In Your Spare Time: From the Blog of Ursula K. Le Guin
R.B. Lemberg reads "First Contact"
Sep 9, 2026 · 14 min · 7 segments
R.B. Lemberg reads post 22, "First Contact," from May of 2011. You can read Ursula's original post here…
In Your Spare Time: From the Blog of Ursula K. Le Guin
Sep 9, 2026 · 14 min · 7 segments
R.B. Lemberg reads post 22, "First Contact," from May of 2011. You can read Ursula's original post here…
R.B. LembergGuest
Molly TempletonHost
Hello, I'm R.B. Lemberg, and I'm reading Post 22, "First Contact" from May 2011.
I have eaten fried rattlesnake, but only once have I ever been in contact with a living rattler.
Maybe it was communication, though of a very limited kind, as communication between alien species is perhaps doomed to be.
I have told this story often as a comedy, a story in which people behave ridiculously with a happy ending.
We were at the old ranch in the Napa Valley, and I was just about to sit down on one of the 1932 iron chaise lounges, carefully, because if you sit too far toward the end, the whole unwieldy thing stands up and throws you off like a bronco.
Startled by my movements, it was heading off into the high grass, rattling away.
About 15 feet away, it looked back, saw me looking at it, and stopped there, its head up and facing me, and its gaze fixed on me, and mine was fixed on it.
I suppose they hear their own rattle as vibration in their body, not in the air.
I said, "If he goes off into the high grass there, we'll never dare walk out in the pasture the whole time we're here." We thought we had to kill the rattlesnake.
That's what you do generally in the country at a place where little kids come and run around.
Charles went and got the big, heavy, long-handed hoe my father called the Portuguese hoe, with which rattlers had been killed before by others, not by us.
Hello, I'm R.B. Lemberg, and I'm reading Post 22, "First Contact" from May 2011.
I have eaten fried rattlesnake, but only once have I ever been in contact with a living rattler.
Maybe it was communication, though of a very limited kind, as communication between alien species is perhaps doomed to be.
I have told this story often as a comedy, a story in which people behave ridiculously with a happy ending.
We were at the old ranch in the Napa Valley, and I was just about to sit down on one of the 1932 iron chaise lounges, carefully, because if you sit too far toward the end, the whole unwieldy thing stands up and throws you off like a bronco.
Startled by my movements, it was heading off into the high grass, rattling away.
About 15 feet away, it looked back, saw me looking at it, and stopped there, its head up and facing me, and its gaze fixed on me, and mine was fixed on it.
I suppose they hear their own rattle as vibration in their body, not in the air.
I said, "If he goes off into the high grass there, we'll never dare walk out in the pasture the whole time we're here." We thought we had to kill the rattlesnake.
That's what you do generally in the country at a place where little kids come and run around.
Charles went and got the big, heavy, long-handed hoe my father called the Portuguese hoe, with which rattlers had been killed before by others, not by us.
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