Bad town for snakes

Oct. 6, Knox City-Sweetwater, 88 miles, SE breeze, 90/65—For a couple of reasons I ride long today: winds are light, and I want to be far down the road when the next headwind shows up. I'm also hoping to see high school football. Sweetwater, a good team, plays at home this evening—in fact, it's homecoming.

For once I don't feel strong on the bike today. At times during the trip I've been heavy-legged, worn out, unenthusiastic, but through it all—and this is not a contradiction—I've always felt strong. But I plug away through the disintegrating towns of Rule and Old Glory, and in Hamlin spend a long lunch at Dairy Queen, clearly the local hangout spot. Bill, a retired locksmith, details for me the decline of Hamlin, which lost the railroad a dozen years ago and is now considering six-man football for the high school.

Unfortunately I don't make it in time for the game, which is Sweetwater's 600th all-time win, 35-0 over Borger, a team from the Panhandle. The Mustangs are now 5-1 and on the verge of a top-10 ranking in class 3A (you can follow Big Country football here). Instead I watch the high school game of the week on television, Nease vs. St. Augustine, whose left tackle is playing the season with a torn ACL.

The next day I visit the team's Mustang Bowl, an earthen-bowl stadium built during the Depression by the Works Progress Administration that seats 16,000. Either I know less about the WPA than I thought, or this is an only-in-Texas thing.

You can't say anything is bigger than Texas high school football, but Sweetwater is best known for its rattlesnake roundup, largest in the world. For a long weekend every March, the Sweetwater Jaycees buy thousands of locally caught rattlers and put on a festival that raises money for charity, this year the Special Olympics.

The roundup sells snake meat and products made of snakeskin, has some educational demonstrations, even a Miss Snake Charmer. It's all very civic, but the ethics of this and other roundups are pretty indefensible. Despite the controversy the Sweetwater roundup doesn't appear to be in trouble—even National Public Radio did a puff piece about it earlier this year (see more here, plus a fairly gruesome video and scholarly reference).

I stop at a liquor store selling rattlesnake souvenirs. They have rattlesnake skin wallets, purses, and cases for cell phones and chewing tobacco, also practical things for people rounding up rattlers: tongs, hooks, snake bite extractor.

Here I meet the owners, Larry and June. Larry is a Jaycee and was Sweetwater roundup chairman in 1967. Until recently he was a large rattlesnake dealer, a middleman. He still gets snakes now and then, and he takes me to the back room and shows me a tiny rattler, probably a first-year animal, and a larger one, three feet long, which he brings out of its box with tongs and places on the floor.

Then Larry and June take me out for barbecue, which comes in a simple sourdough bun with no sauce. Big Boy's has a framed clipping ranking its barbecue in the top 50 in the Texas Monthly survey, a high honor.