That disgusting fence is blocking my lake view. I want it gone today. Ma'am, I built that fence for a reason. Trust me, you do not want to see what's on the other side. I don't care what's on the other side.
I care about what I paid for. I've spent 34 years studying what lives in that marsh. If you take this fence down, then I'll finally have the view I was promised. Are we done here? Ma'am, please just look at the file I brought you.
10 minutes. That's all I'm asking. I don't need a file. I need a demolition crew. She got one and whatever was on the other side of that fence, it came through.
All of it. What happened next shut down the one thing her entire neighborhood was built around. My name is Walt Hendrix. I'm 68 years old and for 34 years I worked as a field biologist for the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources. Reptiles were my specialty.
Snakes mostly. I've been bitten twice in my career. Once by a juvenile copperhead that I should have respected more and once by a cottonmouth that got me through a boot I thought was thick enough. Both times I drove myself to the hospital. Both times I went back to work within a week.
I tell you that so you understand something upfront. I don't fear snakes. I understand them. There's a difference and it's the difference that this whole story turns on. My wife Carol and I bought our place on Lake Marion back in 1991.
11 acres, half of it wooded, half of it marsh that bleeds right down into the lake. Cypress knees poke up through the shallows like knuckles. In April, the water turns the color of sweet tea, tannin stained from the tupelo roots, and the whole property smells like wet bark and gunpowder mud after a rain. That smell never left me. Not in three decades.
We built our house by hand mostly. Raised two kids there. Our son works for the Forest Service in Asheville now. Our daughter teaches high school biology in Columbia. I like to think I had something to do with that.
For most of my career, my job took me into exactly the kind of habitat that surrounded our home. Bottomland hardwood marsh transition zones, the strip where lake meets forest meets yard. I did population surveys on copperheads and cottonmouths for almost a decade. I've handled thousands of snakes. I know their movement patterns the way a farmer knows weather.
That's why back in 2015, when I heard a developer had bought the 60 acres bordering my property to build a subdivision, my first thought wasn't about noise or traffic or property values. My first thought was about the corridor. See, my land sits on what herpetologists call an ecotone, a transition zone between two habitats. Ours ran from open lake through cypress marsh into upland pine and hardwood forest. Snakes use ecotones as highways.
They hunt the marsh edges for frogs and fish. They bask on the sunny margins. And in late summer, when the marsh gets crowded, they push inland looking for rodents, shade, and drier ground. For 24 years, that inland push had nowhere to go but into undeveloped timber company land. Nobody lived there.