Awesome was the only word to describe the third

Awesome was the only word to describe the third Saturday afternoon performance for the Rappahannock Library’s Summer Reading Program. Ron Cromer brought his Snakes Alive! from High Point, N.C., and you never saw so many snakes and people inter-acting in one room. Everyone seemed to have a snake around his arm or his neck or his waist or cradled in his cupped hands.

Mr. Cromer arrived at 2 p.m., and the program was scheduled for 2:30, so he asked for volunteers to help him set it up. It took six large men to carry in the chest containing the python, and the larger boys helped carry in all the smaller <iages with the other snakes.

There were so many cages that we had to open up the sliding door to the children’s room and move two rows of chairs in there. The children sat on the floor and Mr. Cromer had to put down tape to keeping them from sitting with the snake cages. If we could have opened the back wall it would have been more comfortable, as some people sat on the little chairs in the children’s room, some on the table, and some had to stand. (But it was worth it!)

The actual program started with color slides about the anatomy of snakes. Did you ever wonder about a snakes lungs? Well, a snake doesn’t have two lungs like we do . It has only one lung, and it is long and thin, just like the snake. They have a heart like us, and blood, and a mouth and stomach.

But they don’t chew their food, they swallow it whole and it dissolves in their stomach. They don’t eat again until it is all gone, sometimes it is days or even weeks before they have another meal. Mostly, snakes eat small animals, rats and mice. But big snakes, like pythons, eat larger animals, like monkeys or pigs, or whatever they can catch.

Hog-nosed snakes eat worms and bugs and they have a bump on their nose, which is like a pig’s snout, to help them root around in the ground and find their worms