A Snake in the Mop Bucket

 

Naw Bae's house. Our first home in Mae Sariang - 1984

Here is a photo of Naw Bae’s house where we lived when first going to Mae Sariang. We’re standing in front of the living room which included a dining area. The closed double windows on the ground floor opened into an office/work area. While working in the office, it wasn’t unusual to have someone walk up, stand at the window and watch. Sometimes we’d notice them coming. Other times, they’d come up quietly while we were concentrating on something and we’d never know. Eventually we’d see them and jump out of our skin. But we were not the typical residents of Mae Sariang so we lived in kind of a fish bowl.

Just above us in the photo was our bedroom and across the small balcony seen in the photo is the entrance to the guest bedroom. Also upstairs was a bathroom and a door that went out to a porch area where we did our laundry.

Back to the ground floor, just past the closed double windows of the office was a step down to ground level. The door at the far right of the photo is the entrance to the kitchen which was also at ground level. It’s the tropics and generally warm, so no one worried much about drafts coming in under the doors, so there were usually good sized gaps under any door including the door to our kitchen.

In the photo below, Marcia is standing with Ratana who helped us with buying food, laundry, cooking and cleaning for all our time in Mae Sariang. Her husband was a builder who we sometimes hired to do mission related building projects. They were of the Lawa tribal group and active members and leaders of the local Lawa Christian church which was a product of the New Tribes Mission (which is now called Ethnos 360).

Ratana and Marcia in the kitchen making bread. The
mop bucket with snake skin embellishment is in
 the corner behind the fridge.

Near the corner of the kitchen was our refrigerator which can be seen with the door open in the photo. Since the door is hanging open, I suppose it was being defrosted. In any case, in the very corner behind the open refrigerator door was where we stored our mop bucket with associated cleaning supplies.

I make a historical record of this particular mop bucket as one day Ratana went to get the bucket to do some mopping only to find a good sized snake skin laying on top of the bucket’s contents. We’d often heard that Thailand and Southeast Asia has maybe the highest concentration of venomous snakes anywhere in the world. So seeing the snakeskin caused a response somewhere between being startled and panicked. Ratana called Marcia who called me. The problem wasn’t so much the de-snaked skin but where had the recent occupant of that skin gone to? Was it hiding behind the bucket? Under the fridge? Under the kitchen cabinet, behind the stove? Was it curled, coiled and ready to strike among all the cleaning rags and whatever within the bucket itself? Maybe it had gone up the step and entered the main house?

All possibilities were thoroughly investigated and no snake was found. Ratana and Marcia in particular though, were left with the knowledge that a snake had crawled under the kitchen door, ambled across the kitchen, likely investigated all our dishes and food stores and finally settled on our mop bucket as the optimal place to commit ecdysis. Ecdysis? It is defined as, “the scientific term for a snake shedding its skin, a natural process where they slough off their old, outer layer (epidermis) to grow, heal, and remove parasites..” Parasites? It was bad enough when we were just looking for the snake!

In any case, that is the only snake story associated with that house. The snake was never seen or heard from again and there was no outbreak of snake related parasites. Life quickly returned to what passed for normal.