Spitting cobras, emus, and a Gila monster were just a few of my life companions in the 1970s. Ironically, I’m not that much of an animal lover, it’s more than I tolerate animals. 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 the other way. For four years I endured cohabitation with a strange husband and his strange business at home. I put 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 run away to Florida with him. We packed all of our belongings into my Datsun truck and headed off. Our destination was unknown. For a week our home was in a tent in the Okefenokee swamp. Our neighbors were raccoons that devastated our meager food supply every night. Mosquitoes the size of hummingbirds buzzed us relentlessly. Of course, there were alligators galore lurking at the water’s edge. Once, we rented a sixteen-foot flat-bottomed boat and put in a good few miles through the murky waters of the Okefenokee swamp. In places, it was like walking through a jungle with the occasional alligator eyes peeking 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 ships in sight. All we could do was row. Me with the oar in the back paddling from one side, then the other. My ex was up front paddling to drive. My paddling job was the more strenuous of the two, but there was no way I was putting my arm in the water as alligator bait. Fortunately, after about an hour a loan boater was returning to camp and seeing our dilemma he cast us a line and towed us back to shore.

With no regrets on my part, we headed out of the swamp in search of a more stable home environment. Next stop was a small town called Lake City, Florida and a job offer for my spouse as an alligator wrestler in a place appropriately called Alligator Town. It was a paycheck that provided us with our first roof over our heads, a travel trailer at a nearby trailer park. The trailer was so small that if anyone 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 wasn’t much more than a spigot in a small closet. One week was all I could stand. After that, we continue down the road to a larger trailer… Wow! At least this place had a toilet and 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 set up a large aquarium for his python (or maybe it was a boa constrictor), I forgot. Whatever large snake it was, it escaped 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 extra concrete 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 for us and our growing menagerie to move into. The house was horrible, but beggars can’t choose. It was at home 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 really 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 headed down the hall to the door to the guest bedroom that housed all the bugs. Like hundreds of other times, I opened the door, reached in and flipped on the light switch. The first thing that caught my attention 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 within two inches) with a boa constrictor. Apparently he had broken out of his cage and in doing so knocked over anything that slipped in. Slowly backing away and closing the door, I went back to bed and slowly pulled the covers off my husband and then with a hard smack in the middle of his back, woke him up. Over the next few days, I found baby snakes all over the house, some harmless, some poisonous.

My best friend was not put off by our strange habitat and visited frequently. On a whim, we decided to cook dinner for the gang. Bustling around the kitchen, we gather our ingredients and kitchen utensils to make dinner. She was unable to locate a particular size pot in a lower cabinet. I told him I’d find it and searched the cabinet and again experienced another heart-stopping moment when I realized my arm was floating over the head of a coiled rattlesnake. Knowing well enough not to make a sudden move, I backed away slowly and when I knew I was out of range I started yelling at my husband. Hearing the panic in my voice, he hurried into the kitchen and focused his attention on where I was pointing my finger. Breathing a sigh of relief, he said, “So that’s where she’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 in it was occupied and horrible and the ceiling had a hole leading to the attic. The hole was covered with a thick piece of butcher paper. It was from this point that he hung a six inch baby cobra and it was I who noticed this anomaly. Once again calling for immediate help, my husband entered the room and carefully removed 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 for days. For the most part, he was only home for a few hours each night because he worked 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 usually 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 instructions to feed the animal…carefully. Honestly, I tried, but he pounced and scared the shit out of me. The Gila monster didn’t eat dinner that night and was apparently mad at me. Although he was in a cage in a locked bedroom, he was making a terrible noise by banging against the cage and making threatening guttural noises. I couldn’t afford to go to a motel and I had nowhere to go, but I was determined not to stay in the same house with this creature; so I took my blanket and pillow and slept in the car for the next two nights.

One day a package arrived at the house of 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 was peeled off. The lid of the box was lifted and in a split second, hundreds of Tokay geckos were out and running at the speed of light in all directions. They are fast little lizards. For the duration of our stay in that house, we found Tokay geckos everywhere. Our neighbors, who didn’t particularly like us being there, also reported geckos in their houses. It wasn’t all bad because they loved to eat cockroaches and palmetto bugs (which abounded) and spiders, which I despise. However, it was disconcerting to lie in bed and feel the gecko run across the sheets or be woken from deep sleep by 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 an insane asylum was one of those days when my husband was on a reptile hunting expedition. He was home alone and it was pouring rain, a veritable ravine washer. A van pulled up and a man with a big plastic trash can stood at my door. I opened the door and he asked me if this is where anyone bought snakes. I said, “yes, but you’ll have to come back later.” He said he couldn’t, that he had a big rattlesnake and if we didn’t want it, he’d go somewhere else. Well, I had seen my husband carrying a sack containing snakes hundreds of times. I didn’t see the harm in giving the guy money and putting the snake, still in the bag, in the “snake room” until my husband got home. Well, this particular snake wasn’t in a bag. The man wanted him to put the snake in a bag. When he took the lid off the trash can, all I saw was the huge body of the largest rattlesnake he had ever seen. “No way, man,” I told him. In fact, he was angry that he wouldn’t take the snake off his hands and pay him money. He said a few choice words and went off with his snake. When my husband returned, I told him about the event. His response was, “Are you crazy? … Do you know how much money that snake would bring?” Did I feel foolish because my priorities were not 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 bedroom is not one of them.