This week, beware of paraskavedekatriaphobia — fear of Friday the 13th. Raised in the desert, my father had ophidiophobia — a deadly fear of snakes. It wasn’t a fear in the sense of cowering in the corner and crying, but an irrational terror that led to sweating, cursing and murdering.

Once he was driving down the main street of Vernon and happened to spy a snake on the side of the road. Eyewitnesses state that he shifted the pickup into neutral, jumped out while the truck was still moving, and grabbed a shovel from the bed. He then killed the snake, chased down the pickup that was still moving, tossed the shovel in the back, climbed in and drove on his way.

There is a detail to this story that makes me believe it happened. As I recall, the pickup in question didn’t have brakes, so it only makes sense that he had to chase it.

All the while growing up, I watched my father’s panic over the slithering creature. Eventually, his brother George explained the root of the behavior. My father was a lover of nature from an early age, often playing with small rodents whenever he could find them. A childhood in the desert can be a lonely time. It seems Grandpa wanted to teach them to respect danger, and would slide a bullwhip through the grass where his son was playing. When the curious child went to check it out, he would snap the whip to scare the child.

Naturally, as the boy grew to a man, he responded with hostility toward serpents.

Parenthetically, Grandpa also identified the call of the wild sage thrasher, a native bird which, in the child’s imagination, whipped and thrashed the unsuspecting much like a dragon. Truth is, the Oreoscoptes montanus of the mockingbird family is a harmless bird only 7 inches long. Dad told us how he learned about the sage thrasher, and that knowledge set him free to venture outdoors in spite of the sage thrashers’ call.

Such knowledge did not extend to the Great Basin rattlesnake, which are relatively harmless as poisonous snakes go.

We haven’t seen as many rattlers as we used to. Bull snakes and gopher snakes seem to have crowed their habitat. At least that is the theory.

Although I possess no phobias, I must admit that while looking on the Internet, my skin crawled and my muscles tightened, as I vividly remembered the first time I rolled a bale of hay to hear the unnerving rattle.

That rattle could send Dad into orbit, or at least to another state of consciousness. Mom’s younger brother told of a time when as a young teenager he spent a month of summer vacation out on the ranch and one day observed Dad’s heightened response and higher violence provoked by the sound of a rattle. After the snake was dead, my uncle noted the location and returned later to extract the precious rattle. Then he waited for the proper moment.

Over breakfast the next morning, he gingerly removed the prize from his pocket and rapidly shook it. As he told it, my father jumped up, turned over the table and all its contents and attacked the source of the sound. When he found it was in my uncle’s hand, he attacked him as well.

“I had it coming,” he said. “But it was worth it for the look on your dad’s face.”

Elizabeth B. Mitchell, along with her husband Alan, operates the Bennion Ranch at Benmore.