"Hey Mark, why did the equipment list say 'mid-calf leather boots'?" I ask my burly research partner after picking him up at a rest stop on the Pennsylvania turnpike.
"I don't really know," the curly-haired sophomore shrugs with a tilt of his head toward the backseat of my sky blue Datsun 210. "I'm just bringing my old high-top hikers."
"Yeah, my construction boots will have to do."
We were headed west to our research site on the Wilcox Playa at the dead center of the Mojave Desert. Mark was an upcoming linebacker on the college team that I had been tailback for the year before. We'd been hired by our entomology professor as summer field assistants for a project to map tiger beetle populations on a unique salt flat surrounded by five mountain ranges in southeast Arizona - Chiracahuas, Pinalenos, Dragoons, Little Dragoons, Dos Cabezas. The ancient internal drainage system hosted diverse and unique habitats and insect populations. This historic Salton Sea is also infamous for its venomous snakes - the Arizona coral snake, the western diamondback, and the particularly deadly and quick-to-strike Mojave rattlesnake.
Our job entailed beetle population surveys at dawn and dusk before and after the monsoons awakened life in the region sometime between late June and September. In the middle of each day, when temperatures reached above a hundred, we had a working siesta in our cheap hotel shared mostly with migrant workers up from nearby Mexico for the onion harvest. Dr. Barry Knisley, Mark, and I took turns cooking while the so-called sous-chefs caught up on field notes, letters home, or sleep.
Missing from our research assistant job description was a side gig for the college biology department specimen collection. Driving at morning magic hour to one of six research sites scattered around the Playa, we were the first to find any cold-blooded animals struck as they attempted to soak up heat from the blacktop in the cool night of the high desert. We took turns jumping out and running back to bag the road kill in a burlap sack.
"I got it," Mark calls from the backseat as Barry pulls over just past a particularly long snake apparently crushed along the broken yellow stripes of a passing line.
"My God, that's the fattest Mojave I've ever seen," exclaims Barry, a veteran of four previous summers here.
I lean forward to watch in the side mirror and see Mark reach down and leap back as the green-tinged serpent springs into the air and strikes at his neck.
“Did it get you?” Barry screams as we both scramble back.
“Just missed,” laughs Mark as he clamps it behind the spatulate head and stuffs it's brown-checked body into the sack. “Must have been a last reflex.”
“Snake boots wouldn’t have saved you!” declares Barry shaking his head as he gets back behind the wheel.
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