I am sure by now that most of you have seen the news reports on those people from Alabama, I think, and their smoking nasty grill.

You haven’t?

Come on…

You have not seen the news reports of the couple who started up their grill only to find that a very large snake had coiled around the heating element?

The huge clouds of black smoke?

The pieces of greasy snake smoking and dropped on the pavement?

Now, you remember…

I have already heard people going “Waddya mean they burnt up a snake? Didn’t they check the grill first? Some people are just plain idiots.”

Un-hunh. Let me tell you a story.

A friend of mine once bought a restaurant stove at an auction. It was a huge industrial one with eight burners and a double oven. The stove had come out of a closed restaurant and had been in storage for years.

The smell knocked you flat the moment you opened it.

PHHHHEWWW!!!

There was at least two inches of grease compounded everywhere inside that stove. There was so much grease that the knobs didn’t turn right and the pilot wouldn’t stay lit. And, you couldn’t really see anything under the stove without scraping a couple inches of muck out.

I literally had to cut a four inch square cube out of the underpan to find the pilot.

Yeah, that was gross…

So, there we are in the woods of West Virginia trying to figure out how to clean this monstrosity.

We tried spraying it with water but even a fire hose couldn’t make a dent in that crap. All it did was slide off with weird noises.

Oven cleaner was a losing proposition as well. Who can afford fifty gallons of Easy Off? And what store has that much in stock?

We tried a gallon and all it did was rearrange a little of the muck and drip off with a sound like a baby’s rattle.

Well, the only way was to melt it off. Literally.

So, we hooked up a propane converter and lit the pilot. Once the pilot would stay lit, we turned all the burners on high and raised the roof on that oven to incinerate.

At first, nothing happened as the oven heated up.

Then, the oven began to make weird noises as the metal began to heat up and expand. It sounded like some wind up toy about to explode.

And the noises were all coming from the underpan.

“What the hell is that rattling?” hissed my friend.

“I have no fucking idea.” I said, “Open the oven and find out.”

Clay grabbed a stick and used it to pry open the oven.

The noise got louder and then –

“It’s a fucking rattlesnake!”he screamed.

AND IT WAS!

EVER SEEN AN EASTERN DIAMONDBACK RATTLER?!?

I HAVE!

AND IT WAS COMING FOR US!

AND, IT WAS PISSED!

Running for the treeline, we took off for the hills.

A lot of beer, and 12 hours later, we came back.

No snake.

BUT,

That oven was spotless…

NOW LET’S DO IT RIGHT!

Rattlesnake Bites