WHEN A SNAKE FELL FROM THE SKY

THE WOMAN ON THE LAWN MOWER THOUGHT THAT WAS BADESPECIALLY WHEN IT HIT HER. THEN THE HAWK SWOOPED IN.

- Derek Burnett

EIGHT BILLION PEOPLE INHABIT PLANET EARTH.

Thirty million live in Texas. Residents of the town of Silsbee, just west of the Louisiana state line, number roughly 7,000. Let's estimate, for the sake of argument, that on any given Tuesday evening, 20 of those Silsbee residents are out cutting their grass. Out of all those 20 mowers and 7,000 Silsbee residents and 30 million Texans and 8 billion humans, only one that we know of, 65-year-old Peggy Jones, was unlucky enough to have a living, writhing snake fall out of the sky and onto her.
The story only gets weirder.

Peggy and her husband, Wendell Jones, were tending a property they own just outside the Silsbee city limits on July 25, 2023. Wendell was out front, weed-eating, while Peggy drove a tractor (Kubota, 26 horsepower) pulling a mowing machine around the big piece of open land out back. They'd waited till evening to do the work, avoiding the nearly 100-degree temperatures of the afternoon.

Out of sight and earshot of Wendell, Peggy was lost in thought, hands on the wheel, when suddenly a 3½-to-4-foot snake dropped out of the clear blue sky onto her right forearm.

This is not something one expects to happen. "At that particular moment, I don't know if I realized it was a snake," Peggy says. "You're out here, there's grasshoppers and little flying bugs, so you automatically just kind of sling it off. Just an automatic reaction. And that's exactly what I did." But this creature did not sling. It clung, having immediately coiled itself tightly around her arm. A millisecond later, when she realized that the creature on her arm was a snake-and a big one-she shrieked, and flailed more wildly.

She had no idea what kind of snake the heavens had favored her with, nor did she much care to know. "To me," she says, "a snake is a snake."