Me n’ The Snake...In the Pickup...At 55 mph.

On a lighter note, here's a recounting of an adventure I had earlier this summer that I thought might be entertaining.

June 26, 2012
Newnan, Georgia

Late this morning Mr. Cecil called.  Mr. Cecil is the old timer shade tree mechanic, literally. He works mostly on lawn equipment, assisted by his very precocious bloodhound puppy who at 14 weeks still has yet to be named, under a big old Georgia pecan tree growing beside his house, on his old homeplace outside Luthersville, a small rural town about 20 miles south of my town of Newnan, Georgia. He wanted to let me know that he had finished replacing a bunch of parts on my aging riding lawnmower and that my vacation from summer lawn care duty was, alas, over. I had to pick up the mower.

After lunch I heaved a sigh and moseyed next door to Mike’s house to borrow his old pickup and trailer for mower transport duty.

Now, you must understand that we live in a community with a minimum lot size of an acre and a half and Mike lives on our shared lake. His property abuts about 75 acres of undeveloped wild woodland/wetland literally teeming with an abundance of southern woodland/wetland critters. His pickup, probably an eighty-something vintage small model Ford, lives tucked into a tight niche in the edge of the woodland/wetland forest on the edge of his property where multitudes of critters live and go about their lives almost totally unmolested by humankind. Heck, they probably live their entire lives without ever SEEING a human being. To put things in perspective, I guess they figure they OWN the damn place. The truck’s exterior is home to I’d say about 32 species of lichens, molds, mosses, mildews, and maybe even a few mushrooms, given the perfect habitat for molds and fungi that exists in its woodsy niche.

 

The Mossy Snake Truck in its natural habitat

Well, when I arrived to get the truck, I opened the driver’s door and fished around for the keys which Mike keeps in the glove box, since we have no crime in our neighborhood, we are somewhat loose regarding physical security; many of us never lock doors and keep keys to vehicles in more logical than secure places. The keys were, predictably, where they always stay and, after hooking up the trailer, I drove south through Newnan and sleepy little Moreland in the 95 degree summer heat with both windows rolled down for whatever cooling I could wring out of the automotive generated breeze in midday, summertime Georgia. I was wearing shorts, no socks, a pair of Crocs, and a t-shirt, summer uniform hereabouts.

As I accelerated out of Moreland on the two lane asphalt highway leading to Luthersville, I found myself behind a slower (?) Honda with a badly bent right rear wheel which was wobbling wildly and, no doubt shaking the fillings out of the driver’s teeth. I was unable to pass him since the Ford can only be pressed so hard before her engine begins to balk by refusing to make more power as she spits and vibrates in protest with the application of what she deems to be excessive throttle. She will only accelerate after the driver eases up on the throttle, and then only reluctantly. 55 mph is about the maximum velocity one can coax from the old girl when a trailer is attached. I had nudged her up to that limit when I happened to feel something gently rub across my bare right calf. Naturally, I looked down and saw what I, at first, took to be a slender 3' long black strap waving at me just over the edge of the bench seat. After about a nanosecond my age-deteriorated cerebral function finally calculated that cloth straps are NOT, as a general rule, tapered to a point. After calculating frantically for a second nanosecond my brain screamed at the top of its voice: SNAKE!! IN TRUCK!! WITH YOU!!

 

 

Southern Black Racer

(click image to see him - NOT NEARLY as big as I did)

I instantly, and totally, forgot that I was anywhere near, much less driving, a somewhat unstable truck/trailer rig hurtling along the highway at about 55 mph, with the trailer hitched behind and just waiting for me to saw the wheel so it could jack knife the whole ensemble into the woods off the side of the highway. I HAD to stay cool as the proverbial “center seed in a summer Georgia cucumber.” My brain was wildly performing calculations on somewhat the scale of a Cray Supercomputer in order to somehow assure my survival. It DID fairly rapidly determine that the snake was non-poisonous, that’s GOOD; that its head was moving away from me into the passenger floorboard area – GOOD again. My only choice at this point was to get that damn rig stopped with the utmost dispatch and THEN deal with the black snake sharing the truck with me. One of us HAD to go, and I wasn’t of a mind for it to be me.

Now, while I generally LIKE snakes, I prefer a “live and let live” relationship. I NEVER have aspired to get close to, pet, or otherwise touch any snake and I was pretty well convinced he shared these feelings reciprocally. So I attended to first things first….I crammed on the brakes and steered the bucking rig onto the shoulder of the road with tires screaming in protest. Somehow I managed to keep the truck and trailer in line on the longitudinal plane until motion ceased and the snake and I were out of danger from a violent crash at relatively high speed into some rural Georgia swamp.

Next, somehow, despite being strapped firmly in my seat, I managed to dive over to the right side of the cab and wrench open the passenger door to provide as wide an avenue of escape as possible for my three foot long, no-shouldered friend. I even thought I might motivate him to utilize the door opening by sort of trying to herd him with the cardboard box containing the tie-down straps I’d brought to secure the mower for the return trip. No joy, he headed for what HE thought was safety in his slithery little world and made a serpentine break for the back (or front depending on your perspective) side of the instrument panel where he likely figured he could camouflage himself as, say, a bundle of windshield wiper wires, or something.

It was now or never as his head scuttled up behind the glove box in the right front corner of the red interior. I made a desperate dive and, for the first time in my life, wrapped all four of my fingers, thumb, and palm fully and firmly around the poor, terrified snake’s soft, tubular body about a foot from the tail. I simply could not allow him to take refuge in the dashboard wiring and just continue on my journey to Luthersville with a stowaway serpent. IT COULD NOT HAPPEN!!

I pulled with all my might but the squirming little rascal had managed to gain some firm purchase in the rat’s nest of wiring and support structure behind the dash and declined all my offers of freedom, life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, and sexual pleasures to be found in a new neighborhood. The little sucker just wouldn’t let go! So I pursued the only option I could think of…I managed to get hold of him with my other hand and, with two hands pulling as hard as I could, he finally decided, as had I, that either he let go and consign himself to his fate or be rent quite literally in twain with his halves terminally separated; one to rot on the roadside, and the other to rot behind Mikes dashboard. So, under grave protest he finally and very gradually relinquished his grip on the wiring and structure and was flung with all my might as far into the roadside stubble as I was able to launch him. The last time I saw him he was still flailing wildly in an attempt to defend his body from dismemberment (such as a snake can suffer, lacking members in the traditional sense) as I hastily slammed the door on this small drama of my life.

I opted not to stop at the country diner in Luthersville for a cup of coffee as my nerves were quite adequately stimulated, a condition that lasted the rest of the day.

"One Dark Night In Vietnam I Was On An Ambush Patrol..." - In A Medical Breakthrough Blind Mice Given Sight.

Joe Kirkup shares a harrowing personal incident from his Vietnam experience and a Bloomberg article about an extremely encouraging medical breakthrough

Lowflyer

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 One dark night in Vietnam I was on an ambush patrol approaching the small river that marked the Cambodian border. 

Unfortunately the enemy had set up their ambush first and we walked right into it.  The gunfire and the general chaos was punctuated by explosions from grenades and crude Viet Cong claymore devices which contained rusty nails, broken Coke bottles and human feces. 

One of these blasts tore a hole in my shoulder and covered my face with mud, foliage, tiny cuts and excrement.  For about twenty seconds, where there had been light from illumination rounds and the constant flicker of muzzle flashes, now there was only darkness. 

I thought I was blind. The bottomless pit of terror that opened up in my stomach is almost impossible to describe.

For me it was a fleeting experience, but for many, many others it is a daily reality.  Let's all make damned sure this research gets 100% of the funding it needs and give thanks that we live in a society that can make things like this happen.
  
  JK

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Blind Mice Given Sight After Device Cracks Retinal Code

By Jeanna Smialek - Aug 14, 2012 7:05 PM ET

SOURCE: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-08-13/blind-mice-given-sight-after-device-cracks-retinal-code.html

(Corrects the experimental process in seventh paragraph of story published yesterday.)

Blind mice had their vision restored with a device that helped diseased retinas send signals to the brain, according to a study that may lead to new prosthetic technology for millions of sight-impaired people.

Current devices are limited in the aid they provide to people with degenerative diseases of the retina, the part of the eye that converts light into electrical impulses to the brain. In research described today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, scientists cracked the code the retina uses to communicate with the brain.

The technology moves prosthetics beyond bright light and high-contrast recognition and may be adopted for human use within a year or two, said Sheila Nirenberg, a neuroscientist at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York and the study’s lead author.

“What this shows is that we have the essential ingredients to make a very effective prosthetic,” Nirenberg said. Researchers haven’t yet tested the approach on humans, though have assembled the code for monkeys, she said.

Once the researchers determined the code the mouse retina used to communicate with the brain, they were able to mimic it with electric-signal sending glasses, Nirenberg said. Previous prosthetics have used less-specific stimulation and proved inherently limited as a result, she said.

About 20 million people worldwide are blind or facing blindness due to retinal degenerative diseases, such as macular degeneration and retinitis pigmentosa. The disorders cause a progressive loss of the retina’s input cells, or photoreceptors.

Visual Equations

Nirenberg and co-author Chethan Pandarinath first monitored healthy eyes to determine the set of equations that translate light received by the retina into something the brain can understand. Then, they used special glasses to create a similar code and deliver it to the eye, which had been engineered to contain light-sensitive proteins. The cells received the code through the light sensitive proteins and fired electric impulses, which the brain could interpret as images.

Nirenberg’s research “is basically giving vision back to a system that doesn’t work,” said Aude Oliva, a principal investigator at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who wasn’t involved in the research.“I’ve never seen, and other people have never seen, this quality.”

No foreseeable barriers should stop the movement into humans now that the technology has been created, Oliva said. Nirenberg said that if researchers can come up with adequate cash to fund clinical trials, she hopes to soon adapt the technology.

Macular degeneration is the leading cause of blindness in people older than 55 in the western world and may triple in incidence by 2025 according to a 2009 report by the American Optometric Society. Retinal diseases could find a “reasonable solution” in the technology, said Jonathan Victor, a professor in the department of neurology and neuroscience at Weill who was familiar with, but not involved in the research.

“It’s a major step, it’s elegant, and it works,” he said.

To contact the reporter on this story: Jeanna Smialek in New York at jsmialek@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Reg Gale at rgale5@bloomberg.net