There is a scene in my novel A Gathering of Diamonds where the protagonist, Tom Logan is deep in the Ouachita Mountains in search of his brother's missing journal.  He and teenage guide Mary Ann Stewart have spent the day, trekking steep paths and exploring caves, crevasses and mine shafts.  Taking a potty break, Tom ventures off the trail for a little privacy and finds himself surrounded by rattlesnakes.  The scene is fictional but, like a good fiction, has a basis in fact.

I attended geologic summer field camp in northern Arkansas, the terrain there similar to the Ouachita Mountains, but more eroded and less angular.  Joe Martinez, my mapping partner, asked me to climb a fairly steep slope to see if I could find the contact between two geologic formations.  Boulders, slumping down the hill, covered much of my path up the slope, along with lots of gravel that had sloughed off the slowly moving boulders.  I moved uphill quickly, my thoughts focused on locating a color change in the rock.  Finally I found it.

"I got it, Martinez," I yelled down the hill.  I didn't hear his answer as I used a marker to pinpoint the location on my topographic map.

I had found the contact just as a wall of rock halted my progress.  I didn't need to go any further because what I sought was right before my eyes.  What I felt at that moment was the elation of discovery.  When I turned back toward the valley, my euphoria turned to immediate dread.

I was on a flat plain of rock, standing amid a wad of snakes that stretched at least five feet in all directions.  The inert reptiles were huge, some thicker than my thighs.  When I saw a head protruding from the mass, I knew they were rattlers.  I had apparently walked across them in my zeal to find the outcrop contact (I know! It must seem like I'm making this up but every word is true.)

I tried to yell but my voice was locked deep in my throat.  Finally, I managed a squeaky call for help but Martinez was too far away to hear and there's nothing that he could have done anyway.  My heart was about to pound out of my chest as I searched my mind for a solution to my problem.  My back was pasted against the vertical wall of rock behind me.  The only way past the snakes was over them, a path I wasn’t prepared to take, even if I could have persuaded my legs to move.

I finally caught my breath and grabbed a loose rock from the wall behind me.  When I tossed it on the snakes, they didn't even move.  The next rock did the trick, causing the snakes to begin slithering away in all directions, providing a path of escape, one that I quickly took down the hill.  When I reached a large flat rock, I collapsed on my butt, refusing to move until my heart rate finally returned to normal.

The lethargic reptiles were sunning on the ledge, using sunlight to raise their temperatures - the reason that I didn't suffer the death of a thousand bites.  Still, it was lucky that I was young or I would probably have had a heart attack.

Unlike Tom Logan, I still don't have a terrible fear of snakes but I have had an experience or two that gave me the insight to describe a person that does.

http://www.ericwilder.com