If you have been reading some of my recent posts, you are probably aware that I have been talking about some of my exploits and experiences after being assigned to the Joint Interoperability Test Center (JITC) at Fort Huachuca, Arizona. The subject of my post today is going to jump back a ways. When I first started talking about my exploits at Fort Huachuca, I talked about my efforts to secure a garden plot at the Fort Huachuca Garden Club. In that same post, I talked about searching for and buying a little trailer to haul cow shit to fertilize a garden plot. I also talked about the division of labor between my wife and I in that garden plot. Basically, the division of labor amounted to me doing all the menial shit like tilling the dirt, digging holes, hunting gophers, and watering plants. You know. Your basic run-of-the-mill menial shit. I also mentioned hooking up with a guy who had a garden plot by the name of Eddie. You may have read all of these details in that other post, but soon we had a third member of our little garden watering beer drinking club. It was the German lady who had originally turned me onto some peppermint plants to ward off the pesky little gophers that liked to dig tunnels all over the got-damn gardens and snatch whole plants out of rows of plants by the roots. Those little bastards could cause some serious damage in a garden. Before the German lady had turned us on to the peppermint plants, we basically had to rely on primitive methods to deal with the gophers. You know, like whack-a-mole ala Bill Murray in Caddyshack. That meant we had to try to trap them or use stink bombs in their tunnels or basically flood their tunnels. None of those methods was very effective, much as it was for Mr. Murray in the film. Every once in a while, we got lucky and caught one of the little bastards. But usually, those little suckers managed to escape. They had more escape mechanisms than Houdini, and their luck was a helluva lot better than his as well. But the peppermint seem to work. Those pesky little varmints hated the smell of that shit. Another trick I tried was to capture small to medium-sized gopher snakes in order to release them down the gopher tunnels. I figured that the gopher snakes might work as a pretty good deterrent as well. Well, one afternoon when I got to the garden plots, all of the Korean ladies near my garden plot seemed to be pretty agitated. They claimed that they had seen rattlesnakes. I thought that that was highly unlikely. I had never seen a rattlesnake around the garden plots. However, those Korean ladies were pretty spooked. They insisted that there was a rattlesnake in the garden plots. They wouldn’t go in there. Meanwhile, I ran into my old buddy Eddie. He was leaning against his truck, and he seemed a little bit more drunk than usual. Since it was my turn to replenish the stock of beer in the cooler, I walked over with our favorite brand of brew (Red Dog) to add to the cause. He looked at me and slurred, “Juss take one out and set the rest down. The cooler is kinda full. I got a big ass rattlesnake on ice in the cooler. I replied, “No way.” “Way. I killed that bitch with this shovel right here.” It was in the garden plot on the trail next to one of those Korean ladies’ gardens.” “Are you serious?” “Over the cooler and check it out.” So, I popped the lid on the cooler and saw a Western Diamondback rattlesnake decapitated and gutted and laying in the cooler. The snake had to be five feet long, minus the head and the rattle. I looked at him and said, “That must be the rattlesnake that those Korean ladies over there were talking about. They’re scared shitless. I’ll walk over there and tell them that you killed it.” I walked over to where the Korean ladies were standing by their cars and told them that Eddie had killed the rattlesnake. They didn’t believe me. I told him that I wouldn’t lie to them, but they still wouldn’t believe me. So, I opened the gate and walked down the trail to my garden plot and started watering my garden with no problems. When the Korean lady saw this, pretty soon, they realized that there was no danger, and they entered the garden plots and went to their own gardens. After I watered my garden, Eddie and I drank some more beer and we cooked up a couple of rattlesnake steaks. Those rattlesnake steaks were delicious. We ate rattlesnake steaks and drank beer, and we had no exercises in futility.
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