AOW: Marine thwarts snake attack
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| Valmeyer pitcher Ray Brandt "saved the day" July 13, keeping this snake from doing any harm on spectators, players, or reporters-including the author of this article"-in the Lakers' game against Columbia at Kleinschmidt Field in Millstadt. Mark Feldmann photo |
For one thing, I know you fine people don't like expressions like "flights of fancy" so I try to control myself and keep my personality, my thoughts and opinions, to the fringes. This section should be about the high-school heroes of our times, not the idiot with the keyboard and too much artistic license. Sure, the Clarion Sports are touched by (some would say "doused in") my idiosyncrasies, but I like to think that the gold of the spotlight's arc falls mainly on the teenagers.
I have to beg your indulgence this one time, friends (do you mind if I call you friends?), for there is a bigger issue at stake.You see the snakes have finally shed their cloth of calculated disinformation and attacked and if it weren't for the presence of a Marine-to-be, I and many others would probably be dead.
I take you back to July 13, Kleinschmidt Field in Millstadt, Valmeyer at Columbia in a Mon-Clair League clash of nice guys. At a point in the early innings a clutch of players on the Valmeyer bench rose to peer through gaps in the cinderblock dugout. They were looking down. I was next to the Columbia dugout on the opposite end of the fence. I'm always looking down when I'm outdoors and I had an inkling what was happening.
Eventually the snake made itself known. It uncoiled and shot anti-gravitational-like to sway on the face of the fence. I was meat for its fanged embrace, no more than 45 yards away.
"It's just a black snake," photographer Mark Feldmann said.
"Sure it is, Mark," I replied. "Sure it is."
Before the serpent could launch his attack, Valmeyer pitcher Ray Brandt grabbed it by its tail and pulled it gently off the chain link. Mesmerizingly, the snake danced in midair at the end of Ray's fingertips and he let it drop for just an instant. Like Tai Chi, like corkscrew pasta, it twisted upon itself, but Ray regained his handhold. He walked it into the nearby field and let it go.
"I have never had a problem with snakes," Brandt said.
I have a huge problem with snakes.
"When I was growing up my brother always caught snakes and put them in a little terrarium," Brandt said. "We kept them for like a week and then we let them go."
I once killed a copperhead with a four iron, murdered it, 60 hard strokes until it looked like sushi, a terrible justice.
"I didn't have any problems with it," Brandt said.
I couldn't stop shaking in the passenger seat of my best friend's blue van.
July's daring display was a surprise to pretty much nobody. Brandt, who leaves for the Marine Corps Nov. 3, stepped right out of his high-school dugout and into the Mon-Clair League without ever looking a step out of place.
"Ray is an outstanding young man," Valmeyer skipper Dennis Pieper said. "On the field he is very dedicated to the team. He gives his full effort when he is out on the field and I really appreciate that."
"He'll do anything you ask of the young man," Waterloo American Legion coach Rich Fisher said. "He has a positive attitude in everything he does. He is fairly quiet, not too boisterous or rowdy or anything. he just comes to the ballpark and loves to play. He gives it 110 percent, if not more, when he plays."
Here at the end of my indulgence there are two things that we should take away from the interlude of this between-seasons meditation.
1. There is no WAY they are more afraid of me than I am of them.
I understand that there are farmers or other outdoorsmen and -women who will read this article thinking of a snake's benefits, such as the quick and clean extermination of mice in a soybean field or ... well, that's about it. But I was witness to an attack I have been on the lookout for basically my entire life. It was not unlike stories I hear of the Tet Offensive. Unchecked, it's bound to get worse. Much worse. "Night of the Living Dead" worse.
2. The Marine Corps will be a stronger organization as of Nov. 3.
The tremendous courage Ray Brandt showed in attacking the snake, before it could do its devil's work, is just the sort of bravery and selflessness we admire so deeply in our servicemen and -women. Wherever we come down on the snake divide, we can all watch with pride as he steps into the breach, carrying the bayonet and the flag on behalf of Monroe County.
"Ray comes from a really good family," Pieper said. "He felt that school wasn't right for him at this time, but he wanted to enhance his education and going into the Corps is going to help him do that. He will really enhance his life experiences as well."
"It does make all of us proud," Fisher said. "You are going to have a wake-up call and find out that the service is altogether different than how it is in civilian life. When that instructor touches his nose against you and calls you every name in the book, you'll find out. It's being done so you can control your emotions because it's going to keep you alive if you ever go into combat.
"If you can't control yourself, in the service, you are going to be in a lot of trouble. It's just what is expected. Ray is exactly the type of kid who will hear it and he'll do it. He'll keep his mouth shut."
