
evade the snake, all my parents had to say was “we told you so.” I guess I
learned a valuable lesson that day, to always listen to your parents. The only
justifiable excuse is that I wouldn’t have this crazy story to tell!
This was a great story and it reminded me of when I was a kid and my grandpa would let me take the BB gun down to the creek and let me shoot at little minnows and I ended up somehow killing a snake in the process, possibly from the rock I threw at it.
ReplyDeleteThose are by far the worst words to hear and yet we always seem to hear them from our parents "I told you so".
ReplyDeletei guess this is a classic you better listen to your elders story and they never get old. i have had to many to count but you will never forget those moments.
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