The Construction of Space Shuttle Launch Complex 39-B
A very personal and technical written and photographic history, by James MacLaren.
Page 38: Growing Up With Rockets. And Rattlesnakes.
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And then one day, you get this.
And this.
It is late morning, Monday, August 31, 1981, and The Hand of Fate has chosen you to be a witness to the completion of Columbia's second-ever Roll to Pad, along the length of the Crawlerway from the VAB to Launch Complex 39-A, and has further chosen you to be a witness from atop the high steel of Launch Complex 39-B, which will, one day, host its own Space Shuttle launches.
You have been coming to this miraculous location for less than a year and a half, having first arrived here as a completely uneducated surfbum with no qualifications of any kind, and yet somehow The Fates...
...have chosen...
You are a Child of the Space Program who grew up with rockets during the 1950's and 1960's, and now your own son is Growing Up With Rockets too.
He is in daycare this day, and soon, soon enough, he will be given the moniker of "Richard Truly" by the kindly woman who runs the daycare, Mrs. Muller.
Richard Truly will be the Pilot of STS-2. Richard Truly will pilot the Space Shuttle Columbia, which you see here above, nearing the top of the Pad Slope at 39-A, when it vaults into the heavens with a deafening roar on November 12.
And your son, growing up with rockets, is as deeply taken by them as you are, and it's coming out of the pores of his skin all around, as it is with you, and so Mrs. Muller very reasonably hangs the name "Richard Truly" on him, in recognition of it.
And although you are now thirty years of age, you too are still growing up with rockets and will continue to do so for all the days of your life.
And although you are now thirty years of age, you are also still very much a little kid yourself...
...and since the first photograph, up at the top of this page, includes a good look at the location of the events, I'm going to switch from the sublime to the ridiculous, and tell you a pointless tale of unbridled dopiness on the part of myself, interacting with a very large Eastern Diamondback Rattlesnake.
There's no point to the story at all, I was never in any danger, and nothing really even "happened," but it serves to further fill in the details of this amazing place called The Kennedy Space Center... and maybe a little bit about me, too...
...some of which are...
...maybe not exactly what you might expect...
...and have nothing in the world to do with anybody's Space Program in the slightest degree.
Here's Image 39 once again, labeled so you can see exactly where the events I'm about to tell you about occurred.
So ok. So it's late-afternoon on a warm sunny day, and as one of the salaried office employees, I'm finally on my way home, after almost everybody else had already departed the Pad, and I'm taking a road back home that almost nobody else uses anyway, and I'm the only one on the road now, and I'm the only one on the road for the full duration of the goofiness that was about to go down.
Long shadows.
Dead silence.
Utterly alone in all the world.
And I had just rounded the corner there by the Perimeter Fence, and was rolling southeast toward Beach Road on what, before von Braun and Crew discovered that the Money Faucet was jammed wide-open and they were gonna be allowed to try and fly a few Insane People to the fucking Moon and picked this place to try and do it, had been named Florida State Road 401, and before there ever was a "Pad B" it cut diagonally, directly across the location of that Pad-to-be, and directly ahead of me was...
A very large, and very well-fed, Eastern Diamondback Rattlesnake.
As a bit of background, I grew up in a house just south of Patrick Air Force Base which we moved into immediately following its construction in 1958, in a place that had only very recently been bulldozed out of the native wilderness (yes, I know, I'm part of the problem, and I'm not part of the solution, but dammit I was a little kid and had no say-so in the matter), which was still surrounded by that wilderness, and...
Hey, I'm just a kid, and there's cool shit out there, and I liked exploring, and...
...yeah, snakes are part of what you find in the Florida Wilderness, and sometimes they're rattlesnakes, and...
I'd had enough prior experience with rattlers to know just how far I could go with one, before an invisible line got crossed...
And things might become...
...unpleasant.
And Sonny Lawrence used to catch them and kill them and tan their hides on a makeshift rack in his backyard...
And Eddie Cibella got hit by one...
And Becky Pinkerton's dog got hit by one...
But they didn't die or become disfigured for life...
But I also never heard either one of them recommend the experience, either...
And I never crossed the invisible line...
And I'm off the gas and easing into the brakes, working the clutch taking it into neutral, and my diamondback is easing into the grass along the north side of the pavement, and it's almost all the way off that pavement, with just a little bit of its very fat berattled tail still on the asphalt, and I'm very careful to avoid running it over, but I want to get as close as I can...
Ease on down to a slow stop, dead-even with it, and lean out my rolled-down driver-side window to get a nice close look at one of the largest diamondbacks I've ever seen in my life from point-blank range, down there on the ground no more than six feet from my eyes.
Big snake. Heavy snake.
Diamondbacks, if well-fed enough, can become surprisingly bulky, and this one, clearly, was doing just fine for itself...
...and I had interrupted its ever-so-slow traverse of the road, and as I had stopped, it stopped too, in no wise coiled up or otherwise giving any sort of dynamic look, never so much as shook its rattle, even once, and with outrageous, exquisite, slooooowness, it swiveled its spade-like head around to the left until its neck was bent around like a hairpin, and the highlighted dark bands curving down across its face away from its eyes were visible on both sides as it was now looking squarely at me, and rattlesnakes have eyes that... well... they don't quite glitter... but they have this... sharpness about them... and there is this hugely concealed energy field... one hell of a powerful mana... and this one knew exactly who was in charge of the situation, and it knew that wasn't me... and...
Stasis.
A tableau, frozen in time, eye-to-eye, just me and the snake all alone together in the Deep Wilderness with the long shadows growing longer and deeper as time went by.
Ok. Now what?
The snake, clearly, was in no hurry to go anywhere, had zero fear of me, and I suppose it could have been just as curious about things as I was, and so it simply stopped, kept me squarely in its sights, and I guess it figured it would wait this one out, just to see what might happen next.
And as time goes by, and we consider all of that, we need to learn a little bit more about our Early 1980's Vintage James MacLaren, because that enters into what comes next, and that particular version of James MacLaren had a ratty car, and he did not like people who trashed the countryside with their goddamned litter by throwing it out car windows, and he drank a lot of chocolate milk, which, back in those days, came in little one-pint paper/cardboard cartons, and when he finished one, he would close it up nice and push the top down square so it wouldn't stink out loud later on and then toss it on the floorboards in front of the passenger seat beside him, and that stuff could accumulate to quite the pile of crap, before he would get off his dead ass and dump it all into a trashcan somewhere.
That version of James MacLaren was also possessed of a puckish personality that caused him, when interacting with the world around him, to occasionally want that world around him to interact back, and it's always good light fun, but even so there have been a few occasions where I wound up regretting it, but never quite enough to make me quit, and... I dunno. Whattaya want me to say, anyway? It's who I am. Been this way all my life. Too late to change, now, so fuckit.
And I looked over at the floorboard covered in empty chocolate milk cartons...
And my diamondback has not moved a millimeter in all this time and is keeping me fixed in its gaze...
And it won't move...
And yeah, you know where this is going...
And I reached over and picked up an empty milk carton...
And leaned a little bit farther out the window so I could get my arm clear of things...
And the empty carton weighs an ounce... maybe two... no more than that... and it constitutes no kind of weapon at all...
And I tossed it at the snake...
And missed!
From five feet away, I missed!
Pshit.
And the snake, eyes remaining fixed on mine, watches the damn thing come sailing in, off-center, landing on the ground right next to it...
And may as well have been carved from stone for all the reaction it gave.
Nothing. Not a shiver, not a shake, not a twitch, not a tremble.
As unto stone, frozen, unmoving, uncaring.
This snake knew exactly who was in charge, and would have been more than happy to demonstrate that to me, had I foolishly decided to get out of the car and close with it.
Which of course I did not do, 'cause I know where that invisible line is when you're dealing with diamondbacks (they're weirdly placid... until they're not), and I was not about to cross that line with this snake.
But dammit, I want it to move!
I want it to do something.
Another carton.
Another miss!
Damn, I'm really not very good at this, am I?
Snake remaining as unto a marble statue, but with a very realistic paint job.
Another carton.
Another MISS!
Christ! I suck!
And by now I've quit counting, but I have not quit... being puckish.
Stone snake, all the while.
Finally, with throw number I don't even know, I managed a direct hit, right in the middle of its back, half way from nose to tail.
Stone snake.
Sonofabitch refused to react. To anything.
Alright then, if that's what you want, a bombardment it shall be.
And it went on for quite a while, and it included a few more direct hits, and in the end, I was still dealing with a stone snake, and I had completely expended all of my empty chocolate milk carton ammunition, and...
...now what?
And then I realized what I'd done, and it distressed me sorely.
I had successfully trashed the place, and had created a litterbug's dream come true in the form of a multitude of empty chocolate milk cartons scattered across the grass on the side of the roadway...
With a fucking gigantic Eastern Diamondback Rattlesnake right in the middle of it...
...and...
Whattya gonna do now, Mister Smart Guy?
Snake still hadn't moved. Not one inch! Never rattled. Never so much as even twitched its tail.
And this time discretion became the better part of valor, and I chose to remain inside the safety of my car, and the hell with the fucking pile of rubbish I'd just created out there on the side of the road, I ain't going out there to pick any of it up, no matter how big of an asshole that made me, and it made me a pretty big asshole indeed, actually.
Fuckit.
Back to my original staring contest with the snake.
Which...
At long last...
Sensed that it had won this stalemate, and with the same syrupy sloooowness, swiveled that deeply-evil spade of a pit viper's head back around until the hairpin bend in its neck had disappeared and it was once again pointed in the direction of its original heading when I first encountered it...
And with continued syrupy slooooowness...
It recontinued its northbound motion into the brush just past the mowed grass on the shoulder of the road...
Until there was nothing left to see as the last bit of its rattle disappeared into the growing darkness over there...
And I found myself staring at a pile of crap I had just created...
And I didn't have the balls to get out of the car, even then, and go pick up the shit I'd strewn all across the mowed grass.
And I didn't like that, not the shit, not the lack of balls, but the longer I considered things, the more my unease at dealing with a very large, and very poisonous rattlesnake hidden somewhere nearby grew, and finally, in abject defeat...
I simply put the goddamned car back in gear and drove off!
The pile of crap glared at me from the rear-view mirror, but I was having none of it, and I went home.
I said earlier that I suck, and it's true. I suck. I trashed the place.
For no good reason.
Dammit.
And of course, the very next morning, I was inbound toward the Pad on the same road...
And my Edifice of Roadside Garbage was nowhere to be seen!
None of it! Not so much as a single chocolate milk carton remained.
I have no idea what became of it.
Was it carried off by raccoons? Possums? Birds? Rattlesnakes?
I shall never as long as I live, know.
I suck.
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