Hollifield Column: This will go wrong!

As the crow flies — or more appropriately as the snake slithers — the Savannah River Ecology Lab in South Carolina is roughly 200 miles from my house.

Scientists there have built a large snake pit and stocked it with snakes implanted with high-tech gizmos to determine if Florida’s Burmese python problem will spread across the Southeastern U.S. and
into my backyard.

I can almost hear them hissing at the door. Or it could be a gas leak.

According to a story by the Associated Press, the source I turn to for terrifying reports about giant man-eating reptile experiments in states where the governor goes for unannounced, stress-relieving
hikes along Argentina’s curvaceous and seductive Appalachian Trail, scientists are monitoring seven Burmese pythons dumped into a “snake-proof” pit to see how they react to a more northern climate.

In sunny Florida, according to AP, the non-native snakes were likely introduced into the ecosystem by the pet shop terrarium-smashing Hurricane Andrew in ‘92. The snakes began to breed like rabbits in
the wild, whereupon they ate those rabbits and continued to breed like Burmese pythons until there were “thousands if not hundreds of thousands” slithering around Florida, gulping down the native
creatures like tourists at an all-you-can-eat seafood buffet, according to herpetologist Whit Gibbons, professor of ecology at the University of Georgia and a member of the python project.

Gibbons downplayed the danger to AP writer Alysia Patterson.

“A 20-foot python, if it grabbed one of us, would bite us and then within just — instantly — seconds, it would be wrapped all the way around you and squeezing the life out of you,” Gibbons said.

WHAT?! HOLY %$#!

We’ve got this to worry about now? In addition to swine flu, job insecurity and North Korea’s nuclear threats, we could possibly have an influx of giant snakes that can squeeze harder than Great Aunt
Eunice at the family reunion?

If there’s one thing that watching the Sci Fi Channel instead of spending quality time with my family has taught me, it’s that the South Carolina python project, despite good intentions, is bound to go
HORRIBLY WRONG.

Sure, its goal on the surface is far from ominous, but one of the scientists — not Gibbons, he’s a good man — will turn out to be working for a nefarious, clandestine government agency that wants to turn
the pythons into a superweapon to counteract North Korea’s nuclear threat. There’s some radiation involved, some gene splicing, blah, blah — I’m usually flipping through the channels during the scientific
mumbo jumbo, waiting for the carnage to begin — and then the carnage begins.

The superpythons go on a rampage, as per their reputation. A guard is squeezed to death. A chubby scientist is swallowed whole. A sexy, sassy herpetologist who takes no guff from her male
counterparts loses her shirt and barricades herself in a secluded section of the lab. The head of the project team tries to contact the South Carolina governor, but the governor is row-boating in the
Bermuda Triangle with a lady friend from the Lost City of Atlantis.

The superpythons escape the lab, catch I-26 outside Irmo, S.C., and eventually end up, mean and hungry, in my backyard.

That’s where I, played by Lorenzo Lamas, and the sexy, sassy, shirtless herpetologist, played by an actress who is even less accomplished than Lorenzo Lamas, battle the superpythons with nothing
but our wits and an AH-64 Apache attack helicopter.

That’s what I fear.

It may seem farfetched, but I can almost hear them hissing at my door. No, I’m pretty sure now it’s a gas leak.

Scott Hollifield is editor/general manager of The McDowell News in Marion and a columnist for the Media General News Service, N.C. Contact him at P.O. Box 610, Marion, N.C. 28752 or e-mail
rhollifield@mcdowellnews.com.