When I was around 7 years old, I had my first acquaintance with rattlesnakes. There were two boys named John in the neighborhood that extended around us, and the fat one’s dad raised snakes for venom.

Mostly we played with the kids on our own street or those from the more recently-built tract development behind our back fence, where the farm was when we came in 1953. But once we started grade school our physical universe expanded along with the intellectual one. We walked to the Thayer House, we walked to the Bohacks market in the little strip mall, we walked.

As I remember the geography, handsome John lived out our cul-de-sac and a block or so to the right; fat John lived at the far left end of the horseshoe that intersected with the open end of our curved street.

Fat John’s father had at least one wire cage in their garage area, and the cage always contained at least one rattlesnake. He didn’t let us handle the animals, but he told us about them as we watched.

We learned to be respectful about vipers but not afraid. He showed us that the way to hold a snake is with one hand clasping the animal immediately behind the jaw and the other hand grasping the end of the tale just before the rattles. We saw that, in 1957, the way to milk a rattler was to irritate it till it attacked a clean sponge, and then to squeeze the venom from the sponge into a cappable container.

What shocked us most was what fat John’s dad told us about the venom. It’s pure protein. Similar to the white of an egg. Very good food. Till then we had no idea that intravenous egg white can kill.

A year or so later we moved to Chula Vista. Rattlesnakes were as prevalent as field mice. We heard them in the scrub areas behind the high school and we encountered them in rock piles near Otay. We learned to listen and look and, although it seemed everyone had a snakebite kit, I never saw one used.

I guess the closest I came to a bite was the time I was running with Becky the beagle, early one sunny morning behind the high school. The dog was pulling me at the end of her 6-foot leash, and when she jumped the snake that was stretched out in the sun, I had no choice but to follow her leap.

The only time I got scared around a snake was on a camping trip to the middle fork of the Feather River. It was around 1974 when Nick and I encountered the crazy fisherman who said he saw a rattlesnake in the rocks around him. The guy was shooting a handgun where he thought the snake went, and his bullets ricocheted in every direction.