So I got invited by my friend Dr. George Heinrich, one the most bad-ass herpetologists in Florida, to film the last day of his biannual burrow count, and i got invited the the evening before it was to take place. I had two hours at most to get to the army navy store to buy snake boots and field pants. I get there and they have a power outage so they can only take cash and there are no lights on. I told them what I needed, told them my sizes then left to find a cash machine. When I got back, they had pulled the snake boots and pants and boxed and bagged them. All I had to do was pay. I got home feeling pretty damn prepared
I woke at 5AM the next morning to find that in the dark, whoever pulled the boots, grabbed one of mine (a female’s 8.5 and a male’s 10. I had to make it work or lose the shoot opportunity, so on my right foot, already a size-and-a-half smaller than my left foot, I put on two thick, wool ski socks and stuffed the shoe of the boot with two more balled up ski socks then laced the boot on as tight as I could get it. It weighed a ton.
Throughout the day, I tripped on vines and roots and sand mounds and shrubs and branches. You name it, I tripped over it. I kept thinking each time I fell face first, I was going to land on top of a pissed off rattlesnake and take a bite to the face. I couldn’t put my hands out to break my fall because I was holding a gimbal mounted with a Canon DSLR camera, easily a 10 pound rig. The brave burrow hunters kept picking me up out of the thicket.
About half an hour before the crew called it a day, I headed back to the road to catch some trail time, hoping for some turtle footage. I did not know the right pocket of the trousers had a whole. When I got home that night and emptied my pocket, I discovered the five full SD cards from the day’s shoot were gone. I freaked! I called and left a message for George and the Volunteer coordinator, thinking you never know. Maybe someone might have found the cards in all that snaky edge habitat thicket we sloughed through.
The next morning The volunteer coordinator called me and said that a volunteer from the crew had come up onto the road and found the cards. All of them! They gave me her number, and I called. Turned out she only lived a few streets from me and she dropped the cards off after work on her way home. She saved the day!
Trace Taylor 