Almost immediately, my parents made a very unsettling discovery: the hillside was alive with snakes; mostly rattlesnakes of a dismayingly large and aggressive nature… dismaying because they did not stick to their usual habitat of brush and rocks, but sought out the sunny, sheltered flats around the house… where JP and I were likely to be playing. Rattlesnakes and toddlers are incompatible life forms, and no alternatives were viable. We could not be kept in the house all day, and Dad could not kill every snake on the hillside. He made a gallant try, his favorite weapon being a long handled hoe wielded with pinpoint accuracy and considerable force. Scarce a dent was made in the population, and Dad considered a revolutionary solution: knowledge.

JP and I were immediately enrolled in Dad’s seminar on “Snakes, General knowledge pertaining to, with special attention towards the dangerous varieties” and an ancillary course on first aid for snakebites.

He captured king snakes and the other harmless varieties with a snake hook, showed us the holes and shelters they preferred, let us handle them, lectured us on what they liked to eat. We were drilled on identifying them by their colors and markings, the patterns they made in the dust. For a time, there was a picture of me calmly handling a six-foot long specimen, about twice as long as I was tall.

“They eat rats and mice, “Dad lectured, “They are useful, keeping things in balance.”

Then he upped the ante and captured a rattler, keeping it in a large aquarium with a sturdy lid on the top in his study, so we could study it.

“Look at the diamond markings on the back…. Also it has a neck. In this part of the country the dangerous snakes almost always have a pronounced neck…. Listen to the sound it makes. “Dad tapped the side of the aquarium, and the snake coiled into a taut spring, tail rattling madly. “When you hear that sound, you should hold still until you see where it is coming from…. Then back away, slowly. They strike if they are cornered; given a chance they will go away. Be careful about large flat rocks, snakes like to lie out to get themselves warm. And never, ever put your hands or your feet into a place where you can’t see in.”

Grandpa Al and Granny Dodie were visiting, while Dad was keeping the rattlesnake in the den, and from the living room they could hear the sound of it buzzing distantly.

“What on earth is that sound?” Granny Dodie demanded, and Mom quickly replied. “Cicadas!”

First aid for snakebites was the final segment of the seminar:

“The bite would look like this, “Dad showed us the picture in the First Aid Book, “You would first need to make a tourniquet, and put it on your arm or leg between your heart and the bite. “
How to make a tourniquet from a belt or shoelaces, how to widen the wound and suck out the venom and blood, being careful not to swallow any of it, Dad drilled us and made us practice: it’s outdated practice now, but we were letter perfect. If I ever did have to administer snakebite first aid, I would revert automatically to what Dad taught us so carefully. The area around the house was not fenced, and we had the freedom of it, but did not wander very far from Rattlesnake Cottage. I think the most foolish things we ever did were to make the rounds of the garden, eating a bite of everything in it, just to see what it tasted like, or pretend to be earthworms and sample a mouthful of dirt. (Which because of the decomposing granite hillside, was somewhat crunchy) We even had a playhouse, of sorts, Dad’s ancient Mercury sedan, which at the end of its’ natural life, was getting a mile to the gallon of everything, gas, water and oil and leaking copious quantities of all. He nursed it up the hill one day, clanking and smoking, and parked it on the level below the house, in the shade of the eucalyptus, from whence it never moved again under its’ own power. Squirrels nested in the upholstery, and JP and I played in it; in our imagination the Merc became a house, a fort, a rocket ship. Mom and Dad replaced the Mercury with one of suburbia’s necessary badges--- a station wagon, a slightly used, jade-green Plymouth, which became the main family car for decades. (Dad eventually bought another Plymouth of similar vintage, just to keep the first one in parts.)

With Dad’s penchant for animals:  we had a parakeet, a bowl of goldfish which were lab subjects and supposed to die from the experiment, but didn’t and so came home, and a pet desert tortoise, until it snapped the lead it was kept on, through a chain link in the hole drilled in the edge of his shell, and vanished in the general direction of the desert.

Mom and Dad also acquired another staple of suburbia, the faithful family dog, although a cat would have to wait, since Grannie Dodie and Grandpa Al had raised Dad with an unaccountable prejudice against them.

“Sneaky little thieves!” Grannie Dodie said. She had never lived on a farm.

Our landlord, a lanky amiable man who had invented a device to package gumballs in long sealed strips of plastic, lived in a larger house, farther up the hill and kept horses and dogs. The horses were named Danny-Boy and Bellamy, and the chief dog a big, gangly mostly Great Dane female unimaginatively called Puppy Dog. Our new dog, Punch was one of her pups. Mom and Dad brought him home, a big, exuberantly friendly yellow dog, half-grown, who began licking my face so forcefully, he knocked me down. I climbed up into the low cruck of the oak tree in the front yard, and he sat at the foot of the tree, tail wagging and looking expectantly up at me. Puppy Dog’s ancestry and that of Punch’s sire included lashings of hound, yellow lab and German shepherd, besides the Great Dane, resulting in a largish, yellowish, shepherdish sort of dog, with large brown eyes of astounding sweetness. For a while, as a young dog, he had a vertical stripe on his eyelids, so was called Punchinello, after the commedia del arte character. He survived being bitten by a rattlesnake as a young and foolish dog, not having had the advantage of Dad’s extensive snake-avoidance training.

All our excitements were small, the stuff of childhood: Mom and Dad woke me up once, after bedtime, to hold me up in front of the sixteen-pane window in the large bedroom. Outside in the dark, it was snowing, pale flakes like feathers floating down. I never saw it snow again until I was quite grown. The large bedroom had been Mom and Dad’s when we moved in, and JP and I shared the smaller one, calling it the Nursery. But when we began egging each other on to noisy play at odd hours, they worried that neither of us was getting enough sleep. We played in the Nursery, or outside during the day, but I slept at night in the large bedroom, and Mom and Dad on a fold-out sofa in the main living room, and peace was restored.

Rattlesnake Cottage seemed as huge, a mansion to me then, the ceilings open to the roof beams, and a long, long corridor running along the side of the house from the master bedroom, past the Nursery, Dad’s study and the bathroom, to the living room and kitchenette, which were a step down or two below the level of the rest of the house. This part of the house looked out onto what little formal garden there was, fenced with a hedge of pyracantha bushes. But it was actually quite small and very much out of the way. 

It was used for a week, for a TV location shoot, to the great amusement of my parents. So far out in the hills, and isolated from other houses, it made a perfect hideaway for an escaping gunman on the old Highway Patrol series... and the leftovers from the generous catered meals on the set augmented the food budget rather nicely, as Dad was still in graduate school. It turned out that the director was an alumnus of Occidental, like Mom and Dad. The sheer amusement value of watching Broderick Crawford’s male nurse keeping him away from the alcohol made up for the inconvenience of the lights and cameras, and having to keep quiet and out of the way. JP escaped Mom, once, and toddled up the long corridor, as one of the actors opened the door, looked inside and said

“No one here!” while heroically managing to ignore the small boy at his very feet.

Dad was often away in Nevada, during this time; he was one of the field biologists doing research on the residual radioactive materiel in the animal burrows and other places left over after atomic tests. I remember discovering Mom curled up in the big red armchair, crying, after a phone call--- he was either away again, or not coming home for another week or so, and there she was, marooned again, alone in the hills with two small children, and I was frantic because I couldn’t comfort her enough to make her stop crying.