One day in Tucson, as the sun baked the desert Arizona earth, my mother discovered a rattlesnake in my backyard. You see, unlike most backyards that are fenced in order to keep your dogs or pets inside, yards in Tucson are fenced in order to keep javelinas,  Now understand that when one lives in Arizona one must become accustomed to the occasional encounter with desert creatures. Wildlife runs rampant in the desert hills of Tucson, and though my parents had lived there for fifteen years, raising a new family had left them wary of such wild and unfriendly neighbors.

Now you can imagine that a mother with three children, none older than six, would have been quite upset to find this unsettling and venomous reptilian sprawled out amongst the brown rocks covering the yard. In fact she was livid and terrified.. She had discovered the snake whilst talking on the phone in my backyard, and would have stepped on it had she not heard the ominous rattle of the reptile’s tail. If I think back hard enough I can still remember the sound of her ear piercing scream and the ferocious manner of which she locked us in the house.

“Get inside!” she yelled, “and nobody open the back door!”

From the back windows above the patio, my two younger siblings and I pressed our faces to the glass and watched the beast sitting in the rocks. To children, events such as these are exciting and they fuel the childhood imagination. I remember the draw of the yard being painful to avoid as we were locked inside. As a five year old, the snake seemed like a mighty dragon, scaled and dangerous, lurking in the shadows, there was a courageous part of me that wanted to be the hero of this story. I could picture myself, clad in golden armour, racing to the aid of my wailing sister and brother and smiting the beast where it lay. Thank goodness my younger self had just enough common sense to see the stupidity in that dream. 

As my mind wandered to scenes of knights fighting massive reptilian dragons, my mother frantically called my father who was at work. “Rob! Rob!” she said, “Rob there’s a snake in the backyard and I don’t know what to do!” I never heard my father’s reply, but from what I gathered I assume he had given her detailed instructions on how to kill a snake using a garden hoe. My father was the type of man who believed in taking matters into his own hands. He had grown up the youngest son of a farmer in Iowa, and had since been brought up with a different perspective and ability to deal with pests. “No, no I’m not killing that thing!” my mother said irritably.

“No I don’t care where the gardening hoe is, come home and kill it!” The phone was aggressively slammed back into its holder on the kitchen counter.

I turned back then to look at my siblings whose faces had transformed into flat little disks from being pressed to the glass for so long. My little sister, Abie, had begun to drool as her two year old mouth remained open in awe of the snake. My brother, Alex, had transformed his half of the window into a masked pane of handprint covered glass, as he moved around trying to get a better view of the back yard. My mother had begun to dial our next door neighbors in hopes that someone would be home and come to our rescue. I heard a sigh of relief come from the kitchen and five minutes later there was a knock at our front door.

Like the hero of my imagination, our neighbor Dr. Blake stepped into our house, shovel gleaming in his tattooed hands. If you didn’t know that Dr. Blake was indeed a doctor, you would have probably assumed that he was in a biker gang. With tatoos lacing intricately around his limbs, colorfully cloaking him in a demeanour of mystery, he caught the attention of everyone who saw him. His ears were also gauged and stitched together by a remarkable array of earrings, and as he stood in my doorway the evening sun reflected across the sparkly jewels, casting him in a halo of light. He looked like a modern day stain glass window masterpiece, and in my young mind he would be forever embedded in my creative imagination.

He was focused though, and his mission was clear to him as he walked slowly towards the drooled on and handprinted patio door. “Hello Mary,” he said with his deep resonating voice. “is the snake through the back door?” Our three young faces watched him, mesmerized by his aura of calmness and his composure. Did he know what lay beyond the patio? The danger he might face? Did he know that he may never come back?
My mother replied shrilly, her hands had not let go of the telephone, “Yes, yes right through that door and about two yards from the patio stairs.”

She set the phone down then and hustled to open the door for him and pull my siblings and I away from the windows. As he walked out of the door, slowly making his march towards the rattling desert devil, he became the hero of legend. We could hear the maraca like sound of the snake as it curled itself in preparation for the duel. It seemed like hours had passed as he made the walk from the safety of our home to the danger of the desert. He walked before us in slow motion, though still bearing his halo of golden light. Stopping just two feet away from the snake Dr. Blake raised the gleaming shovel above his head and “CRUNCH!”

We heard the sound of the shovel digging into the brown rocks of our back yard. No longer would that beast terrorize my house hold. We said our goodbyes and thank you’s as Dr. Blake left our home and my mother’s demeanor had shifted dramatically from protective to now grateful and smiley. I was grateful for Dr. Blake and his shovel, but mostly I was thankful to know that heroes were everywhere, they might even live next door.