An 8 Footer and a Jacked-Up Left Eye

You're gonna love this one!


Hey Mom and Dad,

You are probably wondering what the heck my subject line is referencing. Let's get this party started...

Last Wednesday was New Year's Eve. I suppose more diligent missionaries could care less about not really celebrating any holidays for two years, but I kind of get a little bumbed. It was 31 December and all we had planned was to walk or ride the streets in an effort to find at least one person who was still in town for the holiday. The best we could do was go eat Swensen's for our dinner hour at 2000.

Elder Burnett and I left the house, kneeled on the porch to pray, finished praying and then started unlocking the bikes. By this time, Elders Jensen and Thepitak had come out. Elder Thepitak was looking at our pathetic and unkempt little pond while Elder Jensen was situating his belongings, and suddenly Elder Thepitak scream, in Thai (probably actually Laotian since people tend to fall back to their native language when in distress), "BIG SNAKE!"

Pure joy flooded through me. It was game time. New Year's Eve had adventures in store for us after all. Relief and satisfaction.
Suddenly we are all running around trying to get a look at this thing. None of us can see it, as it is hiding in the rocks, but Elder Thepitak is convinced it is there and keeps yelling for us to be careful. "It can't be that big...", I thought to myself. So I start thinking what I can use to catch this thing and defend myself if it comes to that. I ran inside and grabbed a knife from the kitchen, some massive garden shears, then grabbed a stick of bamboo from the yard that Elder Jensen had been using the night prior to try to snag some fish out of the pond. Used the knife to turn the stick into a spear, and laid the shears aside, instructing Elder Burnett to be ready to cut its head off if the opportunity calls for such drastic action. I just wasn't sure what we were dealing with, you know.

By this time I had seen its head and body. Elder Thepitak was right. BIG SNAKE. The part I saw was probably as thick around as my forearm. Biggest snake I have seen in real life. Well, we had alerted it to our presence by now, and it snuck behind the rocks even more than at first. It had also left the prize it had found for us to see: a huge toad that we though had been bitten because it was still clearly alive but wouldn't move when we prodded it with the spear. This caused us to believe that is was poisonous, which to me meant it was dangerous and needed to die. The hunt ensued.

I told Elder Jensen to get the camera. While he's getting it all set up, I'm jumping around all these rocks trying to find this veritable anaconda, all the while ignoring Elder Thepitak's pleadings for me to be careful. He was probably right. I was probably far too close to that thing and its domain, but my reasoning was, "Hah. I'm a man. No need to be careful. Let's kill this thing."

I poke and probe in some crevaces trying to find it. Nothing. Finally Elder Jensen spots it. All we can see is the thick, scaly body. Not sure exactly what part of the snake, but hey, on a snake I guess it's all one part, only difference is how close to the head or the tail that section is. Video is rolling now. (Ya'll are going to love this one. I'll send it as soon as possible.) So I give this giant serpent what I thought was a cout de tat (French word that I think means approximately "kill shot"), but this bad boy was a lot tougher than the garden snakes we used to deal with back when I was four years old in North Dakota.

What I thought was a strike that would inflict a fairly mortal wound ended up just forcing him out of his hole. Then the hunt turned to a chase.
It left the rocks and headed for the far wall. I chased it down, trying to jab it a few times, but I'm not as good as the cavemen in regards to handling a spear, so I figured I'd just club the thing a bunch. Got a few good hits in, but it was all on the run as it was heading behind the house, presumably fleeing to the brush over the fence on the other side of our house. The bamboo stick was pretty much useless by now, but Elder Thepitack stopped screaming like a female for just long enough to hand me the mop. So I re-equipped and went back to battle.

First hit stopped his slitherings. Must have busted some important bones because the parts of it behind where I made contact stopped moving, and he couldn't get anywhere after that. Now I thought, "Nuts. He's suffering. I need to end this." I would have just gone for his head except that I wasn't sure if it was poisonous or not, it had tried to bite me about two times already, and my mop was not longer than it was. I figured I needed to eliminate his ability to strike before going in for the final blow.
I had my senses about me enough to discover that the neighbors had taken an interest in the noises coming from the white boys' house (hopefully they realized that the only person screaming like a woman was the Laotian, and not the Americans), and one guy was climbing through a hole in our fence to get a better look and identify the snake. Another guy was just looking through the fence. Two ladies had come out on their balcony, exclaiming, "What? What is it?" They all started telling me to hit its head, to which I replied, "Too far."

I rethought my approach. The end of the mop I had been hitting it with was now busted enough for the metal to be exposed and formed into a crude sharp edge. Took a stab at it. Finally broke some skin. This upsetted the snake even more, so he turned and tried to bite me, but I hit him in the face with the part of the mop that you connect the mop head to. Then he bit himself where I had broken his flesh, which gave me time for the final blow as he tried to get his teeth out of himself.

Now the guy climbing through the fence came all the way through and grabbed the snake. I told him he could take it if he wanted, and they said they would eat it. We took some pictures, which you will enjoy. The thing is definitely taller than me when I stretch my hands to the sky. Turns out its bite is not fatal, but poisonous nontheless.

Elder Jensen got some pictures of it being prepared for eating. We got a bowl to eat when we came home later that night. Pretty tasty. Only problem is that they just ground up the meat and bones together, so we didn't eat all of it, in an effort to save our teeth from crunching on bones.
That was New Year's Eve in Thailand.

Two days later we were invited to a member's home for a small New Year celebration. We played some games. The only one I won ended up in me receiving some broken blood vessels in my left eye. They had us race to blow up some balloons until they popped. There weren't enough fresh balloons to go around, so some people just deflated already inflated balloons. I wasn't about to get beat by someone with an advantage, so I put my lungs on turbo (thank you to mile high elevation at school for the past two years), and won. Unfortunately my balloon came back and nailed my eye, and then they started telling everyone else to cover their eyes. I spent the rest of the night worrying about my ability to fly airplanes. I think I'll be alright though. I can see fine how. Eye just hurts a bit and has a big red L where it should be white due to busted blood highways.

Hopefully you enjoyed those stories. I'll write a letter today with the missionary work stories. Some excellent stuff happened this week. Miracle status for sure. Glad to hear you all got back from Utah safe and sound. Happy New Year to you all as well.

Much love.
Aaron