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On September 11">
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This is a mirror of the article by Mark W.
Moffett from the April 2002 issue of Outside Magazine simplified for
inclusion in the memorial pages for Joe Slowinski. |
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Bit
On September 11, in a remote corner of Myanmar, herpetologist
Joseph Slowinski reached into a snake bag, as he had done a thousand
times before. The next 28 hours would be his last. Mark W. Moffett
recounts the death of a friend—a man for whom beauty lay in a flash of
danger hidden in wet grass.
By Mark W. Moffett
Mark W. Moffett is an ecologist at the Museum
of Vertebrate Zoology at the University of California, Berkeley
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| Slowinski in extremis, 11 a.m.:
from left to right, American researcher Guin Wogan, Chinese
herptologist Roa Dingqi, Joe Slowinski, Burmese assistant U Po
Cho, and American ichthyologist David Catania |
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THAT MORNING I WOKE at dawn and crawled from my tent into the big
unpainted schoolroom where the members of our biology expedition slept.
We were in Rat Baw, a village in the far north of Myanmar. Outside,
expedition leader and herpetologist Joe Slowinski and his best friend,
photographer Dong Lin, stood wearing matching green T-shirts stenciled
with one of Dong's photos of a cobra, poised to strike. I walked up as
Joe's Burmese field assistant, U Htun Win, held out a snake bag. "I
think it's a Dinodon," he was saying. Joe extended his right
hand into the bag. When it reappeared, a pencil-thin, gray-banded snake
swung from the base of his middle finger. "That's a fucking
krait," Joe said. He pulled off the snake and kneaded the bitten
area, seemingly unmarked, with a fingernail.
Other scientists have been known to cut off their finger at such a
moment. Joe sat down to join the rest of us for breakfast at a long
wooden school table, joking about his thick skin. It was 7 a.m. on
September 11, 2001.
I'D KNOWN JOE FOR TWO YEARS, seeing him most often when he drove over to
Berkeley for evening herpetology seminars at the University of
California. A 38-year-old field biologist with the California Academy of
Sciences in San Francisco, he had published papers on evolutionary
theory, systematics, and the origins of biological diversity—but
mostly he was the man to talk to about cobras. For years, Joe had been
concentrating on the rich biological triangle of Southeast Asia where
Myanmar—still commonly known as Burma—and Laos meet southwestern
China. He was conducting a comprehensive survey of the herpetofauna of
Burma; on ten expeditions since 1997, he'd found 18 new species of
amphibians and reptiles, including a new spitting cobra, Naja
mandalayensis—which he considered "the ultimate
discovery." He hoped to help the country establish a biodiversity
museum; eventually he wanted to write the definitive book on the area's
natural history.
Before a seminar, Joe, Dong Lin, and I would share beers at La Val's
Pizza. Dong, now in his midforties, told me how, after surviving
Tiananmen Square with 60 stitches, he had escaped China in 1990 and made
his way to a position in photography at Cal Academy. There, Joe helped
guide him through the book English as a Second F**king Language,
and soon after, Dong started to join him as expedition photographer.
Over Coronas, Joe would describe his upcoming trips, slapping me on the
back and telling his best adventure stories to entice me to "come
along this time, bro."
As an entomology researcher at Berkeley, I recognized in Joe someone
like myself, someone who in earliest childhood fell hard for a
disrespected creature—in Joe's case snakes, in mine ants—and managed
to retain that fascination into adulthood and even build it into a
career. He had a boy's sandy hair and freckles, and his habitual
expression of sheer uninhibited wonder was matched by a precise and
agile mind. His fieldwork had the same old-fashioned sense of
exploration I'd grown up admiring in 19th-century scientist-explorers
like Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace.
Time and again, Joe's schedule and mine had conflicted. Then one night
in La Val's he described a trip coming up in September. He'd recruited
colleagues from different disciplines to conduct a broad species
inventory of Burma's remote northern mountains. Perfect.
[end of page 1] |
Bit (Cont.)
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| Slowinski in Burma in May 1999 |
THE EXPEDITION WOULD TAKE us into the foothills of the Himalayas; it was
scheduled to last six weeks and span 200 miles. Our group of eight
American and two Chinese scientists and four Burmese field assistants
gathered on September 3 in the village of Machan Baw—the dusty remnant
of an old British outpost—and started walking, accompanied by a long
line of porters. Machan Baw sits at 1,400 feet; the plan was to climb
above 10,000 feet, surveying a range of habitats from subtropical
forests to temperate highlands, and traveling eventually into the new
Hkakabo Razi National Park.
Adventures are made mostly in the recollecting mind; the doing is
generally more drudgery than drama. It was monsoon season, and our path,
more mud trough than trail, was hard slogging. Leeches emerged in
droves. We tried to keep them at bay by spitting tobacco juice onto our
legs or wearing panty hose but Joe, trekking in shorts and sandals,
simply put up with them, as did many of the porters. At times I'd look
down and see the rain puddles along our route were red with blood.
The first week took us through farmland and villages. Houses with
roughly stacked pole walls were raised on stilts so that pigs and
chickens (and their legions of fleas) could sleep in the slightly
protected muck below. Each evening sandflies speckled our arms with
welts, while mosquitoes threatened us with a malaria resistant to most
prophylactics—one reason we zipped ourselves into tents even when
sleeping under a roof.
In patches of rainforest between rice paddies we found enough species to
keep us moving eagerly toward richer territory. The sonic duet of
gibbons and two huge-beaked hornbills passing overhead indicated more
pristine habitat nearby. After each trek, Joe would gather bags with the
day's specimens from his Burmese team and from our frog specialist, Guin
Wogan, one of his graduate students at Cal Academy. Dong Lin would video
the most unusual individuals. If venomous snakes were involved, Joe
would wrangle them so Dong could get the best footage, shooting from
inches away—greatly impressing the inevitable crowd of Burmese
onlookers. Joe was careful with snakes; he'd chased them since he was a
boy in Kansas City, Missouri. He was also famous for close calls. Bitten
by a copperhead in college in Kansas, he'd gone back the next day to
catch another, left-handed. On a previous trip to Burma, a spitting
cobra had struck through the bag Joe put it in, stabbing his finger. He
waited calmly for the venom to take effect. Luck of the draw, he would
say, telling the story: Sometimes a snake bites without injecting its
toxins. On a later Burma trip, a cobra squirted venom into his eyes.
After a few hours the excruciating pain passed. Joe never paused much
over these incidents. He seemed to embody the understanding that a fully
natural world includes the possibility that nature can kill us—and
afterward glide freely away into the wet grass it came from. That love
in any form involves an element of risk.
[end of page 2] |
Bit (Cont.)
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| The fatal Krait |
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IT WAS GOOD TO SEE JOE AT WORK in the country he'd described so often.
He was proud of his Burmese field assistants, on permanent loan to him
from Myanmar's Department of Forestry. In a country with few scientists,
Joe saw these young men and women as an essential resource for the
future. Species inventories are a big part of conservation, and his
assistants caught, preserved, and documented specimens year-round. Joe
had struggled hard over the past five years to build government contacts—research
in heavily militarized Burma is no simple thing.
Returning late at night by headlamp, Joe would unload his catch of
snakes and frogs and sit with whoever was still awake, usually Dong Lin
and me. During those conversations I began to see the different sides of
my friend. Some nights it seemed he felt invincible. Downing Burmese
rum, he knew he would rise high enough in the hierarchy of science to
put a stop to the "political bullshit" he saw
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At 7:30 a.m., Joe lay down. At 8,
his hand began to tingle, and he called the group together. The
toxins would leave his system in 48 hours, he said. He'd be
conscious the whole time.
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all around him. Much of what he imagined seemed
possible: He'd just been awarded a $2.4 million grant from the National
Science Foundation, already a sponsor of his ongoing Burma research, to
study biodiversity in China's Yunnan province. He confided a thousand
ambitions, certain he'd realize them all.
Other times Joe raged into the night, once about another biologist
working in Burma who he believed had blocked the original funding for
this trip. Joe had hastily cobbled together funds from his other grants
and gone anyway. His tirade explained something. I'd wondered why our
expedition had come during the rainy season, when (as was evident once
we started walking) we could have taken jeeps along much of the route
any other time of the year. Remembering how discovery breeds rivalry and
how scientists can turn research into races, I sat in a small dry spot
surrounded by what seemed a world of mud, an understanding comrade to
Joe's fury.
Still other nights Joe grew melancholy. For years he'd focused only on
science, he said; he'd been too single-minded, traveled too much, even
for love. Now, though, he'd started a relationship with an ornithologist
back home. He wondered if he should devote less time to snakes.
Managing the people and logistics along with his research on this trip
was clearly taking a toll. There was a lot to worry about. Among the
multitudinous supplies we'd brought were drying ovens and pounds of
newspaper for the plant specimens, snap traps and mist nets for the
mammals and birds, gallons of alcohol to preserve reptiles and insects,
a generator and its gallons of fuel to recharge batteries for cameras
and computers and to run the blacklight for attracting insects.
Ninety-odd porters hauled the equipment of ten academics. Many of the
inevitable problems were handled by a Burmese guide, but Joe had to
think about them all. In addition, he'd paid $44,000 to a well-connected
expedition coordinator to cover the in-country expenses, yet somehow
such basics as rice and bottled water were in astonishingly short
supply, so Joe kept spending more, out of pocket. Nor was there any sign
of the two military doctors and radiophone the government had promised.
Joe guessed the real cost of the trip was probably a tenth of what the
expedition had put down.
Then there were the scientists. Each of us wanted to work at our own
pace and had our own agenda. Personalities often clash in the field, and
for Joe, feeling responsible for the group's harmony must have been one
more stress, along with our long daytime treks and his own additional
nocturnal collecting. I noticed the accumulating effect on him during a
walk on September 10, the seventh day of the trip. Joe was moving
sluggishly, and each time he paused to pull a leech from his leg, his
fingers were visibly shaking.
[end of page 3] |
Bit
(Cont.)
AFTER IT WAS OVER, we'd all wonder why Joe had reached into the snake
bag with barely a glance inside. As with any pivotal moment, the exact
words exchanged beforehand would be endlessly debated. Snakes of the
genus Dinodon are harmless, but some are near-perfect mimics of
the multibanded krait (Bungarus multicinctus), a cousin of the
cobra and much more deadly. As field team leader, U Htun Win should have
known the difference—but he told us he'd been bitten by the snake the
day before and nothing had happened. Joe, however, was the authority.
Possibly simple exhaustion brought his guard down; perhaps he failed to
heed the uncertainty in U Htun Win's tentative identification.
Following breakfast, around 7:30, Joe lay down. At 8 he noticed a
tingling in the muscles of his hand, and asked Dong Lin to call the
group together. By 8:15, two Burmese assistants started the run of eight
miles to Naung-Mon, the nearest town with a radio. Joe calmly told us
what would probably happen and what we should do. He described the
effects of a slowly increasing paralysis, eventually requiring
mouth-to-mouth respiration until he could be taken to a hospital. If he
lived, the neurotoxins would work their way out of his system in 48
hours. He would be conscious, he told us, the whole time.
As the morning went on Joe had to reach up to open his eyelids. His
breathing grew raspy; his voice was reduced to a slur. In time he could
only write messages: "Please support my head, it's hard for
me." "If I vomit, it could be bad." "Can I lean back
a little." By noon he could no longer breathe on his own.
"Blow harder," he wrote. In his final message, minutes later,
Joe spelled out "let me di." We won't let that happen, Guin
Wogan said. Kick butt, Joe, I added.
At 3 p.m. our runners returned alone, and told us the military had
requested an update before they would send an air rescue. Two fresh
assistants were sent back, again insisting that a helicopter be sent. By
evening the weather turned from the best we'd seen in a week on the
trail to a renewed downpour; low clouds would impede the rescue again
the next day. That night soldiers arrived on foot with an ancient field
radio and a young Burmese doctor with two nurses and a little equipment,
including an old respirator no one could get to work.
Throughout that long night, we all helped out as we could, but much of
the time was spent in simple exhausted witness. From time to time, Dong
would put his arm around various members of the group and say, "I
love you." In one long moment of vertigo, as someone who's had his
own close calls with snakes, I looked at Joe in the torchlight and saw
how alike we were in build, complexion, even our features, and I felt I
was somehow watching myself die. Looking at Dong, Guin, and U Htun Win
standing silently nearby, I wondered if they felt something similar.
By 3 a.m. Joe could no longer signal us except with his big toe. His
final communication occurred when ornithology assistant Maureen
Flannery, whose strength had been keeping us all going, asked if she and
Guin could stop doing mouth-to-mouth and let the guys take over. Joe's
toe signals indicated a preference for the women.
During the 26 stifling, sandfly-infested hours that the artificial
respiration continued, four airliners plowed into their final
destinations in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania. The only one of
us who knew was David Catania, a Cal Academy ichthyologist so
unobtrusive I often forgot he was there. Dave had listened to his
shortwave radio after collapsing briefly in his tent late in the night.
Keeping the news to himself, he came out and gave Joe mouth-to-mouth for
hours, his face showering sweat. He refused to let anyone else take
over, even long after Joe's heart had stopped.
At 12:25 p.m. on September 12, the doctor told us Joe's pulse was gone.
We began three hours of CPR, in anticipation of a rescue helicopter that
was never able to land.
[end of page 4] |
Bit (Cont.)
JOE'S BODY WAS CREMATED in a small Buddhist ceremony two days later in
the town of Myitkyina, and Dong Lin and some of the team brought his
ashes back to San Francisco, along with many of the expedition
specimens. Other members made their way home as best they could. It was
not until two months later that I returned from Asia and visited Ground
Zero in New York. Compared to the devastation before me, Joe's tragedy
had been such a small, intimate drama. For everyone in Rat Baw but our
team, September 11 had seemed an ordinary day. It was a place where
death from such natural causes as snakebite was a common event—there
are more snakebite deaths in Burma than almost anywhere else in the
world. Children played in the field within yards of the room where our
small circle performed CPR. Elders sat on benches outside, talking
softly and watching the rain, as one supposes they always had.
One of Joe's gifts was the way that for him the ordinary always seemed
to yield to the extraordinary. The day before the bite Joe had returned
from a walk in Rat Baw flushed with excitement—he'd found a pair of
entwined kraits. "It was beautiful. Goddamn beau-ti-ful! Courting
like that, right in the middle of the trail. I've never seen anything
like it." His arms sliced arcs in the soupy air. The weight of all
our petty concerns had vanished from his face, and his eyes seemed to
glow, as they always did at moments like this, with the love of snakes.
[end of page 5
end of article] |
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