"We Have Rattlesnakes"

Were it not for the Sweetwater Jaycees' World's Largest Rattlesnake Round-Up, which attracts 35,000 tourists each year, few people other than Sweetwater's 11,000 residents would know of this Texas town, hard on the southeastern rim of the Panhandle and surrounded by vast, uncelebrated plains and juniper-lined draws. Most of what lives out here has thorns -- mesquite, prickly pear, yucca, acacia, devil's claw -- or fangs. "Pasadena has its roses and its Rose Parade. Sweetwater doesn't have roses. We have rattlesnakes," proclaims Mayor Greg Wortham. "The roundup," he says, "is part of our identity, our community fabric."

Roundup weekend begins with a Thursday afternoon parade -- marching band, floats, and antique cars -- followed by the crowning in the municipal auditorium of Miss Snake Charmer, the winner of the annual beauty, talent, and schol­arship pageant. Jacque McCoy, the executive director of the Sweetwater Chamber of Commerce, competed in the pageant in 1964, and two of her daughters have too, including her youngest, Lori Yarbro, who was crowned Miss Snake Charmer in 1989. "It's a chance for our young women to come to the forefront," McCoy says. "It's their chance to shine." McCoy hopes her granddaughter China will enter someday. "I would love to see her in the same pageant as her mother and grandmother."

In addition to competing in the talent and congeniality rounds, each contestant has the opportunity -- strictly voluntary, but many girls choose to do it -- to skin a rattlesnake, an event recorded in the local newspaper. As I pay for my ticket at the Nolan County Coliseum, I ask the Jaycee who mans the booth what might motivate a young woman to skin a rattlesnake: "If they want the scholarship money, they must earn it," he jokes.

Separating a snake from its skin seems a strange rite of passage, yet another reminder that our relationship with wild predators is far from peaceable. Our struggle to make amends with creatures long feared and reviled persists in many parts of the country: in the northern Rockies, dozens of gray wolves were shot and killed within just a few weeks of the federal government's decision to remove them from the endangered species list. Grizzly bears following the scent of food into backyards often meet with the same fate. Rattlesnakes may be as finely tuned to the arid plains as any creature, the spectacular by-product of eons of hemispheric evolution, yet here in Sweetwater, as is so often the case, fascination takes the form of fear rather than reverence. And so snakes are killed for fun, for profit, and -- though no facts support this claim -- in the name of human safety.

Amid the bitter, mineral-rich creeks of what is now Nolan County, Texas, the Kiowa Indians found what they called mobeetee, "sweet water," an oasis also favored by buffalo and, in turn, by buffalo hunters, pioneers, ranchers, cotton farmers, gypsum miners, and petroleum drillers and refiners. After the railroad arrived in 1881, Sweetwater was named the seat of Nolan County. The county, which is about the size of the state of Rhode Island, has a population of just 15,000, and most people live right in Sweetwater. Beyond the last street in town, short grass hugs the ground and waits for rain, which sometimes arrives in spring as a fusillade of hail. At best, 25 inches of precipitation fall on West Texas each year, sometimes with a hard cloudburst that ranchers compare to "a cow pissing on a flat rock." When it's not raining, the wind freights a gritty haze, the epidermis of the southern plains, which clogs screens and makes for spectacular sunsets.

Sweetwater's ethnic makeup is pretty close to that of Texas as a whole: 61.5 percent white, 31.7 percent Hispanic, 5.8 percent black, and 1 percent "other," according to the chamber of commerce. Only about a third of all adults in town have completed high school, less than half the national average. You can rent a home in Sweetwater for less than $200 a month, buy a chrome-plated blue coffin at a yard sale (price negotiable), or swim in a community pool tiled with crucifixes down the sides and across the bottom. Sidewalks in the center of town are raised, the streets clean.

Sweetwater is home to the United States Gypsum Company, the country's largest producer of wallboard, and, since 2005, the world's largest wind farm, part of a multibillion-dollar regional alternative energy business. The rattlesnake roundup was once an essential source of income for the town: businesses catering to the influx of out-of-town guests -- motels, restaurants, bars, liquor and convenience stores, filling stations -- used to pull in as much as 25 percent of their gross annual income during roundup weekend, says Jaycee president Riley Sawyers. To­day most local businesses are flush with patrons -- and cash -- drawn to Sweetwater by the wind.

Continued...