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The life and death of Joe Slowinski
By EDWARD M. EVELD
The Kansas City Star

Joe Slowinski's killer, a baby snake about a foot long, was handed to him in a cloth bag.

It was early in the morning on what had become a miserable scientific expedition into Myanmar, formerly Burma, in southeast Asia. Soaking rains. Ankle-deep muck. Hungry leeches.

Slowinski, snake biologist and leader of the trip, usually would revel in the challenge.

His passion for adventure was immense, a very real part of his makeup, along with an infectious amazement with the natural world.

As a youngster growing up in Kansas City, he combed sandbars on the Kaw River hunting mastodon and mammoth fossils. A fun undergraduate weekend at the University of Kansas: scouring the prairie for rattlesnakes to bag and mark.

But on this trip to Myanmar, his 11th, even Slowinski was worn down. He was fighting a lingering case of malaria from an earlier expedition and was trying to manage an entourage of 10 scientists, several Burmese field assistants and 80 porters hired to carry equipment.

That morning, though, always happy to check out a snake catch, Slowinski got assurances from a Burmese assistant that the specimen in the bag was not poisonous. Then Slowinski reached in.

The venomous fang he felt was that of a young krait, a cobra-relative with a poison so toxic it slowly paralyzes the victim, who remains conscious until even breathing becomes impossible.

For the next 30 hours some of Slowinski's closest friends and colleagues exhausted themselves performing mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and chest compressions, long after he could speak or signal with his big toe, long after he could scribble his last message: "Let me di"

Sept. 11

In Kansas City, Slowinski's father, Ron, heard from an American official in Yangon (formerly Rangoon): A radio dispatch from the expedition had said his son needed medical attention in the coming hours.

One way he could help, the official said, was to contact a medical evacuation group called S.O.S. in Singapore. What didn't help was the date, Sept. 11. Making international calls was not easy.

"I was trying to figure out how in the hell we were going to save Joe's life," Ron said. "It was unbelievably, horribly frustrating."

S.O.S. could transport Slowinski to a medical center if local helicopters could first get him out of the expedition's remote camp. But those attempts failed, turned back by heavy rains.

Joe Slowinski had gained international recognition as a herpetologist at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco -- and even a measure of fame, starring in such shows as National Geographic TV's "Cobra Hunt."

Slowinski was good on camera, from his tussled sandy hair and the constant excitement in his voice to his grin, which revealed a big space between his front teeth.

Ron, an artist and professor of painting and drawing at the Kansas City Art Institute, was one of his son's biggest fans. He was amazed at his strong drive and focus.

At 38, Joe Slowinski was credited with identifying 18 new species of reptiles and amphibians in Myanmar. He recently was awarded a $2.4 million grant from the National Science Foundation for research in China's Yunnan province.

Looking back, Slowinski's career track seemed predestined. At his Brookside home recently, Ron pulled out a favorite photo: his smiling son proudly holding a turtle he caught in Loose Park.

But Joe had more than a child's interest in insects, reptiles and amphibians. At 5, he liked to identify species. He collected and tagged bones and rocks like a museum curator.

Martha Crow, Joe's mother, fanned that interest. When he was 11, she took him to a college geology club meeting at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.

The young Slowinski was a fixture at the club through his high school years at Pembroke Country Day (now Pembroke Hill). Graduate students treated him with occasional visits to the department's collection of 2,000 rocks and fossils.

"This was a banquet for Joe," said Crow, a senior editor at Food and Wine magazine in New York. Joe's parents divorced when he was 11.

It was at a geology meeting that he heard about fossil hunting on the Kaw River. He and Crow discovered a bountiful spot in Bonner Springs. She recalled his discriminating eye.

"He saw something that looked like a pebble to me, and he said, `Hey Mom, look what I found. Over here. Come on.' So we start digging with our fingernails and the water's coming in as fast as we can dig and finally we have it, this huge, calcified elk antler."

A garden of snakes

Slowinski maintained his wild fascination. Myanmar was perfect for him. Relatively unstudied, it was ripe for the identification of unknown species. The country needed thorough surveys of its biological diversity to help officials make conservation policy.

Slowinski fell in love with the country and its people during his first expedition there in 1997.

Myanmar, he wrote in a natural science magazine two years ago, "is a visually stunning place. Ancient gilded pagodas sprinkle the landscape; the enormous Ayeyarwady River cuts through the middle of the country, unconstrained by dams and levees; jungle-clad mountains form a continuous, horseshoe-shaped barrier around the country..."

The people, Slowinski said, are "unbelievably friendly." Except, that is, for the country's military bureaucracy, which required constant cajoling.

But the ultimate draw: The place was a garden of venomous snakes, including his favorite, the cobra.

On a trip to the country several years ago, a dark brown cobra at a wholesale snake market caught his eye. It lacked the markings of the two known species in Myanmar. And it was a spitting cobra, able to spray venom six feet. This was a potential species discovery.

A year later on another trip, Slowinski and photographer Dong Lin, a close friend and colleague at the California Academy of Sciences, confirmed the find by locating one of the snakes in the wild.

As they videotaped the cobra, it skimmed between Slowinski's legs, aimed upward and shot Slowinski in the eyes. Against the pain and blurred vision he tried a local folk remedy, juice from tamarind leaves squeezed into the eyes.

"More searing pain!" he wrote in the Spring 2000 issue of California Wild. "I bolt upright, yelling in agony, and pour more water into my eyes, which are now ruby red."

The pain subsided in a few hours and his vision returned.

"Did the tamarind juice work? I don't know. If tamarind is not available, I'm told, lime juice works as well."

`King of the Kaw'

The element of risk attracted Slowinski. Stan Rasmussen, a lifelong friend, spent countless college weekends tracking timber rattlesnakes with Slowinski.

"It's pretty exciting when you've got 4 feet of rattlesnake in your hand and it's rattling and trying to bite you," said Rasmussen, an environmental lawyer who lives in Lawrence. "There's a rush to it."

Slowinski developed a project around catching and marking the snakes. They recaptured the snakes later to log their growth and the distance they ranged.

The two had struck up a friendship their freshman year at KU. They worked together cataloging fossil specimens at KU's Natural History Museum. Slowinski was a biology major.

On weekends they borrowed cars from dorm mates for Kaw River fossil-hunting, an interest he maintained. Friends called him "King of the Kaw." Many local fossil finds at the KU Natural History Museum have Slowinski's name on them.

Besides snakes, they both loved to canoe and explore caves. They also happened to like Clint Eastwood movies and Warner Brothers cartoons.

No question they tried to out-macho each other, but they had a healthy respect for poisonous snakes. Slowinski got bit once by a copperhead. Its fang sunk deep into his thumb, which turned purple and huge but recovered.

Never, Rasmussen said, did Slowinski grab a snake out of a bag.

"I have trouble visualizing that," he said. "He and I collected hundreds of snakes. We never reached into the bag. We dumped it out first."

Slowinski visited Kansas City last April, and the two met for beer and a game of pool. Rasmussen told him he saw the National Geographic show in which Slowinski got bit by a cobra. The bite was dry, or venomless.

"It scared me, Joe," Rasmussen told him. "I worry about that."

They discussed a drastic, potentially life-saving strategy for a venomous bite to the finger: Cut if off, and quick.

"Joe, you've got to do that if you're ever bit," Rasmussen told him.

`I don't want to die'

Dong Lin, the expedition photographer in Myanmar, was there the morning Slowinski reached into the bag. Dong has gone over and over the episode in his mind.

"It's complicated," Dong said. "It's not black and white."

First, Dong said, Slowinski trusted the Burmese field assistant, someone he had trained. The assistant told Slowinski the same snake had bit him the night before without effect.

Slowinski examined his finger and, although he had felt the bite, he couldn't find a puncture spot.

"Are you sure you're OK?" Dong asked Slowinski. "I don't want you to die."

"Bro," Slowinski said, "I don't want to die either."

Dong and Slowinski were soulmates when it came to work intensity. When Dong was putting in extra hours in the photo department at the academy, Slowinski was doing the same across the hall in herpetology, busy with lab work, writing articles for scientific journals, planning field work.

They both had tempers but often agreed about what angered them. Slowinski, however, had special disdain for people who whined about conditions in the field.

"There's no reason to complain," he would tell Dong. "We're all in the same situation."

The grumbling on the Myanmar trip was obviously draining Slowinski, Dong said. And Slowinski worried about the team members. They were hiking 200 miles through high jungle. He worried someone would get seriously sick or injured.

The expedition lost some of its funding at the last minute, and some amenities Slowinksi had expected weren't available, including a radio and small medical team.

"It was too much pressure for one person," Dong said.

For others who knew him, it was hard to imagine Slowinski losing his concentration. His focus was legendary, not only on expeditions but throughout his career.

With little distraction he had moved from his doctorate program at the University of Miami in Coral Gables to a postdoctoral position at the Smithsonian Institution to a faculty post at Louisiana State University and finally to his position at the academy.

During the Myanmar expedition, Dong said, as the two hiked together, Slowinski wondered about all that focus.

Maybe he had concentrated too much on his work. Maybe he should travel less, stay out of the office more on weekends. He was excited about a woman he recently started dating, a romance with real possibilities. He vowed to work on that back in San Francisco.

He knew what was coming

About an hour after Slowinski was bitten, his hands began to quiver. He told Dong he was going to need help. About 8:30 a.m., they sent an assistant to a nearby village, 81/2 miles away, the closest place with a radio.

The first request for an army helicopter went out at 11 a.m. Permission came but not until 4 a.m. Sept. 12.

"They spent 17 hours making a stupid decision, to let us use the helicopter or not," Dong said.

Slowinski knew well what was in store for him. He told the team that the venom's neurotoxins would slowly cause paralysis, but that he would remain conscious. When his breathing was affected, the group would have to perform mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

If he got to a hospital, he could survive. The poison would essentially wear out in 48 hours.

Through the morning, Slowinski grew weary. Hour by hour, his condition worsened. About noon, he couldn't breathe without assistance.

"We asked him, `If you hear us, wiggle your toes,' and he did," Dong said. "But he couldn't tell us what he was thinking."

The team had set up camp in a wood schoolhouse in a remote mountain village. It was beastly humid.

Slowinski's academy colleagues had kept a long night's vigil. They exhausted themselves performing mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. By early afternoon, Slowinski's pulse was gone. Several more hours of CPR followed, but the rains kept help from arriving.

Ron got word of Slowinski's death after midnight Sept. 12. He spent another sleepless night. By the afternoon, Ron realized it was a day of brilliant sunshine. He drove to Loose Park, sat on a bench in the rose garden and cried.

In November Slowinski's family gathered with his friends and colleagues in San Francisco for a memorial observance.

His sister, Rachel, a photographer in Los Angeles, had prepared a slide show. Dong and others had compiled a seven-minute video montage: scenes of Slowinski in the field, here talking about the spitting cobra, here wearing a poncho and flashing a thumbs-up sign, oblivious to the leech on his ankle.

But there was another video. After the service, Dong told Slowinski he had videotape he recorded after the snake bite. It was to be a video of Slowinski's rescue, of course, not his death, Dong said.

Ron couldn't watch it then. About a month ago, he asked Dong to send him a copy of the tape. He called Rasmussen, who agreed to watch it with him.

The footage, 21/2 hours from the ordeal, was raw and painful, Ron said, except for one thing.

Watching the video, Ron saw firsthand the love and determination of his son's field companions, fighting to save his life.

Their rescue attempt -- tireless, heroic -- was a fitting goodbye to Slowinski's life, so devoted, so driven.

Epilogue: Last month a screenwriter in Los Angeles expressed interest in creating a story based on Slowinski's life. An agent has contacted Ron about several possible projects. But he wonders if a "fictionalized monument" to his son is appropriate. He wants to think about it.

To reach Edward M. Eveld, features reporter, call (816) 234-4442 or send e-mail to eeveld@kcstar.com.