There's a snake in my tent

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Yes, I know this is a lizard, not a snake, but I didn't have a photo of my own of a small snake.  The one I write about below was about the length of this lizard.

It was just about two years ago, in July of 2017, when I woke up in a tent.  I wasn't camping, I was living homeless in a patch of woods in a mid-sized North Carolina city.  For several years, I wasn't able to find any kind of job in that area, so in November of 2015 I went all in on turning my weird form of Sharpie artwork into a living.  Obviously, in July 2017, that hadn't happened yet.  It still hasn't.  But I've been making some money from selling my Sharpie drawings, consistently, for 3 1/2 years.  I've scraped by, with help from several friends along the way, homeless much of the time.  I've sold over 80 drawings, most of which took 35 to 45 hours each to draw.

On that July morning, in the humid Carolina woods, I got out from under the tarp I used to keep the rain off of me, and put my shoes and socks on.  I slept in my clothes, and wore the same ones for 3 or 4 days, because I couldn't afford to do laundry.  My plan for the day was to put on my small backpack with my art supplies in it, pick up my big sketch pad, double wrapped in trash bags, and hike out of the woods to the nearby McDonald's.  I would pay nearly half of the money in my wallet to buy a sausage biscuit and a Diet Coke.  Then I would spend a chunk of the day working on a big Sharpie scribble style drawing.  After that, I would take a bus to a library, and draw some more.

My whole goal was to keep drawing, promote my drawings with my blog and social media, and to sell them, until I could make an actual living again.  That was it, all or nothing.  Either I got to a point where I could make a living with my writing and artwork, or I would die.  Period.  Living in a tent was simply the place I was at in life.  It was a really slow, really long term grind, and I just kept at it.

As I packed up my stuff, my spare clothes, and everything, were in trash bags, to keep them dry in case of another afternoon thunderstorm.  My big, six person tent, didn't have a rain fly so rain would pool on the roof, then start dripping in.  As I was getting ready to head out, I grabbed a bag that was near an overhanging flap in the side of my tent.  A quick sound and  movement caught my attention.  Something, a mouse, I figured, had found it's way into my tent, and shot into the cover of the folded over part of the tent.

I got up to my knees, pinched the wall of the tent above the fold, and lifted it up slowly.  A small, fast squirming creature writhed around as its cover disappeared, scaring both of us.  It was a small snake, light brown in color, about as big around as a pencil, and probably ten inches or so long.  It was drawn up into a circular shape.  It squirmed around some more, then calmed down a bit.  It had no good place to go, and I had no idea how to get it out of the tent.  I also realized that I didn't know what a baby copperhead looked like.  It wasn't a rattlesnake, I could see that. I wasn't sure it it was poisonous or not.

But I didn't know it it was a rat snake, or if maybe copperheads, of which there were plenty in Central North Carolina, were born plain looking.  Did they have the pattern adults had?  I wasn't sure.  As I tried to figure out what to do, I realized that the snake could have been in my tent, crawling around me at night, for a week.  A week before, some kids found my tent, looked through it, threw a big stick through the side of it, and left the door completely unzipped.  I was gone every day, so it was open to checking out, and attack.

Finally, I remembered that I had an old recipe card box, which I kept my bar of soap in, in one of my bags.  I set the flap of tent down, giving the snake its hiding place again, and dug out the little box.  Then I lifted the tent flap back up, and managed to get the snake into the box without getting bit.  A lot of people may ask why I didn't stomp on it.  Snakes have their place in the woods, much more than I did.  I wanted to release it alive, if possible.

With the little snake in the box, I took it out by a fallen log, let it loose, and it scurried out of sight in a flash.  Problem solved.  I went back to the tent, got my backpack and sketchpad, made sure I zipped the tent door closed all the way, and hiked out of the woods, towards McDonald's.  That was the first half an hour of my 51st birthday. Later I looked it up, I'm pretty sure it was a harmless rat snake. 

One Year ago today... 7/6/2017

One year ago today, I woke up in my big tent, where I was living as a homeless guy, in a patch of woods in Winston-Salem.  I'd been living there for just over a month, because moving out of my mom's apartment and into the woods was the only way I could focus entirely on building my artwork into a small business and actually be able to reinvest what I earned from drawing.  In ten years of living in North Carolina, I haven't been able to get hired at a "real job."  But I'm a Californian at heart.  If I can't find a job, I'll create my own. 

As I got ready to grab my art supplies and head down to the local McDonald's that morning, I heard something scurry into a little flap of loose tent fabric.  There were spiders and bugs all over the place, but this was bigger.  I thought a mouse had chewed its way into my tent.

I cautiously lifted up the tent wall to expose the area under the flap of fabric, and I found a small snake.  I'm not sure which of us was more startled.  It freaked out and coiled into attack mode, and I screamed.  It was tan, about as big around as a pencil, and 8 to 10 inches long, a little smaller than the snakes in the video above.  It was also moving and thrashing fast as hell, in a little coil.  I had no idea how to get it out of there. 

I remembered I had a 3X5 card box with my soap in it, the kind of plastic box used for old school recipe cards.  The snake was tan, with a little brown bar above its eyes.  I know fairly well what the four kinds of poisonous snakes in the U.S. look like.  Those are rattlesnakes, water moccasins (aka cottonmouths), coral snakes, and copperheads.  What I didn't know is what those snakes looked like as babies.  So I thought my little tentmate was probably not poisonous, but I wasn't sure.  So I very cautiously caught it in the box, and released it next to a fallen log, which it immediately squirmed under.  We were both relieved at that point.

I don't know how the little snake got into my tent.  But a full week before that, some kids had found my tent, ruffled through everything, and left the tent door unzipped and wide open.  So I probably had a baby snake in the sleeping area of my tent for a full week without realizing it.

Now, a year later, I'm making about $500 or so a month selling my Sharpie drawings, and I'm sleeping on a futon in a living room that a new friend offered to me, to help me get back on my feet.  Today my focus is on selling more artwork this weekend than I usually do in a month, so I can pay my $630+/- court fine by Monday.  If I do that, I can avoid 30 days in jail.  All of that stems from me getting arrested for buying a pack of donuts at Aldi's on Peter's Creek last fall.  It's along story...

Alright, the Heavy Rebel Weekender event starts today, let's have some fun.  Back to work.

How did a snake find its