My family and I live on a rural five acre lot - about four acres of which we try to keep mowed with a small lawn tractor. That's been a particular challenge this summer. Heavy rainfall has caused our grass to grow more than usual, and we've had fewer days that the lawn has been dry enough to mow. So, a couple of times this Summer, our lawn has gotten a bit higher than what would be acceptable in a suburb.

Actually its not acceptable here either, and this has nothing to do with aesthetics. Where we live it's dangerous to have a high lawn.

It's not at all hard to find snakes in the woods behind my house. It's a perfect environment for Water Moccasins - a particularly nasty and aggressive venomous snake. When the lawn is mowed we don't see these snakes around the house very often. We might even go a year or two between visits. But if our lawn gets high, our bad neighbors venture in from the woods more often.

My wife was mowing this week when she hit a Water Mocasin with the blade, cutting it into two pieces. When she realized she had hit a snake, she doubled back to make sure it was dead. She might have had second thoughts about going back if she had read this article from Scientific American:

Farmer Danny Anderson, 53, must have thought he had things under control after using a shovel to hack the head off a snake that had slithered onto his farm in central Washington State. He couldn't possibly have predicted what happened next: The severed head did a "backflip almost" and bit his finger, the AP reports, sending Anderson to the hospital as his tongue swelled from venom. Actually, maybe he could have predicted this bizarre plot twist from straight out of Snakes on a Plane 2. At least five other men have received snakebites on their fingers from dead or decapitated snakes, according to a 1999 New England Journal of Medicine paper. The phenomenon may go even further back. As noted in the December 1999 SciAm, poet Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote in an 1820 letter to his wife Mary that "vipers kill, though dead." In fact, "decapitated snake heads are dangerous for between 20 and 60 minutes after removal from the body of the snake," Jeffrey Suchard of the Good Samaritan Regional Medical Center in Phoenix told SciAm's own Steve Mirsky earlier that year. So remember: wait an hour before handling a dead snake.

It's like a horror movie where the monster JUST... WON'T... DIE!

When Sheralyn approached the snake again, the head-half struck. The formerly three foot snake lunged it's remaining half-foot up onto the deck of the mower - mouth open for a strike. Sheralyn pulled her bare leg out of the way at the last instant. As the snake fell away from the deck, she hit him with the mower blade again.

Thinking about the kids, Sheralyn immediately got a shovel and buried what was left of him.

It looks like I'll be doing the mowing for the rest of this grass season. And from now on, whoever mows will be wearing long pants.

UPDATE:

[I thought Washington State didn't have poisonous snakes. - Ed.]

Hmmm. Yeah, me too. This makes me doubt the details of the Farmer Anderson story. But Sheralyn's story is true, so be careful with snakes that should be dead. They stay dangerous for awhile.