The Globalist Communists

The communist tyrant Ceausescu’s favorite descriptor for any person who held anti-communist views was “reactionary.” He even called Republicans “reactionary.” Any human who was not a communist was a “reactionary.”

Since he took power in 1965, Ceausescu was the absolute ruler of everybody and everything. His dear leader portraits were hung in public buildings, offices, courts, classrooms, stores, on building fronts, and stores.

Anything the tyrant wished became law with a scrawl of his pen. He could make life unbearable for anyone. All the domestic media belonged to him and entertained his every whim.

Scinteia (the spark) was the “official voice of the Communist Party.” As the main indoctrinating rag, Scinteia dedicated its front page to stories of what Ceausescu did the day before, “praising his leadership in every facet of life.”

Every day the radio and television broadcasts ended with the lying praise, “to the most adored and esteemed son of the Romanian people.” People who were not boot lickers of the Communist Party, hated his guts.

From time-to-time important people defected to the west; Ceausescu was humiliated and took such defections personally. The defectors were painful thorns in his side, and he ordered their immediate capture and assassinations.

It was not enough that he subjugated an entire population with his Communist Party philosophy of imprisonment, famine, and death. It was not enough that he stole their freedom, dignity, pride, and basic human rights. He wanted more, way beyond the cult of personality which he had built around his persona. He wanted to be the ultimate lord and god over their lives.

All came to a halt one day, not because people finally had the courage to revolt, they did not. Not because they were armed, they were not. Not because they were organized, they were not. (They snitched on their own families to get a few extra crumbs of food.) Not because the church united them, it did not. (The church worked with and for the Communist Party and against its own parishioners.)

Ceausescu was deposed in a KGB-GRU directed coup which installed its own Gorbachev protégé, Ion Iliescu, to power. The same Communist and Security police individuals stayed in place. Ceausescu and his wife were summarily executed, following a brief army-directed trial on Christmas Day 1989.

People do not realize that they can vote themselves into socialism/communism regimes easily if they are not careful, but they cannot vote themselves out of socialism/communism.

After the Ceausescus’ double execution, “unfair and unfree elections took place, giving victory to Communists.” NSF (National Salvation Front) suppressed opposition parties and publications. The Security Police intimidated people like before.

Funderburk wrote that NSF-Iliescu-directed ‘miners’ beat up anti-Communist demonstrators and trashed the opposition parties’ offices. Under the new communist rule, the economy worsened during the winter of 1990-1991 when inflation tripled; wages stayed the same except for the miners’ wages.

The military-intelligence coup was planned months in advance by the Soviet KGB and GRU. They conspired with a pro-Soviet group in Bucharest to remove Ceausescu by using a popular uprising against Ceausescu. It was done to preserve communism and reorganized it under different communists. The army was told to side with the demonstrators and against the Ceausescus.

Funderburk wrote, “The coup was masterfully staged and televised to the world.” Even the victims of the “revolution,” shown as dozens of bodies allegedly gunned down by Ceausescu forces, were actually “bodies in a pauper’s grave in advance stages of decomposition.”

The National Salvation Front (NSF) President, Ion Iliescu, was a life-long communist, Central Committee member, and a friend of Gorbachev from their college days in Moscow.

The NSF Prime Minister, Petre Roman, belonged to one of the oldest communist families in Romania and close friends with Zoia Ceausescu (daughter of Nicolae and Elena).

Local and county-level Communist officials just changed their hats of allegiance to NSF.

NSF gave freedom of travel and emigration, allowed contacts with the West, small private enterprises, and created the “appearance of political participation for non-communists.”

But the electoral campaign and the actual election were a sham. NSF controlled everything – information, jobs, salaries, police operations, communication, television, radio, transportation, access to media, and every facet of life in Romania.

The opposition to the NSF commies had their offices ransacked, people beaten, some beaten to death, campaign headquarters broken into, all materials destroyed.

The election was stolen long before the actual balloting took place. Election day violations were widespread, ballot boxes were stuffed, ballots were pre-stamped for the Front (NSF), police agent monitored the polls, manually placed people’s ballots in boxes, and intimidated voters – secret voting was not possible.

Howard Phillips, an observer, witnessed widespread fraud at numerous voting precincts in and around Bucharest. He wrote, “in a country where going against the government can cost you your home, your job, your freedom, or even your life, it takes unusual courage for an impoverished peasant to risk voting against the NSF in such circumstances.”

The fraud was so unbelievable that over 17 million votes were cast in a country where the electorate was only 16 million. Yet the regime in Washington categorized the May 20, 1990, elections in Romania as fair.

Thus, the stage was set for the globalist communists to thrive over the next three decades. New foxes were in the henhouse.

 

Ways to Die in National Parks

Before we started on our journey to the Grand Canyon, I read the glossy travel brochures, the history behind important places, rocks, trails, the history behind its exploration, the original trailblazers, their victories, and failures. I was excited and ready to explore even though I had no intention of going down into the canyon based on my age and physical abilities.

Upon return, I brought three books which cured me of the desire to explore on foot anything having to do with national parks and the dangers hidden behind the beautiful landscapes, the rock facades, the verdant mountain forests, and the wild animals residing within.

Recently, while on the official boardwalk of a Yellowstone Park thermal area, the tourists were too close to an erupting volcano, and did not run away immediately; they appeared stopped in their tracks, mesmerized by the sudden explosion of hot mud and gases. Only when they felt the heat and smelled the burning ashes did they decide to run away. I hope nobody got burned from that sudden and unexpected eruption.

To say that there are hidden dangers in parks, it is a mild description of all the things that can kill you. I know that we cannot spend our lives worrying about things that we have little control over, but we can be meticulous and not throw caution to the wind just because the view is breathtakingly beautiful and nature has its plans anyway, why fight it?

I learned that a gorge’s vastness, a park’s natural beauty, and wild animals can kill in so many ways. Experts claim that most of the time accidents and deaths happen because humans are uninformed, take foolish chances, don’t know much about their environment, step into wild animals’ habitat without being prepared or are prepared and die anyway, are not aware of dangers, don’t value their lives enough to take basic precautions, have really bad luck, or think that they are invincible in the face of terrible odds. Thus, people continue to tempt fate and die unnecessarily because of:

-         Scalding in thermal baths accidentally or on purpose to take in hot baths, not knowing that some water holes have temperatures more than 150 degrees Fahrenheit; some tourists accidentally step on a thin crust of dirt which gives way into a 205 degrees Fahrenheit water hole; others fall in while walking in the dark, drunk, or lost.

-         Drownings in deep lakes and due to swift currents in rivers such as the mighty Colorado; clothing bogs down with silt and even good swimmers are pulled to the bottom and drown.

-         Accidental falls of all types.

-         Falling trees and branches.

-         Falling rocks from above (usually thrown carelessly by people on the rim, not thinking that they would dislodge larger rocks which would strike people below who would be killed).

-         Struck by lightning  (being on mountain top ridges and on high rocks; the most dramatic instances were recorded near the Old Faithful geyser in Yellowstone in 1966 when a bolt of lightning struck the cone of the geyser, it traveled via a wire underneath the wet boardwalk, jumped to it and injured numerous people; in 2005 a bolt struck fifteen yards in front of the boardwalk at Old Faithful, causing crowd pandemonium and 11 injuries).

-         Hot springs which appear innocuous and cold.

-         Grizzly bears attacks (they need little provocation to attack, kill, and feed on humans).

-         Bison attacks (park visitors usually get too close to take pictures with or pet huge animals who can stomp them to death).

-         Poisonous gas (hydrogen sulfide gas and carbon dioxide which emanate from the geysers and are also found in caves or in trenches or dug holes).

-         Ingesting poisonous plants like water hemlock, confusing it with an edible plant.

-         Poisonous mushrooms (there are six types in Yellowstone National Park, i.e., the death cap, the destroying angel, the deadly conocybe, the deadly cort, the deadly galerina, and the conifer false morel).

-         Falls off the rim of a gorge or inner gorge like the Grand Canyon.

-         Falls while rock climbing or rappelling.

-         Fatal goring by mountain goats (it is rare, but it happens)

-         Attack from coyotes and wolves.

-         Attacks from a pregnant elk or a momma bear with cubs.

-         Attacks from mountain lions.

-         Poisonous snake bites while far away from any medical help.

-         Scorpion bites especially in Arizona’s Grand Canyon.

-         Death from avalanches and freezing (at least six people died this way inside Yellowstone National Park).

-         Freak accidents such as death by a cave-in when an embankment broke free and buried Peter Hanson in 1907 – he died of asphyxia in Yellowstone.

-         Falling trees which suddenly hit and kill people while hiking, walking, or camping below (trees can fall because of high winds, blizzards, logging or cutting incidents, or plain rot that finally overcomes the precarious balance of nature).

-         Hypothermia sometimes strikes even when prepared with adequate clothing if items get soaked.

-         Heat stroke (below the rim in the Grand Canyon, temperatures rise way above the temperatures around the rim, to 120 Fahrenheit plus, killing those hikers unprepared or physically unable to withstand such hot temperatures for extended periods of time).

-         Suicide (hurtling through empty space in free fall, Thelma and Louise style, is a nightmare that some people have experienced purely by accident, i.e., backing their cars over the rim, forgetting to put on the parking breaks, or deliberately by driving their cars over the rim of a deep gorge, or deliberately jumping to their deaths; Michelle Shocked wrote in her song “Over the Waterfalls,” It don’t hurt you when you fall, only when you land).

-         Forest fires (in Yellowstone National Park 15 firefighters lost their lives).

-         Earthquakes (on August 17, 1959, an earthquake measuring 7.5 on Richter scale killed twenty-eight people in the Madison Canyon just northwest of Yellowstone).

-         Drowning in the rivers and lakes of national parks.

-         Diving (into unknown depths with skull crashing sharp rocks; crushing vertebrae and instant paralysis from hitting shallow bottoms of pools which appear deeper than they are).

-         Horses, mules, and wagons (crushing passengers when they overturn).

-         Accidental and self-defense shootings (Whittlesey wrote that there were at least ten such deaths in Yellowstone National Park).

-         Murders (Lee Whittlesey documents several murders in Yellowstone and a few are documented in the Grand Canyon).

-         Missing and presumed dead.

-         Gas stove explosions (a few died grizzly deaths while camping in Yellowstone).

-         Deaths on the park’s roads and in the air above a national park (Grand Canyon holds the record for the one-time, largest number of deaths in the air, 178, from the collision of two commercial airplanes in 1956).

For national park visitors, hikers, campers, explorers, fishermen, hunters, and fun-seeking persons who are oblivious to potential dangers, this list should be a good starter to remember that nature is not a Disney ride, wild animals are not our friends, they should never be approached, photographed too close, or petted, and warnings from the park rangers should be carefully considered and followed.

Note: I have read by now several books on accidents in the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone National Park, and other national parks and I can honestly say that my encounter with the chasm at Grand Canyon was a type of "fatal attraction." On one hand I was in awe of its magnificent beauty and geological significance, and on the other hand I was utterly terrified of it.

 

                                     

Praise from Dr. Kurt W. S. Smith

During my years of teaching, I crossed paths with remarkable students who left a lasting impression. One such student was Kurt Smith, class of 2006 at the Mississippi School for Mathematics and Science in Columbus.

Mississippi has many talented people, and a few develop their aptitudes to the fullest extent and become excellent professionals and outstanding Americans who love what they do for a living and return to Mississippi to pass on the baton of excellence.

During my twenty years at MSMS I have fond memories of students like Jennifer S., who became a successful engineer and marathon runner, Ben H., financial advisor and excellent Mercedes mechanic. Shannah T. H. advocates for rare diseases, giving platform to those who had no voice before and saving her daughter in the process; Melissa H., an excellent elementary school teacher and long-distance runner and an avid world traveler; Melissa M. A., excellent mother of three boys and an advocate for juvenile diabetes. Some former students are gifted engineers and doctors who care for all Americans. Bryan, a young medical doctor with a Ph.D. in medicine, studies prions in mad cow disease; Joe S. and his friend Michael H. whom we took to baseball games at MSU are medical doctors, saving women’s lives; Katie D., excellent RN and mother of five; the Italian class I took to Ole Venice (18 miles away) as a reward for earning college credit through a standardized test; Emily S., a medical researcher; and Nate W., an engineer who runs his wife’s medical practice in rural Alabama. These are just a few of the students who left a clear and lasting imprint in my fond memories.

This May 2024, Kurt W. S. Smith earned his Ph.D. in Linguistics after an undergraduate in German and International Studies, with a minor in Italian and Spanish, a master’s degree in German and Teaching English as a Second Language, and another master’s degree in business administration. He also worked for more than ten years in higher education administration at Ole Miss.

Kurt’s doctoral dissertation dealt with the “utilization of authentic reading materials in ESL textbooks and the role that textbook-based tasks serve in enabling language classrooms to mirror the target environment.”

Kurt proposed a “new Continuum of Authenticity Scale technique to measure the authenticity of materials in textbooks beyond the current binary model.”

At his dissertation defense, Kurt thanked “my MSMS language professor, Dr. Ileana Johnson, for inspiring me with a zeal for language learning and for modeling authenticity in the classroom environment.”

Kurt wrote on the MSMS alumni webpage, “Dr. Johnson was the kind of professor who, in addition to teaching me in German class, also let me sit in on her Italian and Latin classes because my schedule was too full to formally register for them, and she privately taught me and another student Russian lessons during her office hours. The earliest foundations of my dissertation were rooted in how she would bring in sales receipts, brochures, newspaper clippings, and other seemingly mundane artifacts from foreign cultures as windows of authenticity for students to see true representations of language as it is actually used in the target environment as opposed to a reliance on the completely pedagogically invented texts found in textbooks, with their invented characters, invented scenarios, inauthentic passages, and obviously fake dialogues. Indeed, her subtle rebellious contempt at having to use a textbook in the first place helped to shatter the within-the-box thinking that had been instilled in me for the prior ten years before attending MSMS. (What? But how can you have a class without a textbook? You can’t question the paradigm.)” It turns out that she could.

Ten years later, as a researcher-teacher, Kurt described how he scrapped the textbook for the course he taught and developed an “open-source course packet instead, filled with authentic materials from the target language and culture that complimented the learning objectives of the course, expanding on the approach Dr. Johnson so effectively modeled.”

Kurt celebrated his doctoral graduation with a pilgrimage trip to Italy with his family and was pleasantly surprised how easily the “language came back to me, with vivid memories of how I learned functional words and authentic language skills in Dr. Johnson’s class.”

Posting on the MSMS alumni website, Dr. Kurt Smith wrote, “I just wanted to share with the rest of the MSMS family how impactful and life-changing the MSMS experience was for me, and how the passion and personality of one phenomenal professor set me on a path to improving humanity’s understanding of language pedagogy.”

As a life-long teacher and a consummate professional for thirty years, I had seldom received praises or recognition from my colleagues, the dean, or the professional field in MS for a job well done, nor did I amass the Department of Education certificates on the “I love myself educational wall” other than my four college diplomas which I earned while raising a family of four as a single mom. I was content with the stellar results of my students.

Kurt’s writing brought tears to my eyes and made me realize that some of my students did recognize the quality education they received from me. And Kurt is a shining example of my exceptional students.

 

Submission to Communism

With the help of technology, technocrat corporations have enabled those in control of our country to find out everything there is to know about each and every citizen.

With the help of AI, scouring our social media platforms facilitated by the development of the Internet, bureaucrats and unelected controllers spend no time to worry about how to collect information and build dossiers on all citizens to keep them submissive and compliant.

There is no freedom of speech on social media platforms. Simple posts are removed under the guise that it violates “community standards,” i.e. any post with a prayer, or that uses the word God, posts against Marxism and wokeism, posts criticizing the woke Olympics, posts against the globalist digital currency, against global communism, or anything the social media platform owners dislike.

There was a time when the Soviets and their communist satellite countries in Eastern Europe and around the globe had to spend a lot of time, money, effort, and manpower to control the populations living under those police states.

There were many ways to control their citizens:  fear, beatings, jail, torture, death, starvation, small wages, gun confiscation, money confiscation, land theft, house theft, savings theft, inadequate medical care, empty stores, empty pharmacies, taking children away, no job promotions, denial of travel, higher education, and denial of basic human rights and freedoms.

Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa, who defected to the west but was once Ceausescu’s right hand, wrote in his book, Red Horizons, about the conversation between the dear leader and his wife Elena, who was unhappy that their communist underlings could not find out who wrote an anonymous letter sent to Radio Free Europe in Munich, criticizing the cult of personality of the dictator and his wife.

She suggested that the dictator should fire everyone and then should bring in the army. Irritated, Ceausescu asked his wife how the army could find out who wrote the letter. She answered sternly and grimly, “If they can’t figure it out, then they’ll just shoot every other suspect.” All it took in the communist regime was to be a declared suspect and you died without the benefit of a trial.

If that suggestion was not extreme enough, the dictator ordered that in three months’ time all Romanians’ handwritten samples had to be collected, starting with children in first grade. Retirees and housewives were to be forced to fill out an absurd form to obtain their handwriting samples.

He also ordered samples of every typewriter in use at home or in offices around the country which then had to be registered with the Security police. He decreed that renting or lending a typewriter was also forbidden to all Romanian citizens, and the police had to authorize ownership.

When the dear leader was told by one of his minions that such an order would be unconstitutional for private citizens, Ceausescu responded, “Did the Constitution make us, or did we make the Constitution? We made the Constitution. We will change it if we have to.” Law, order, human rights, and the lives of all citizens were worth nothing to the communist dictator and his wife.

Ceausescu’s behavior had a Soviet precedent. When Khrushchev wanted to institute the death penalty for speculators, he was told by the public prosecutor general of the Soviet Union, Roman Rudenko, that the law did not authorize the courts to do that.

Khrushchev responded, “Who is the boss, we, or the law? We are masters over the law, not the law over us – so we must change the law, we must see to it that it is possible to execute these speculators.”

The Presidium of the Supreme Soviet issued a decree introducing the death penalty for the crime of speculating.” Why were there speculators (often from the lower ranks of the Communist Party or their informers) in the first place? Because the economy was horrific, people were starving and would pay high prices to speculators to buy food and medicines on the black market.

Communists had no qualms about eliminating people from the opposition or even their friends who became too competitive and thus inconvenient; they manufactured crimes to dispose of them. Countless individuals of the communists’ inconvenient friends and of the opposition were thus sentenced to death or “disappeared” in gulags.

Not even famous people escaped the control of Ceausescu’s communist regime. The famous Dr. Aslan, the founder of the first geriatric institute, who made money abroad in the 1970s in the west with her Gerovital pills and cosmetic creams, was not allowed to keep any of the money she made in foreign currency.

Gen. Pacepa described in his book the event when Aslan was arrested at Bucharest airport with $800 hidden in her hair bun. The communist regime was infamous for confiscating the earnings of famous athletes as well.

It seems that today, in our country, it does not take a whole lot to become a suspect and displease those in control; all one must do is contribute money to the non-communist political side, vote for a non-communist candidate, or attend a peaceful rally. The repercussions and the fear of being jailed prevent any future participation in political dissent. That is how the Marxists win.

 

Feeling the Silence of the Grand Canyon

Of all the magnificent places I have seen around the world in my lifetime, nothing had ever prepared me for the surreal moment when my eyes were filled by an otherworldly sight, with an ethereal light, rock spires, cathedral rock buttresses, and indescribable colors of the most beautiful and dangerous gorge God has ever created.

Colin Fletcher called it the “soft, luminous light of a desert crevasse.” I found it to be a luminous Chasm painted in a fusion of pastel hues of blue, lavender, pink, yellow, and orange. Even looking at the canyon from afar, safely away from the rim, my eyes could not fix on any magical feature and my head was spinning in vertigo that continued even after I closed my eyes.

From the lip of the South rim, the depth, the distances, the sharpness of the sculpted and dangerous rocks were dizzying – cliffs, buttes, terraces, boulders hanging by a thread suspended in the air, hidden crevasses, hidden fatal cracks in what appears as a solid boulder, swirling dust picked up by the updraft currents, the suffocatingly hot temperatures going down, and the rain of rocks dislodged accidentally by the occasional hiker making his/her way down.

The Void is carved randomly through the rocky plateau of northern Arizona, more than 277 miles long and over a mile deep in the center. Its width is ten miles in some places, 21 miles via a well-beaten trail, and in others, thirty, and even forty miles wide depending on where and how one hikes across.

The silence of the canyon in day time is like a silent movie from long ago and at night it becomes dark silence that swallows even the sound of the drumming of rain.

Utter silence, seldom punctuated by the screeching sound of an occasional bird flying above, dominated this colossal amalgamation of rocks, allegedly cut through by the Colorado River. Watching the random lacy shapes, I could not help but think of Noah’s flood when perhaps this massive canyon, a dangerous and massive Wonder of the Natural World, was under water.

I could feel with every fiber of my being the utter silence of the Grand Canyon affecting all my senses with its primordial rocky loudness.

Painful Memories of Escaping Communism Legally

To escape communism, its dire poverty, and the total lack of opportunity for a good life for my present and future family, I left behind everything I have ever known and all the people I loved who loved me back. I embarked on a journey to freedom that has given me, my mom, and my children a life that I had never dreamed of having.

For four long years, before I was given permission to emigrate, to depart the lovely communist country I was born and raised in, I was interviewed and interrogated at the most inconvenient times, sometimes in the middle of the night, had to file hundreds of sheets of various forms, affidavits, all notarized, translated, and quite expensive to obtain; I had to pay for my “free” government education I received as part of being a Romanian citizen, schooling which suddenly became valuable because I was going to live with the capitalist enemies and my education was too important to the communist police state and it cost an x number of dollars which I had to pay in cash. Not having such cash at all, I had to rely on my American husband.

At that time, I did not know that I would spend four more years in America being interrogated by the INS and filling out paperwork, notarizing them, paying expensive fees with money I did not have, before I could become a naturalized American citizen. Today all that process has become an expensive joke as illegals waltz across the border greeted by a welcoming committee of NGOs who give them money, clothes, phones, apartments, plane tickets, bus tickets, voter registration cards, and free reign of America, no questions asked.

Knowing what I know now, would I do it again? I am not sure since communism has followed me to America in my golden years. I had thirty years of what made America great, and it was wonderful. But it is waning fast and becoming communist.

Communism did not really die, as the west proclaimed assuredly in 1989, it went underground, it regrouped, and re-emerged stronger and more insidious than ever on the shores of the most powerful nation on earth that had fought communism. McCarthy was right. Not only do we have communism now, but it has also spread globally.

One of the many reason for my journey was that I was born to impoverished parents who were not Communist Party members, were part of the proletariat, did not have college degrees, were ordinary people who worked hard in the communist factories for a paltry salary and a rental apartment in a small, grey, reinforced concrete high rise complex which the communists built in a hurry to house urbanites and villagers alike whom communists dispossessed of their land, homes, and family valuables. We had no hope of building a more prosperous life and nothing to look forward to in such an oppressive regime. I had to escape and, even though I was an only child, my parents agreed that it was the only way.

Did I want to leave behind my parents, my friends, my relatives, my books, my grandparents, and all memorable places attached to my growing up? Most certainly not, but I had no choice. The communists made it difficult for people like us to succeed, all venues were closed to us and were reserved for communist party members, their children, and even their extended families. The dear leader’s armies also had special privileges not reserved for the likes of us, simple people spied upon by an army of informants to make sure that we took our place in the daily drudgery, cogs in the communist well-armed machine.

When I moved to America legally, the locals called people like me derisively Eurotrash. To my face, they were welcoming, unsure where exactly my country was on the map as geography was not their strong suit or any suit for that matter. I was the stranger who left her family to come here – who does that, they said, and they were right unless they knew where I came from. Nobody in her/his right mind would move halfway around the globe for a better life, with no family at all, no friends, and fighting new prejudices and rejections from the locals. The rejection was so obvious, you could have cut it with a knife.

If I had money for an air fare back then, and they were quite expensive, I would have returned to my birth home, but I was too stubborn to admit that I was wrong, and that America and my new family did not exactly welcome me with open arms.

I endured the pain and eventually became comfortable with my new life and family, becoming a naturalized American. My roots still live inside me but I am an American citizen. The apartment that I grew up in, our “home,” is still standing today, but I found it more foreign with each visit to my homeland. The expression, you can’t go home again, rings true because you can never find again what you are looking for.

Is there any place left in the world to escape to from the global communism that is infecting the planet and our country?

The Young Snake Wrangler

All summer long I watched from my deck a grandma with her three grandchildren strolling by to the pond nearby. The little girl picked flowers, the baby usually slept in his stroller, and the young boy waded fearlessly in the shallow end of the pond with rubber boots on. I waved at them every time we saw each other but we never met.

Once she told me from afar that her oldest grandson loves snakes. I was about to tell them that there were plenty of snakes in and around the pond and to be careful, but I figured that they already knew that.  There are thousands of snakes per square mile in Virginia.

The young boy with blond curls was not interested in the turtles, the bull frogs, the tree climbing nutria, the resident beaver family, the miniature ducks, the Canada geese, the blue heron, the two foxes, the deer, the rabbits, and many other creatures that showed up daily from the forest, just the snakes.

I wanted to meet this young wrangler, but they were always too fast for me, disappearing in the forest nearby once he was done with the pond. He quickly found the exact corner with the huge den of snakes and the den under a big pile of rocks on the right bank; nobody had any idea how the pile of rocks got there. They always seemed out of place.

Today I finally met the young snake wrangler at the pool. His grandmother introduced herself and her three grandchildren. His name is Gabriel and is 9 years old. What makes his passion so different is the fact that Gabriel is color blind, and he cannot distinguish snakes by colors, just shape of pattern and shape of the head. He catches and releases the snakes as his enthusiasm is to study them and handle them, not to collect them or dispose of them.

I asked him how he came about to like snakes so much. Gabriel (Gabe) has an uncle who catches snakes for a living, disposing of unwanted residents in peoples’ yards, sheds, pools, and homes in Prince William County. His uncle’s job turned into a fascination for young Gabriel. As the consummate professional, Gabe carries a snake catcher’s grabber hook.