The Python Hunter Who Reads Cormac McCarthy in the Cab

Denny Rojas hunts pythons for the state of Florida. He is paid by the hour and, additionally, by the foot. On a good week he catches four. On a bad week he catches none, and reads. What he reads, mostly, is Cormac McCarthy. He keeps a paperback of Blood Meridian on the passenger seat of his truck, wedged between a can of DEET and a headlamp.

'The sentences,' he told me, when I asked him why, 'are the same length as the road.' Loop Road, which runs for twenty-six miles through the Big Cypress, is a long, straight, unlit strip of asphalt that is, at night, the most reliable place in the state to find a Burmese python crossing from one side of the swamp to the other. Denny drives it slowly, one hand on the wheel, one hand on the book, headlamp off until it isn't.

In forty-two consecutive nights this spring he caught thirty-one pythons, one of them thirteen feet long. He read most of Suttree and about half of The Road. He did not read The Border Trilogy, which he had already read twice. He told me, as we drove back toward Ochopee at three in the morning, that the pythons were, in a sense, the same book as the McCarthy: something that had come from somewhere else, and was now, quietly, changing the country it had arrived in.