Sometimes a treasure is right under your nose

Recently Mom sent me some clippings of Timm’s with the following story. This is how she relates how she found them:

For about ten years a yellowed newspaper had covered a light fixture that had been taken down and replaced. It sat on a high shelf in my garage until a couple of years ago. When I took the fixture down from the shelf, I noticed that the newspaper covering it was the Appeal Tribune, the newspaper where Timm had worked as a sport's writer and photographer. The date on the paper was September 27, 2000. I placed the paper-wrapped light fixture on a table in the garage intending to look closely to see if there might be an article or a photograph in the paper bearing Timm's name.

For two years or more, it sat on the table waiting for me to follow through on my intention. One day earlier this week, I could no longer procrastinate. I was bothered by the sight of the paper, now removed and tossed aside after a recent garage sale. Very carefully I opened and smoothed the brittle discolored newspaper.

To my amazement, I found an article Timm had written about a camping trip he had taken when he lived in Central Florida! It was such a delightful discovery. To think that it had taken me ten years to find it! Hmmm!

As I continued to look more carefully in the paper, I found he had reported on a local football game. There was even a photograph with his name. Then, later as I was photocopying the yellowed article, another article appeared on the reverse side of the page. Somehow the newspaper had weathered three major hurricanes, numerous tropical storms, and four garage sales!

The morale here: don't procrastinate! You might be missing a treasure.

Salem Statesman-Appeal, Sept. 20, 2000


AS I SEE IT


Never look a gift snake in the mouth

Timm O’Cobhthaigh, sports writer


Have you known someone who is afraid of snakes? Their fear seems to transcend that of common phobia, surpasses terror and registers somewhere up in the eminent death category. Growing up in Central Florida (better known as Snakeville, U.S.A.), I was forever encountering these slithering reptiles, as were most sportsmen. Golfers always checked the holes on the greens before reaching for their balls, hunters and hikers stepped over logs with care, lest a rattlesnake strike an unsuspecting calf muscle. But perhaps it was the fishermen who faced the greatest peril. This might sound strange to Northwest anglers whose prisine and relatively snake-free fishing grounds exclude encounters. But not so in the Southern swamps and not so for my former Boy Scout Assistant Soutmaster Jim.

I first learned of his sheer terror when on a campout. One of the adults suggested that I tell Jim that I heard some of the boys plotting to put a snake in his tent. I saw for the first time the shade of ashen cross a person’s face, as he just stood there and began to tremble. For the next two hours flashlight beams could be seen sweeping back and forth in his tent as some unlucky Scouts were forced to check, recheck, and check several more times every inch, bag, and article of clothing in his tent.

But his fishing trip is the event that earned him in the “snake-phobia hall of shame.”

Jim and three other assistants decided to go fishing early one Saturday morning in a swampy region that had several cypress groves, a favorite for Florida’s famous bucket-mouth bass. The fishing as I recall was so-so, when around 9 a.m. as they were drifting along, they received a present from above. You see, snakes in Southern swamps tend to climb the trees, coiling up on the sun-drenched branches for a snooze to increase their body temperature. Of course just like the rest of us (I can hear my mom now, “do not compare us to snakes!” – another snake phobic), as they sleep they begin to relax an doccasionally uncoil and sometimes fall.

Everybody on board was duly surprised with the sudden appearance of the two-foot brown water snake, but none more so than Jim. You see Jim had come prepared. Following his initial shock he dove for his tackle box, ripped it open, dug into the bottom and pulled out a .357 Smith & Wesson, firing all six shots into the bottom of the boat. Of course he missed the snake who by this point had eyes bigger than everybody else’s, and slithered over the side of the now-sinking boat and disappeared into the dark, murky waters.

The basketball-sized hole in the bottom of the boat quickly left the fishermen up to their necks in the snake- and gator-infested swamp, forcing them to wade the two miles back to their pickup trucks.

Nobody saw much of Jim after that incident, not that the others did anything during that now-famous morning stroll, but he resigned from the troop and kept a low profile around town. But I learned an important lesson from this … whenever I go fishing with someone I know to have problems with snakes, I always try to sneak a peek into their tackle box to see if there might be any unexpected surprises.