Post by Joanna on Sept 6, 2017 19:40:52 GMT -5
Are Rattlesnakes Telling Us Irma Will Hit South Carolina?
Dr. Ben Parker, a veterinarian in Bluffton, N.C., looks at the Hurricane Irma spaghetti models and thinks that a swimming diamondback rattlesnake was a bad omen. Add this to the tale of the flying fish on Daufuskie and new reports from the Sawmill Creek area of Bluffton that an amazing number of big, colorful butterflies are batting around right now.
Signs and wonders? Maybe. Or signs of the end times if you’re watching the computer models tracking monstrous Hurricane Irma.
Parker was out on the water with his son, Ian, last Saturday when, he says, “I had a scary visitor ... a big rattlesnake crossing toward Hilton Head at the mouth of the May River.” It was so big it made old-timers swear off swimming. The only thing they could find to like about it was the “toward Hilton Head” part.
A day later, with enough red lines of possible hurricane paths slithering around Beaufort County to choke a computer, Parker posted online: “Perhaps that rattlesnake knows more than the rest of us and the meteorologists. He was definitely headed towards higher ground. Hmm.”
Then yesterday, with a potential hurricane path appearing to come right down U.S. 278, Parker wrote: “Not good. The rattlesnake was not a good omen.”
Meanwhile on Daufuskie Island, the flying fish came up on a dark and stormy night. None other than writer Roger Pinckney XI reported it, and, as it is often said hereabouts, “If you can’t believe Roger Pinckney, who can you believe?” Here’s how he laid it out last Saturday:
“OK my naturalist/detective friends, figure this out: One hell of a storm early this morning, much drama, torrential rain, wind and lightning. Come daylight, there were several salt water fish in the mudhole on Maryfield Lane. The mudhole is about 16 feet above sea level so they didn’t swim there and they damn sure didn’t walk. One fish, maybe an osprey dropped it, but multiple fish? I figure a waterspout? If I had Jesus handy and some barley loaves, I could have fed multitudes, but alas, as it were, too small to eat. What say ye?”
This was followed two days later by this: “Down at the beer joint with Naked Bill yesterday and he remembers it raining tadpoles when he was a boy.”
Everyone agreed the fish thing was weird. Someone said Roger should lay off the hoodoo-voodoo. Someone said it was the Swamp Monster, kin to the Lizard Man. Someone said it was a “Mullet Manifesto,” the title of one of Roger’s books. A Democrat said it was Trump’s fault. Roger said he was putting in an order for red snapper. Someone said it was fallout from the eclipse. Someone else suggested he seek an answer from the Prince of Untruths, Woody Collins. That was a joke.
Then everything was cleared up with this: “As the cities turn into tidal waves in the depths of the ocean dance, the enchanted circles of love will see the falling stars, all at the same time.” It was concluded the fish were, indeed, sucked up by a waterspout and deposited in Roger’s mud waller. And there they died as fishy signs of the times, unobserved by hurricane computer models.
But this doesn’t explain why a rattler – a snake that isn’t particularly fond of water – was swimming for higher ground.
Source: David Lauderdale, MyrtleBeachOnline, September 6, 2017.
