Slush Pile: Natural Selection Failed This Time

2008 Slush Pile

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Natural Selection Failed This Time

2008 Reader Submission
Pending Acceptance

Dale Cupp doesn't remember the rattlesnake biting him on the left thigh.

Or his .20 gauge shotgun discharging and blowing his left knee to shreds.

Or being attacked by a dark cloud of yellow jackets.

He doesn't remember his heart stopping on four occasions, only to be brought back to life by emergency medical technicians and hospital nurses.

"I feel stupid about it," says the 44-year-old ranger with the Mississippi Forestry Commission in Stone County who is back at work 12 months after the accident. "I want to remember. I want to put all the pieces together of how it happened.

"People say it shouldn't bother me, but it does. My belief is, God has a reason for everything. And there is a reason he doesn't want me to remember all of this. It might be too much for me."

Luckily, Cupp had his cell phone in his pocket. He managed to dial 911.

Phyllis Olds, chief deputy of the Stone County Sheriff's Department, was the first to respond, just six minutes after the call came in at 6:13 p.m. that Sunday. Two other county patrol officers and an ambulance arrived moments later.

"This is what we have concluded," Olds says. "Dale was burning trash out by his garden area and chopping some weeds. He saw the rattlesnake, went to get the shotgun. As he was walking to go kill the snake, the yellow jackets came up out of the ground and warmed him. When he turned to run, the gun went off. When he fell, that's when the snake got him."

Cupp says Olds' theory makes sense. "Whenever I see a snake, I go to the shed and get my sawed-off .20 gauge. I've always called it my snake charmer. I've had it since I was 18, and I've killed many a snake with that gun.

"I killed a rattlesnake in my backyard a couple of years ago. So I know they're back there."

Two things he does remember about that day: He had planned to plant some greens. His garden tiller and a receipt for fertilizer were found in the backyard the next day by his wife, Lorinda, who was working her second job in Biloxi, when the accident happened.

Also, his 21-year-old son Matthew had stopped by and invited him to go fishing.

"I wish I'd taken him up on it," Cupp says. "None of this would've happened."

It didn't have to happen at all.

"When people see a snake, they should take two steps away from it, then leave it alone - or call animal control to come get it," says Bryan Fedrick, conservation resource biologist with the Mississippi Museum of Natural Science. "Don't try to kill it or capture it. That's when people get hurt."

Fedrick also says snake season is year-round in Mississippi. "I've seen them in the middle of winter. They have their babies in August, and they make big movements twice a year - in the spring, and then again in late summer and early fall."

But walking away from a snake has never occurred to Cupp, who says he is more afraid of a roach than a rattler.

"One thing is, we have outside dogs and cats, and I don't want them to get bit," he says. "But another reason is, rattlesnakes are beautiful."

The walls of a room in his home on Coot Saucier Road, near Wiggins, are decorated with a 12 1/2-pound bass, a stuffed bobcat, an 8-point buck and rattlesnake skins.

"I'll shoot (rattlesnakes) or run over 'em with the truck, then skin 'em out," he says. "I just like the way they look."

Just this past Tuesday, on his way home from work, Cupp spotted a rattlesnake in the road. He ran over it, backed over it, then ran over it again. "Then I cut its head off, threw it into the back of the truck and brought it home. Like I say, they're beautiful - when they're dead."

Olds thought Cupp was dead when she first spotted him, stretched out about 15 feet from his back door.

"I've seen a lot of dead folks in my line of work," Olds says. "But I began CPR on him, pumping his chest."

She noticed his arm twitch, then he gasped for air. Ambulance personnel gave him oxygen while Olds tied a tourniquet to stop the bleeding.

"At that point, we're still thinking his only injury is a gunshot," she says. "But then I noticed the (yellow jackets) swarming."

Olds is allergic to yellow jackets. So, too, is Cupp.

"I was scared to death I was going to get stung, but I wasn't about to let this man die," she says.

When Olds and the EMTs rolled him over, they saw the imprint of a snake's fangs on the back of Cupp's thigh.

"Just looking at the bite, that snake had to be huge," Olds says.

Twice, he stopped breathing on the 29-mile ambulance ride to Garden Park Medical Center in Gulfport.

At the emergency room door stood Dale's mother, Geneva Cupp, and sister JoAn Niceley, both of Long Beach.

"We knew he'd suffered a gunshot wound, but we didn't know anything about a snake or yellow jackets," Niceley says. "When they brought him out of the ambulance, his face was swollen ... and I've never seen that much blood in all my life. It was like something out of a movie."

And his left leg was dangling. Barely attached.

"JoAn started screaming and just went down to the floor," Geneva Cupp recalls. "She was hysterical."

Niceley was going through her own health battle. She had been cancer-free for six years when another lump appeared in one of her breasts. She was supposed to go in for a biopsy the week her brother was injured.

"But there was no way I was leaving Dale - cancer or no cancer," she says.

After being transferred to Gulfport's Memorial Hospital, doctors told the family that Cupp had less than a 50 percent chance of surviving and a 10 percent chance of keeping his left leg. Lorinda refused to sign the papers to have her husband's leg amputated.

He stayed in ICU for 15 days, in the hospital for 29. He underwent three surgeries, including a knee replacement that was much more involved than normal. "They had to go way up into my thigh bone and down into my calf," he says. "Plus, it's all metal. So my left leg weighs five pounds more than my right."

His stay in the hospital is also foggy in his mind.

"Lorinda rolled me in a wheelchair down to my ICU room one day," he says. "I told her I'd never seen that room before in my life."

He didn't remember writing on a dry erase board "Diet Coke now!" He didn't remember always requesting the TV tuned to the obscure sitcom, It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia. He didn't remember his heart stopping again, and nurses scrambling to revive him.

"It's all like a dream," he says. "The whole thing."

Cupp, a sheet metal worker for 23 years before joining the forestry commission six months before his accident, is a long way from being fully recovered.

He suffers migraines. His memory isn't what it used to be. He tires quickly. "I work because we have to have the money."

He is amazed by the people who stepped up and helped him and Lorinda when his paychecks stopped rolling in but the bills didn't. Friends held fundraisers. A person from Long Beach - someone he doesn't even know - paid his $350 insurance bill for several months, so the family wouldn't lose that. "I was on prayer lists all over the country," he says. "And I'm making it back, slowly but surely."

Niceley, whose nonprofit Pink Heart Funds helps provide wigs and breast prostheses for cancer patients, had her biopsy last October. The lump was not cancerous.

And their 71-year-old mother is doing fine after being knocked down by a 95-pound dog chasing a squirrel last March and breaking her ankle.

On Wednesday, Geneva Cupp rode over to her daughter's house for her daily swim. She spotted a snake as she approached the pool. "About a foot long," she says.

She picked up the net they use for fishing leaves from the pool, draped it over the snake, then beat it to death with a metal pole.

"I wasn't about to let that snake stay around there," she says. http://www.clarionledger.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080928/FEAT05/809280308/-1/FEEDBACK

Submitted on 09/29/2008

Submitted by: David
Reference: Clarion Ledger 9/28/08

>> Moderator Scores <<

Bruce said:
Definitely Toss: No Self-Selection
Wow. It sounds like this guy suffered some serious bad luck. But that's all it sounds like to me. If the bees hadn't come out and scared him he likely wouldn't have tripped, fired the gun, etc. so the accident really can't be blamed on him. Thanks just the same, David.

Candi said:
Definitely Toss: No Self-Selection
What Bruce said. He knew about the snake and the gun, but it doesn't sound like he knew the yellow jacket nest was there. Those things can be bloody hard to see.

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2008 Slush Pile

Natural Selection Failed This Time

2008 Reader Submission Pending Acceptance

2008 Reader Submission
Pending Acceptance