Postcard from America 3:Meet Buzz Ross, Snake Lord

Or: a visit to Rattlers & Reptiles,
the largest live rattlesnake exhibit on the planet. 

Fort Davis is deep in west Texas—half an hour north of Marfa, if that means anything to you. It’s a beautiful, even cutesy town with a fort, an observatory, and plenty of hiking. It’s home to 1,200 people, one of whom happens to have the largest collection of live rattlesnakes in the world. 

Buzz Ross was born in Essex, England, during a bombing raid in World War II. He got his name from the German Buzz bombs dropped on England during the war. He moved to Texas with his family at an early age and has been a kinda British, mostly American snake lover since childhood. 

Someplace: So how long snakes, and why?

Buzz Ross: I was three years old. We were digging up some crepe myrtle trees down at the end of the street; I was catching worms in a tin can with this little girl, and this guy picked a little snake up and said, “Hey, kid, you want this worm?” And I went, “Wow! This is cool!” I took it home, put everybody on their chairs. 

They got used to it. By the time I was eight, somebody brought me a dead rattlesnake—I was already keeping snakes by then—they brought me a dead rattlesnake and I thought that was the coolest thing I’d ever seen. I carried it around for three days. They wouldn’t let me put it in the freezer, so I finally had to bury it. 

I was in a science club from the time I was eight, and we went on a field trip up into Oklahoma when I was thirteen. I found a rattlesnake and snuck it home. I wasn’t supposed to, of course. My mother found it and said, “What’s that?” I said, “A rattlesnake,” and she said, “Be careful.”

S: How many snakes do you have?

BR: Total? Oh, I dunno. ’Bout two hundred?

S: How many species do you have?

BR: I have seventeen different species of rattlesnakes.

S: How many are there?

BR: Thirty-three. 

S: Where did you get them from?

BR: I caught a lot of them, about 80 percent. But I don’t hunt much anymore. It’s a pretty stable collection. 

S: Do you breed them?

BR: Yep. I try not to now. It’s getting so hard to get rid of ’em. The permit to sell ’em costs more than you’d make. I had a war with Texas wildlife for years that I don’t wanna get into.

S: How many times have you been bit?

BR: Five. Three times major and two minors. 

S: What’s the difference?

BR: Minor is just a scratch. You have a little bit of a reaction to it, but it doesn’t really do anything. Major you get a whole arm swollen up. 

S: You have to go to the hospital, right?

BR: Only once. The last one. 

S: Is the poison much different from species to species?

BR: Every snake has a different makeup. In each species and then within the species there are different makeups of venom, and it’s all a mix of neurotoxic and hemotoxic venoms. Everybody thinks there’s neurotoxic and hemotoxic, but it’s mostly a slush of the two. 

S: Are they cheap to keep?

BR: Yeah. I raise my own mice, which is about $20 a week in mouse food. 

S: Do you feel like the snakes have gotten accustomed to you?

BR: I think they know who I am. As far as on feed day, they’re responsive. 

S: Do you chuck a live mouse in there?

BR: No, I kill the mice if I have ’em, and if not I give ’em frozen ones. TV dinners! Hahahaha. I hand ’em to ’em on forceps, let ’em hit it, and then drop it in the cage and they pick it up. I have one cage over there with five snakes in it, and each snake will hit its own mouse and then eat that one. It’s weird. They put their scent on it. 

They’ve done experiments: they’ve had a snake hit a mouse, and then they take the mouse away and the snake will look for it for five hours. Even if another mouse comes right across their mouth, they won’t hit it. 

S: Why rattlesnakes and not other venomous snakes?

BR: I dunno, it’s a fascination. Why do some people like Ferraris and some people like Corvettes? Matter of choice. I ran a reptile house in Fort Worth in the sixties, and I’ve handled it all. My favorite has always been rattlesnakes. And the other stuff is really dangerous. You get hit by a cobra out here and you’re probably SOL.

Enter your email address to get these weekly stories, photos, videos, keepsakes, and news from Someplace Magazine.

Postcard from America 2: The Naked Bookseller (NSFW) and the Camel Driver’s Tomb of Quartzsite, AZ

Quartzsite, AZ, is twenty miles from the border with California, right off the 10 freeway—in fact, the main drag is the freeway approach road. It’s hot as hell in the summer, and in winter a major destination for snowbirds (retired full-time RVers chasing the good weather), who more than quadruple the town’s base population of 3,677 souls. The town proudly declares itself “The Rock Capital of the World,” though you could be forgiven for not quite knowing what that means. It’s a top destinations for rock lovers, with nearly a dozen annual gem and mineral expos drawing a million and a half visitors to the tiny town every year. 

Quartzsite made national headlines a few years ago thanks to some uniquely weird political shenanigans: the elected mayor was prevented from taking office because he owed the town $2,200 in attorney’s fees, and at around the same time he went on record calling the police chief a “corrupt thug.” There was a series of suspensions, sackings, and reinstatements involving the police chief and the town manager. The Arizona Department of Public Safety has investigated Quartzsite’s public officials for corruption multiple times, and the town has been hit with so many lawsuits that the Arizona Municipal Risk Retention Pool, which provides insurance for most towns and cities in the state, withdrew its coverage a few years ago. The town was forced to buy private insurance with no coverage for legal fees and a $100,000 deductible for each lawsuit.

Quartzsite is also home to:

Paul Winer, aka “Sweet Pie,” the Naked Bookseller

Mr. Winer moved to Quartzsite from New York City in the early 1990s. He’s a performer who took up bookselling as an easy way to make cash—go figure. Here’s a clip of Paul performing as Sweet Pie at Joe’s Pub in New York.

SOMEPLACE: How long have you been naked?

PAUL WINER: I’ve been naked in public now for fifty-five years.  

S: And how long have you had the bookstore?

PW: This is our twenty-fourth year. It started as a little ten-square-foot tent and grew into this. The bank actually solicited me for a loan and gave me $175,000 on my signature. I had no collateral. I had no banking records. I’d lived off the grid until then.

S: What brought you to Quartzsite?

PW: We had a daughter then, my wife and I, and she needed access to her grandparents, who were retired in Yuma at the time. She passed away at eight and a half from a viral heart infection. And the town was so good to us we stayed, because this is where people knew her. And we’re still here. 

I’ve been naked for fifty-five years. For twenty-five of them I was an entertainer on stage. I was a boogie-woogie and blues piano player and singer/songwriter and comedian. My show was unique back in its heyday, and there’s still never been another show like it. 

According to Rolling Stone, I’m the source of the very popular slang expression “fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke.” That was the title of my sing-along boogie-woogie anthem. In the late sixties and all through the seventies I had every audience I ever played to screaming that at the top of their lungs, which was a very cathartic experience for people then, because it was a time when hundreds of people just didn’t scream the word “fuck” on cue. It loosened people up a great deal. 

The FBI at one time had a file on me. I was written up as a social-sexual activist and rabble-rouser. This was before anyone knew how to spell “terrorist.” Those were the practice days for what reality is today. 

I was a very outspoken person. I won sixty-eight court cases, including a federal court case. The state of Vermont had outlawed me as an “obscene, lewd indecent act and/or individual.” I had no criminal record, but I was branded. I won, and to this day I’m still the line of the law for verbal and physical freedom on stage. They still quote my case.

S: Why nudity?

PW: Well, there’s no philosophy behind why I’m naked, and it certainly isn’t because I fancy myself something I’m not. It’s because my skin is hypersensitive. If I was wearing jeans or a T-shirt, I’d feel them moving on me all day long. 

I went to a nudist park once—my whole life I’ve only been to a nudist resort or park once—and decided that is not where I belong. I’d rather be where there’s a variety to people. Once everybody is naked, it’s the same as wearing a uniform. They only talk about why they’re naked, where they go naked, who they’ve met naked, where they’re going next to be naked. I find that quite boring. It’s like going to a tailgate party before a football game—all people talk about is football. Naked is just the way I’m dressed. 

The irony is that today, for all the changes women have mandated in our culture, women couldn’t do this, because men would ruin it. Whether she was pretty or ugly, fat, old, young, thin, it wouldn’t matter—they’d come with an attitude that would destroy it. They’d come for the wrong reasons. 

It’s taken me a lifetime to learn how to make nudity in public not sexual. Here, the old conservatives have learned to live with me. They complained at first, and wanted the town to write a dress code prohibiting it. But the ACLU told them that if they passed the ordinance they had created, they were ready to represent me in federal court, because it was unconstitutional. 

I’m not a radical of any kind. I’m a straight, strict constitutionalist. Which is why I have odds with Obama. 

I'm still off the grid, so to speak. I don’t earn any taxable income. I’m lucky if I break even here. In fact, I’m using music again to pick up the deficit on the bookstore, because it’s only busy in the winter. It’s too hot in the summer to have any business here.
 

The Tomb of Hi Jolly

The name of Quartzsite’s cemetery, Hi Jolly, is an Americanized version of the name of Hadji Ali, who’s buried here and whose tomb you see above. Hadji Ali was probably born in Syria or Jordan in 1828 and was known later in life as Philip Tedro (perhaps understandably, if it was a choice between that and “Hi Jolly”).

Hadji Ali was one of several men brought to the United States in the 1850s in an experiment to improve transportation in the “Great American Desert”—the southwestern states, then thought of as a wasteland. The short-lived Camel Corps was led by Lt. Edward F. Beale, who aimed to chart a wagon road across New Mexico and Arizona, ending at the Colorado River. The outbreak of civil war in 1861 put an end to the Camel Corps, but Hi Jolly remained in the US, trying his hand at prospecting, packing, scouting, selling water to travelers, and delivering for the “jackass mail”—the mule-powered mail line between San Diego and San Antonio. He released his camels into the desert around Quartzsite, where they lived for many years.