DEAR PROFESSOR: In 1965 while stationed at Eglin AFB, Florida, I was invited to go water skiing with the family of a friend on a small reservoir in southern Alabama. Along the edge of the lake was an area of tree stumps and fences protruding from the water.
As we were getting ready, the boat owner told us he would keep us well clear of the shoreline, because the summer before a skier had fallen and been killed there.According to him, as the boat went back, the skier started yelling for help, saying he was tangled in barbed wire and couldn't move his legs.
When they pulled him from the water, he was dead. He had fallen into a nest of water moccasins and had died from more than 100 snake bites.
Two years later I was at Barksdale AFB in northwestern Louisiana. Again, I was invited to go water skiing, this time in one of the local bayous.
As we got ready to start - I'm sure you are ahead of me now - I was told we must stay away from the shoreline where all the dead trees were, because last summer a skier was killed when he fell into a nest of water moccasins there.
I'm sure these stories represent rural Southern legends used to scare people new to the region. - GARY L. DIKKERS, LT. COL, USAF
DEAR COL. DIKKERS: Southerners don't just tell "The Hapless Water Skier" to frighten newcomers; they've been scaring themselves silly with that story every summer for at least 30 years. Before water skiing became popular, the story was that a swimmer had dived into a nest of snakes and died from multiple bites.
Southern authors have incorporated variations of the legend into their works. You may remember the story from Larry McMurtry's 1985 book, "Lonesome Dove." In it, a cowboy on horseback who is fording a rain-swollen river finds himself in the middle of a swarm of agitated water moccasins, is bitten repeatedly and dies from the attack. You couldn't forget that scene if you saw the TV movie based on the book!
The water skier version is mentioned by Willie Morris ("North Towards Home," 1967) and Lisa Alther ("Kinflicks," 1976), and I have a fat file of letters from people throughout the South who've heard the same story.
Texas is a hotbed of encounters between water skiers and snakes. One Texan wrote me guessing that every Buffalo Lake in the state - and there are many - has this story told about it.
In 1989, after Texas Fish & Game magazine raised the question of whether or not water moccasins bite under water, the letters column filled with accounts of such bites, including two versions of "The Hapless Water Skier."
Both readers said that the accident had happened to a young man on Lake McQueeney about 25 years ago; one writer claimed the victim had more than 60 snake bites on his body, and the other reported that four snakes were still attached to the man when he was pulled from the water.
In 1990, the San Antonio Light newspaper discussed water moccasins (or "cottonmouths") in its "Who's Who at the Zoo" column, describing the species as "quiet and not easy to locate."
The column mentions as mere hearsay the story of a little girl who fell while water skiing on Lake Amistad and was "immediately killed by multiple moccasin bites when she landed in a `nest' of these snakes."
Naturalist Bruce Lee Deuley, writer of the column, commented, "There are no water moccasins in Lake Amistad, and I have found no record of these reptiles traveling or grouping in large colonies."
Author Ellen Douglas has a more blunt description of "The Hapless Waterskier" in her 1988 book "Can't Quit You, Baby." Douglas called it "an apocryphal tale . . . that rolled like ball lightning through the Mississippi Delta during the late '60s."
Could the story possibly be true? Douglas quips that, "It's always true. Always true that a tangle of water moccasins lies in wait for the skier. Always, always true."
That sounds to me like a local putting on the tourists with a tall tale.- "Curses! Broiled Again," Jan Harold Brunvand's fourth collection of urban legends, is now available in paperback from Norton. Send your questions and urban legends to him in care of the Deseret News.