Every geologist has a snake story.
I awkwardly encountered this large snake in 1958 when trying to climb over a jam of tree trunks in a muddy creek hidden deep in the jungle of the Upper Amazon Basin near Contamana in eastern Peru. Dr. Bernhard Kummel, a paleontology professor at Harvard, and I were surveying the surface geology of an oil-prospective area by wading streams all day long. We were constantly wet. Actually we could move faster in the creeks because we didn't have to wait for a trail to be cut through the undergrowth. Furthermore the rock formations cropped out on the river banks.