Adventures in PYTHON HUNTING (!!)
And Lessons From Amy & the Almighty
My friend Mandy and I lit upon the idea of python hunting as a manifestly excellent way to celebrate the final drop-off of our youngest kids at college. I guess this was our version of “me time”? Another thing got floated too --- that it might be cathartic for us. We’d both experienced a fair amount of loss and grief in the past decade and wondered if facing the terror of monster-snake-wrangling might help us conquer it somehow --- deliver it back to the swamp. But that was a flyover idea. I think we really just felt it would be a net-net positive to catch a big snake.
This is what brought us last September into an empty parking lot near the entrance to the vast 1.5-million-acre sawgrass marsh known as the Everglades where we met Amy Siewe, a licensed hunter, and her fiancée and driver, Dave. I knew from Amy’s Instagram feed that she was cute -- blond-haired and blue-eyed with an outdoorsy, midwestern look. But her hair was up in a baseball cap, and she was injured, in a brace recovering from knee surgery. So cute maybe wasn’t the first thing that came across. My first impression was more tomboy --- like the spirit of Huck Finn had been replanted inside a modern-day woman from Fort Myers. Today Amy’s second in the state for catches and runs a successful business as a guide.
It was in 2019 that Amy first heard about the disaster unfolding in the swamp -- Burmese pythons that had escaped into the wild were propagating, destroying its delicate ecological balance. The State of Florida had instituted a cash for catch program and Amy went to check it out, her first night grabbing a nine-footer with her bare hands. Right then, she says, she was hooked and returned home to Indiana to sell her successful real estate business so she could move to the Sunshine State.
This part fascinated me. I pictured her in Fort Myers alone. And thinking what? Thinking to herself, I’m a python-hunter…I’m just temporarily stuck in the body of a regular unemployed person…
It was there in the parking lot after quick introductions that we got our very cursory lesson, like two minutes long, on how to hunt these Brobdingnagian snakes: you’re gonna grab ‘em with your hands right behind the head, she explained. Don’t let them get away! OK, we said. Got it! (We’d been practicing all afternoon in the hotel with a pool noodle…).
Amy suggested if it got complicated, to just execute a ‘smash and grab’ where you step on their head and then snatch them up while they’re too stunned to be pissed off. What if it bites us?, we asked while we clamored into the truck bed and onto the “snake deck”, an extra metal platform kitted-out with kick-butt flood lights. I have anti-bac wipes in the cab, Amy asserted straight-faced from the front passenger seat, motioning to Dave where to turn.
Mandy and I secured our protective eyewear (for the bugs) and got on our fitted gloves (for the catch) and took our stances on either side of the snake deck. I was so nervous my knees were shaking slightly like they had this one time when I went to my local congressman’s office to discuss a human rights bill and every other single person who was supposed to show up for the meeting canceled last minute. Well, Charles Rangel signed that bill a couple days later and Mandy and I, We Were PYTHON-HUNTING!!!
The first hour or two of the hunt were fantastically exciting, beautiful and weird. First, you need to know that however pumped you might be to find yourself on a python hunt, the gestalt of it is strangely like an active meditation. We were riding along on the snake deck watching the sun set over this vast, steamy swamp, alive with frog, bug and bird sounds, Dave moving at a crawl of about five miles per hour as the huge, flat, hot sky above us appeared to become elliptic and lift away with the heat. It was as if we had stumbled inside the earth’s own sigh.
After sunset, Amy kept us entertained by recounting the stories of her greatest catches. In this she was strategic --- legends of great python hunts were revealed by chance exactly where we happened to be driving at that moment. And Mandy and I cooperated as the perfect audience: relishing details, gasping at the good parts, ready to become an indelible part of it all.
I appreciated that although Amy kept us wrapped around her finger, she managed to do it without hawking her actual, physical person, if that makes sense. She had a native, disinterested self-possession and was not prone to affectation or anything mannered. Like a filly she was — had a way of moving evenly and athletically but slipped quickly into playful diversion. In the age of our phones and the constant preening and posing, it felt so rare, especially for an attractive woman, to be so present and natural. I still remember how contagious it felt. And an encouragement for me too --- to drop my own act.
If Amy flirted at all, it certainly wasn’t with us or even with Dave; it was with the night, the swamp and all the reptiles out there. She claimed to love the pythons in particular actually, and hated having to kill them, said it was necessary, and that part was delivered emphatically. It sounded right to our ears but scarcely concealed her bloodlust.
The first few hours I was filled with frantic excitement, like a nine-year-old-rolling-up to Disney with only an id and that having been doused in cheap lighter fluid. I was piqued and pumped and on that snake deck, wall-to-wall poised, ready for God Himself to call my name. But it was Amy’s voice I was listening for. And I was trash-talking to myself in my head about the snakes to keep up my nerve, all beck and call for Amy. Anything that chick asked me to do, I felt an updraft of readiness.
This is the work of python-hunting. It’s not trudging knee-deep in dark swamp waters. It’s peering into the roadside grass and the first few feet of foliage for anything that glints or reflects, like snakeskin or a python’s eye, as hard and as long as you can, until both your brain and eyes are spent so sideways that all you can do is wish you were back at the motel with the remote in your hand.
We floated along Highway 41 like that, a two-laner that bisects the park, in the tricked-out truck, seeing if any of the snakes had actually slithered straight to us. (They tend toward the hot asphalt.) Which makes it not that different from bird-watching I guess. (...except for the trash-talking and lighter fluid…).
This could only work, of course, if the huge, subtropical wetlands were literally overcome with pythons. And they are. It’s estimated that in the last thirty years their numbers have climbed from some handful that were released by a few eleven-year-olds a couple weeks after Christmas to upwards of half a million.
Some believe it was Hurricane Andrew in 1992 that gave the pythons their edge; that as many as three hundred eggs at a breeding facility leveled by the storm miraculously survived intact and low and behold, starting hatching right there, amidst the rubble. And then those hatchlings did like baby pythons do in Burma – they set off to hunt their first meal.
Fourteen years later, a naturalist with the state hiking in the park stumbled across the first known nest --- pythons were breeding in the wild. A study conducted in 2012 to track the dwindling populations of mammals in the park (since 1997) showed the following: prevalence of raccoons had declined by 99.3%, opossums 98.9%, bobcats 87.5%. Marsh rabbits, cottontails and foxes had effectively disappeared.
It’s FT folks, full-time — for the Everglades, for the ecosystem, for the cottontails. It’s curtains. Unless scientists can figure out how to stem the tide. (There is apparently talk in academic circles of trying to sterilize the boy snakes...) That said, it wasn’t the end of the story for Amy being fixed in my psyche as a heroine and my zest for life being renewed and then redoubled.
I’m sad to report that we didn’t catch a python that night. However, we did come upon another successful hunt involving another licensed guide and a couple of young influencers from Miami, I’m not kidding ---- the young lady wearing expensive lip gloss and one of those cut-off tops. In the dark. In a swamp. I saw her astonishingly white midriff. (I’ve now spent some more time in South Florida and that whole part makes a little more sense.) Anyway, they kindly and briefly shared their five-footer with us which afforded us a photo-op and the sense of a dreamscape too.
Although initially crestfallen, we cheered up the next morning at the Starbucks after like four espressos in the vast retail mall where our motel was located by repeating to ourselves in various iterations that we could still call ourselves python-hunters. Fishermen don’t always make a catch, we told ourselves, but they still get to call themselves fishermen.
In the meantime, though, here are my surprising take-aways from that night that have absolutely nothing to do with snakes and a fair amount to do with Amy and the Almighty:
1. Amazing Amy: Amy’s amazing to me but it’s not necessarily because she wrestles monster snakes for a living --- not even because she took down a seventeen-footer by herself (the state of Florida found a doe and two fawns in that one…). It’s not the snake part. What most impressed me was 2019-Amy. It’s the picture I have of her in a rental in Fort Myers, sitting on a couch in front of a turned-off TV, alone, before Dave has even arrived with his stuff, before she got her license to catch, before the fancy truck and the logo. It’s so unflinching and excellent. I just wish it all weren’t so rare --- when affinity, opportunity and ability line up like that, alongside serious, old-fashioned guts. To my boys, my nieces and nephews, take note: careful not to treat life like a continuous to-do list. It will surely turn into one. Don’t forget that, at heart, it’s an adventure story.
2. The Universe: There was something about what Mandy looked like when she held up that snake in the air for a picture. I could hardly believe my eyes. She looked Young. And I don’t mean like thirty or even forty. I mean some spunky, lionhearted thing sped across her face that made her look like she was in the second grade with a hint of twenty-eight thrown in. I met her back in kindergarten so this is a data-driven observation, not a poetic one. I mean she looked really YOUNG. I honestly think it was the spirit of the essence of Mandy from the center of the earth that came alive and inhabited her for a fleeting second--- something of her very self and soul. I’ll honestly never forget it.
In thinking about why this gem of Mandy’s creation would choose to pop out just then, during a (failed) snake hunt in South Florida, I can only shake my head in wonder. I don’t rightly know.
But I’ve worked out some possible theories and I’ll share them here:
Theory A. The absurd --- After all the years of being genuinely wrapped up in our steadfast, purpose-driven mission of raising our kids, that night we were doing something instead that was patently absurd. Totally un-self-serious. Way out-of-network. Somehow the thought keeps occurring to me ---- maybe the universe deeply appreciates the absurd, the lark, something totally silly. Maybe the universe likes it and likes us to like it too.
Maybe, in fact, if we asked the universe, we would find out it prefers ballroom dancing to the World Economic Forum or fried chicken to poached salmon. It wants a frisbee not a meeting. And that night it was saying it prefers us to be python-hunting once in a while rather than having a constant phantom-grip on the household calendar.
It stands to reason, at the very least, that God immensely enjoys seeing His children at play. I suppose I should preface this by reminding you that I’m a Christian and so begin intellectually with the premise that God created the universe and its people. The most recent article I read about this, how we got here, the scientist-author divined the infinitesimally tiny statistical chance that life on earth could have happened by accident or without supernatural input, an Unmoved Mover. And if that’s true, didn’t that Mover then make the makers of lollipops, waterslides, paintball, cookie dough and roller coasters? Didn’t He make snowy mountains we could slip down and big waves we could dive in or ride cowboy-style on a boogie board? I’m just interrogating the evidence.
All I know is that Mandy’s flash of exuberance struck me as almost transcendent. Or eternal. It was fruit and seed. I’ll leave it there and we can wonder.
Theory B: Being a kid again --- Related but not the same. We were like the kids in this scenario. Dave and Amy sat in the front seat, and they brought the water and granola bars and told us what to do and how and when to do it. They were in charge of everything. We even had to let them know when we needed to tinkle. Maybe this was it? For a split second, I saw a flicker of something I might call radical-adult-adapted-innocence --- freedom from having any power or control over any outcomes. And maybe that was deeply good – some kind of shortcut to soul-joy?
Theory C: Flirting --- In some sense you could say Mandy and I were flirting that night too. But not with the swamp or the snakes. Nor with Dave or Amy. We were sort of flirting with life. And time. With the world. We were sort of laughing at it all and with it. Not in a mocking way but not totally mirthfully either. It was more the laugh of a happy warrior. But if it had any edge to it, we’d jumped off of it. For that one night we spoke the language of the swamp. We were Wonder Women Snake Warriors come to free all the little mammals.
Hey life! Look at us! we said. We’re in a truck bed! We’ve got goggles on! We’re on a snake deck! We’re with Amy!!
And what if life wished to say back to us this:
Finally, you two!! I’ve been desperate for you to come out and play! Come hither to this crazy gift! Kiss the Whole World on its cheek and play hard to get! Chase me and I’ll chase you!
It seemed like we fell through some kind of crack that night. We entered swamp-time and none of the usual stuff from the prior twenty-two plus years --- the shaping of days and modeling of behaviors, the nutritious menu planning, the plodding and plotting, the outcomes for summers and schools, all the endless totes stuffed full to mitigate all the nuisances, were relevant. Like those hatchlings after Andrew, we’d been released into the wild.
All I know for sure is —
Life smiled back at us that night through Mandy.
And said something like – Yes!
I loved this! Inspired to try to flirt back with life as I'm in the thick of it with young kiddos - thank you for the inspiration and the swamp story! :)
“the earth’s own sigh” ❤️