free hit counters
Chapter 15
May, 1987
John Pacobel would rather have left for Athens on Friday night, but they'd had to play a rare evening double-header at Lynchburg to make up for a rainout of the home opener. Fortunately, the field was lit and it was light until late, anyway, but it made for an awful late
evening to get back to Spearfish Lake. His appointment with Pam was for eleven, but that meant that he had to get up very early and drive hard to make it, but the alternative was driving all night and having to sleep alongside the road, not good when he wanted to put forth his
best appearance, for more reasons than one.
What made it worse was that they'd lost both sides of the double-header, their first real league matchup of the season, and that made the rest of the season look not very promising. The opportunities the girls had missed . . . it was very frustrating.
What was even more frustrating, he realized, was that he could never think about what he needed to think about when he needed to think about it. For ten days, he'd been thinking about the snake, when he should have been thinking about softball. Now that he was
actually on his way to do something about the snake, all he could think about was the way the girls had screwed up the softball game.
Oh, well, it was going to be a beautiful day. Some warm weather had pushed in, making for an unseasonably nice spring day, even in the early morning hours. With any kind of luck at all, it should be a good day, both with the snake and with Pam. Either way, it ought to
make it worth a short night and a long drive.
It was indeed a long drive to Athens, and the traffic was fairly heavy. Pacobel glanced at his watch repeatedly; making his appointment with Pam at 11 was going to be a very tight thing. Fortunately, Pacobel knew the Athens University campus well, and he had a
couple of minutes to spare when he pulled into a parking space outside the biological sciences building.
Pam was waiting for him in the herpetological lab, along with a tall, young, bearded man in a lab coat. "John, this is Professor Gerjevic," Pam said by way of introduction. "When you said you had an interesting snake, I thought he might want to take a look at it."
While Pacobel was glad of the extra expertise in evaluating the curious little snake, he was also very good at picking up vibrations himself, and the vibrations he got weren't promising for his secondary motive for the trip. Either Pam had asked Gerjevic to be there as a
sort of chaperon as well as for his expertise, or there was something going on there that was a little beyond the normal teacher/student relationship. Either way, his own chances of getting on the scoreboard were just about zilch. "This is kind of an interesting little guy," he
said. "Probably a Northern Water Snake, but the markings seem consistent with a Gibson's Water Snake, at least in any of the references I've got access to.
Gerjevic took the jar, and held it up to the light, and studied it for a moment. "It could well be a Gibson's," he said. "If it is, it would be a major find. Too bad that it's damaged. How did you come by this?"
"A kid brought it to class," Pacobel said, simplifying the story. "It crawled out of a bathtub drain, and the kid's mother whacked it."
"Out of a drain, huh?" Gerjevic said. "Well, if it were living in a sewer, that would account for being out of the torpid stage this early in the season."
"But how could it live in a sewer?" Pam asked. "I mean, this is a water snake, but it's got to breathe somewhere. And, how could a snake survive when a housewife clears out a sink drain with Drano or something?"
"That question bothered me, too," Pacobel admitted. "But when I read the front page of the Record-Herald this week, I realized that it's a combined storm and sanitary sewer."
"Ah," Gerjevic nodded. "That'll have plenty of openings to the outside air, and the matter in the lines would probably be dilute enough that an occasional dose of caustic soda might not be too devastating."
Pam thought about it for a moment, then commented, "Frank, it might even be an attractor. Perhaps drain cleaner or stuff like that kills of something that might predate on the snake."
The high school teacher commented, "It'd have to be a tough little critter, though, and somehow you don't think of endangered species as being tough little critters."
Gerjavic nodded. "John -- may I call you John? Any life form can be tough under the appropriate circumstances. If this is a Gibson's, it's picked a unique, delicately balanced ecosystem to live in. If it's a Gibson's, this sewer system could be the only place where they
survive, perhaps the only place where they can survive."
"Yeah," Pacobel nodded. "And, it may not last too much longer."
"What?" both Pam and Gerjevic chorused.
"Pam, you're from Spearfish Lake," Pacobel teased, glad to be one up on the lofty sounding professor. "What do you remember about the storm sewer separation project."
The grad student shook her head. "Not much," she said. "I remember reading headlines."
"Well," Pacobel said. "If those snakes are living in a delicately balanced ecosystem, then the city is getting set to screw up the balance." He pulled a copy of the Record-Herald from his briefcase, pointed at the lead story, and handed it to her.
Gerjavic read it over her shoulder, just skimming quickly. In only seconds, he commented. "They'd have a tough time adapting to a separated sewer, if they could adapt at all. I don't think they could survive in the sanitary side. There wouldn't be much air, the chemical
and biological concentrations would be too high. On the other hand, their food source would be a lot more dilute and periodic in a storm sewer, so they might not be able to survive that, either."
"That's the way I read it," Pacobel agreed.
