When it was over, Stephanie Watson was tempted to burn down her car.
She pulled into the Grand Altitude Federal Credit Union drive-through at about 2 p.m. Monday, and waited in line to cash her check.
The bank sits on Riverton’s busiest thoroughfare and the same block as Walmart. It’s also about a quarter-mile from a weedy canal.
A woman ahead of Watson had gotten out of her car and swung her bag toward something on the ground. A truck in line pulled forward, but stopped just short of the bank terminal.
“What is this guy doing?” thought Watson to herself.
The truck pulled forward, and Watson saw a bull snake she described to Cowboy State Daily as at least 3 feet in length.
The woman in the drive-through tried again to shoo the snake onto the grass.
“And then she comes over to my window and throws her arms up,” said Watson. “I rolled down my window and I said, ‘Did I run it over?’ She says, ‘No but it just crawled under your car.’”
It had slithered into the passenger-side frame beyond the front wheel well.
Watson is deathly terrified of snakes.
“Anything that slithers and doesn’t have legs is the devil, in my book,” she said.
Frantically, Watson summoned and grabbed her purse-sized chihuahua Phoebe, and jumped out of the car.
“I don’t know where this thing is gonna come out of – if it crawled in the front, if it’s gonna come up through my vent and attack me and eat my dog,” she said.
Watson walked to the drive-through window on foot to deposit her check.
The bank manager, Betsey, backed Watson’s car out of the drive-through, and bank personnel called the Riverton Police Department’s animal-control office.
“Well Betsey, at the bank, she’s like well let me just reach up there and grab it, it’s just a bullsnake,” said Watson. “And I’m like, are you out of your mind?”
RPD Animal Control Officer Shannon Sanderson arrived.
Despite routinely confronting the aggressive dogs of Riverton, Sanderson isn’t at ease around snakes either, she told Cowboy State Daily.
“They just give me the creeps,” Sanderson said.
RPD Chief Eric Hurtado came to the scene with Sanderson.
Watson’s black SUV sits low to the ground. Hurtado crawled under the car and spotted the snake, but failed to coax it out.
Sanderson recalled “plenty of lookie-loos.”
Watson said these were concerned passers-by who thought she needed mechanical help.
Sanderson borrowed a car jack from the Fremont Motors auto shop across the street. Two of its workers came and helped lift the car.
Hurtado tried again, and failed again, to pull the reptile out.
“It has curled itself up in there, it’s not moving,” said Watson.
Someone suggested Watson drive the car over to Fremont Motors to use the bigger car lift in one of the shop bays.
“They’re like, ‘Well you can drive it over to the Ford store,’ and I said ‘No you can drive it over to the Ford store. You can drive it off a cliff for all I care,’” she said. “I’m not getting in that thing.”
Hurtado told Cowboy State Daily a worker from Fremont Motors drove Watson’s car to the bay, where it was lifted fully off the ground.
“Fremont Motors was pretty helpful with the lift,” the chief said.
Hurtado tried to grab the snake with snake pincers, but it slipped away, growing more evasive during its encounter with the police chief.
So Hurtado grabbed it with his hands.
He dropped it into a trash can, then grabbed it with the pincers and handed it off to Sanderson, who “relocated it.”
Sanderson said she took the snake to the Big Bend ponds outside of town. It was uninjured.
Bull snakes are not venomous, and will eat rattlesnakes.
Both Sanderson and Hurtado thanked Fremont Motors for its help.
Watson said she asked one of the shop’s employees, “Can I just trade this car in right now?”
Watson said the employee’s answer was, “Ehh, you don’t get a deal for having a snake in there.”
When she recounted the story to her daughters later, they were fascinated. So were her friends, who messaged her until her phone died.
As for Watson, she was still astounded Tuesday morning.
“That was such a Monday,” she said.
Clair McFarland can be reached at clair@cowboystatedaily.com.
