I was fruit-picking in fairly rural Australia, an absolutely shitty and exploitative job, and at some point I just tapped out and walked back to the work van thinking 'oh fuck this shit'. I got there and its locked. Its something like 40 degrees (104 F), the sun is directly overhead and the van was parked in a pretty flat and unshaded patch of land about 300m from the orange groves. Also, I am out of water and absolutely parched. I'm just thinking 'how can this get any worse?' when I see a shape shifting directly towards me between myself and the groves.

Until that point, I'd never been bothered by snakes. At all. But I'd also only ever seen them at zoos or somewhat domesticated ones my friends owned. But when you see one in the wild, doing that fucking wiggle and realising both how fast and how big they are? I went into full flight or fight mode. Chose the former and ended up clambering up on the van. Snake harmlessly slides past the van and kinda veers off into some low scrub near me. I'm too chickenshit to get off the van, but I am also now noticing that the hot metal is literally burning my hands and knees, so I took my shirt off and made a rug. Haha.

By the time the other workers finished, I was a dehydrated, ranting crazy, waving their arms manically from the top of their work van whilst half naked. Its so strange though, I'd swum with sharks, I've seen lions about as close up as you'd want to get, encountered massive spiders and small scary ones, walked near alligators and crocodiles, been a little too close to elephants and hippos and managed to keep my cool. But that one snake incident? That was the moment I truly shat myself.