Editor’s Note: We are saddened to learn of the death last Saturday of Dean Ripa, owner of the Cape Fear Serpentarium in downtown Wilmington, North Carolina, and the subject of this beloved 2005 Oxford American feature by our contributing editor Wendy Brenner. Brenner was a finalist for an ASME National Magazine Award in Feature Writing for this story, which was also anthologized in Best American Magazine Writing 2006. (In 2012, Rebecca Burns examined the story for the “Why’s This So Good?” column at Neiman Storyboard.) Details about the circumstances of Ripa’s death are forthcoming (his wife has been charged with first-degree murder; the case is under investigation) and it is yet to be seen what will happen to the Serpentarium and its extraordinary inhabitants. Brenner’s classic profile of Ripa now serves as an obituary for a complicated man of exceptional curiosity and an uncommon passion.
Dean Ripa (1957–2017)
Some passions are more dangerous than others
He is a fool who injures himself by amassing things. And no one knows why people cannot help but do it.
—Danse Macabre
Fortunately, I number among my friends a young man named Dean Ripa, who could have stepped from the pages of a Joseph Conrad novel.
—William S. Burroughs, The Western Lands
One day in 1971 in Wilmington, North Carolina, fourteen-year-old Dean Ripa was at home performing surgery on a cottonmouth snake, and it bit him. This was unfortunate for a couple of reasons. He knew enough about snakes to know he would probably not die, but he did need a ride to the hospital, which meant his parents were going to find out about the fifty snakes he was keeping in their spare room: rattlesnakes, the water moccasins he’d caught in local swamps, even several cobras he had purchased via mail-order—he had a king cobra years before he had his driver’s license.
The bite landed him in Intensive Care for two weeks—with fever, a grossly swollen arm, blistering skin—during which time his father donated Dean’s entire snake collection to a local roadside zoo, a seemingly apocalyptic setback that might have ended any normal person’s love affair with snakes. But Dean turned out to be another kind of person, the kind who, after a full recovery, quickly began amassing more snakes, breeding his own snakes, and making extra money to buy snakes by collecting snakes for the same zoo that had adopted his earlier snakes. A year after the cottonmouth episode, one of his new cobras got loose and the whole Ripa family had to move out of the house for five days until it could be found and shot.
Thirty-one years later, in what might be the ultimate fantasy of young snake-lovers everywhere, Dean Ripa opened the Cape Fear Serpentarium, and, most thrilling of all to a twelve-year-old acquaintance of mine, he lives there, too.
The Serpentarium is no roadside attraction, but an elegant, bi-level, 6,300-square-foot gallery overlooking the Cape Fear River in gentrified downtown Wilmington, exhibiting one of the largest collections of live exotic venomous snakes in the U.S. About a hundred are on public display at any given time, dozens of different species, almost all of which were captured by Dean himself in jungles and marshes around the world. He specializes in the rarest and deadliest: Gaboon vipers, black mambas, spitting cobras, puff adders, and bushmasters, of which he has the biggest known collection anywhere. In fact, Dean was the first person ever to breed the rare blackheaded bushmaster in captivity (he continues to supply them internationally to zoos and researchers), and once even reproduced a bushmaster hybrid, in effect recreating an extinct ancestor of the existing species. He has also survived four bushmaster bites—envenomings is the herpetologist’s Orwellian term—despite the fact that almost all bushmaster victims die, even with anti venom treatment.
The Serpentarium was built by Dean’s father, a local contractor, who has presumably forgiven Dean for his adolescence (or perhaps is just happy to have survived it). The Serpentarium’s neighbors include antique stores and historic bed & breakfasts and Thai restaurants and art galleries. Snakes do not seem especially popular around here; the local attitude is perhaps best summed up by a resident of a snake-plagued Wilmington apartment complex, quoted in a recent story in the Wilmington Star-News: “I don’t like those fellows with no shoulders.” Yet Dean has gotten no complaints from his neighbors (he says they’re grateful for the business he brings to the area), with the sole exception of a group of cat lovers who once confronted him after hearing a rumor that Dean stalks downtown alleys at dawn, collecting cats in a basket to feed to his snakes. “Ludicrous,” he tells me. “I never get up before 10 A.M.”
The Serpentarium snakes live in lush enclosures built to Dean’s specifications by set designers from Screen Gems (Frank Capra, Jr.’s, Wilmington film studios), featuring stalactites and stalagmites and twisted roots and vines, real animal skulls and bones, moss-draped grottos and cypress knees and running waterfalls and ponds. Each snake is rated by skulls-and-bones to indicate its deadliness level (two skulls mean life-threatening to children and the elderly, possible mild disfigurement; five skulls mean survival unlikely), and placards on the exhibits give detailed descriptions, especially popular with children, of exactly how you will die if bitten by each particular snake.
I learn that the Egyptian cobra, whose festive yellow and black stripes evoke Charlie Brown’s shirt, is believed to be the asp that killed Cleopatra; in ancient Egypt, the sign reads, these snakes were awarded to royal prisoners as a means of suicide. The Asiatic spitting cobras, meanwhile, which never seem to run out of venom, are like a “SORT OF ENDLESS POISONOUS SQUIRT GUN.” The bite of the Central American fer-de-lance feels like having your hand slammed in a car door and then seared with a blow torch. As the placard helpfully elaborates, “THE BITTEN EXTREMITY SWELLS TO MASSIVE PROPORTIONS, THE SKIN BURSTS OPEN, AND YOUR EYES WEEP BLOOD.” The fifteen-foot king cobra, the longest venomous snake in the world, can kill an elephant with a single bite, and is known to rear up six feet in the air, hood flared, and look a man in the eye while growling like a dog. For some reason, perhaps a primal one, the male king cobra’s eerie, flat dirt color is scarier to me than some of the flashier patterns on display here. Likewise the look of the steely black mambas, who are long, skinny, and, according to their description, “EXCITABLE” —and indeed each time I’ve visited they were wide awake and slicing around their enclosure like a gang looking for some action. Most disturbing of all, perhaps, are the puff adders, whose odd, fat cigar-shaped bodies make them grotesquely evocative, like nightmare shape-shifter snakes. We are snakes, they seem to say, but we are on the verge of becoming something else.
The Serpentarium also exhibits a few nonvenomous reptiles, including a 250-pound python named Sheena, some ethereally beautiful emerald tree boas, and a nine-foot, man-eating crocodile, which, like every crocodile, alligator, or lizard I’ve ever seen, looks fake, prehistoric, and improbable. One day while I was visiting Dean, the girl at the front desk reported that a worried visitor claimed the beaded lizard looked dead. “It always looks dead,” Dean said irritably. “That’s how it looks.” We went to check on the lizard, which was fine. It resembled a large, exotic purse. The placard noted that “THESE LIZARDS MAKE EXCELLENT—IF UNRESPONSIVE—PETS.”
For the truly obsessive, the Serpentarium gift shop offers a huge assortment of fetishes: toy snakes, snake-decorated t-shirts and snake stickers and snake books, Viper Blast spray candy (and, inexplicably, Skittles), watercolor paintings by Dean’s mother, carved Peruvian rainsticks, and the occasional
