Making hiss-story

Herpetologist Rom Whitaker's new memoir is a rollicking ride through his early adventures

- MANDIRA NAYAR

If Rom Whitaker had his way, the serpent would not be frolicking in the Garden of Eden. He would have caught it with a hook, scooped it up gently and put it in a pillowcase-as he did all his life with his mother's linen-and studied it.

Whitaker was four when he realised he would always be Team Serpent. Turning over a rock to look for earthworms to use as bait, he and his buddies once encountered a snake. "Snake!" they yelled, and pounded it to death with stones.

"Not having seen one before, I was fascinated but afraid. After the boys stepped back, I squatted near the battered creature and examined it. I carried it home on the end of a stick against their advice," he writes in his memoir Snakes, Drugs and Rock 'n' Roll: My Early Years. His mother looked at the snake and told him that it was a harmless garter snake and made him promise that he would never kill a snake. Breezy-as his mother called him (his sister was Gail)-readily agreed and his life changed.

"That was the bane of my mother's existence, because I used all her pillowcases to put snakes in," says Whitaker, in a Zoom interview. "But she was so instrumental in this whole evolution of my life, in terms of loving wildlife and loving creatures, as she had the same feeling that I do about creatures, but perhaps not snakes. But suddenly, I started bringing snakes home when I was four or five years old. And so, like it or not, she got into it. And she just encouraged me all the way. Which mother would do that? Which mother would be crazy enough to let her kid bring home snakes?"