Back
.

http://web.wichitaeagle.com/content/wichitaeagle/2001/10/08/kansas/1007snakeman_txt.htm
[this url is no longer valid]
.

October 8, 2001

Curiosity fueled a life of examining snakes

Take a look at Joseph Bruno Slowinski. [No photo on web]

In this photograph, he's a 12-year-old boy, holding a snapping turtle by the tail. Tom Sawyer in a T-shirt. Look at the eyes and that look-at-me look of triumph.

A child at play, and something more.

A scientist, one of Joe's professors would later say, is no more than a child who refused to grow up, who refused to stop asking "Why?"

Three years after his father took that picture, Joe was bitten by a rattlesnake. By this time, Joe was already roaming the sandbars of the Kaw River with his mom, finding ancient elk antlers, bison skulls and mastodon teeth.

Later, he went to the University of Kansas, drank beer, cheered the Jayhawk basketball team and collected fossils for the school's Natural History Museum. He caught copperheads for fun with his pal Stan Rasmussen in the woods of south Johnson County and along the banks of the Kaw.

He impressed some but not all of his professors with his intelligence.

He drank more beer.

He was bitten again, by a copperhead, when he was 20. The next day, Stan picked him up from a hospital in Lawrence, drove him to Johnson County and helped him catch more copperheads. Joe could use only one hand to catch them, because his thumb was swelled two inches across.

By the time he went to Burma for the 11th time this past August, he'd earned his Ph.D. at the University of Miami, he'd become the associate curator of herpetology at the California Academy of Sciences and he'd won huge grants to study snakes. He'd taught himself to read strands of DNA and to talk to mathematicians about imaginary numbers.

He'd taught Chinese photographer Dong Lin to swear, shot pool with frog specialist Guin Wogan, and kept cobras as pets. He took his sister Rachel to Burma on one trip and showed her how it was possible to strap 16 cases on the back of an elephant so that his team could drink beer in the field.

In Burma, one cobra sprayed him in the eyes; another bit him on the hand during the filming of one of the two National Geographic specials devoted to his work.

In a profession where the discovery of one new species can make a career, Joe had discovered 18 new amphibians and reptiles. At age 38, he was one of the world's best herpetologists. He studied them in the laboratory; he discovered them in the jungle. The total number of his discoveries might soon exceed 20 -- his colleagues say there are probably a few new ones among the specimens his team brought back from Burma last month.

They brought them back along with Joe's cremated ashes.

Sept. 11, 2001.

"Hey, get up, come on, let's go, let's go look at snakes!"

Joe was waking the camp.

"Come on!"

Guin Wogan answered, "All right, all right, I'm there!"

She laughs when she remembers this. Joe was so like a kid, she said. He couldn't wait.

She stepped out of her tent, which she'd pitched under the roof of a local jungle schoolhouse.

All the other tents were pitched inside the school. Joe was calling out, waking his team.

"Let's go!"

It was Tuesday, Sept. 11, before 7 a.m. Burmese time, half a world away from the team's home in San Francisco.

Guin was a frog specialist, and Joe had brought her along because he wanted to study more than snakes; he wanted to study everything. On this trip he'd brought anthropologists: a fish expert named David Catania, a bird expert named Maureen Flannery, whom everyone called Moe.

"Let's look at snakes!"

They were to go exploring again on this day, but first Joe wanted to see the snakes his Burmese field team had caught the night before.

Dong could see that Joe could hardly wait. Joe was wearing a T-shirt, khaki shorts and a grin.

oo .

The team gathered around a collection bag 3/4 Joe, Dong, Guin and the others.

Joe peered into the bag.

It was dark, still not quite 7 a.m. in the jungle. Too dark to see the snakes in the bag, Dong said.

Dong was standing beside Joe, two feet away, and Guin in front of Joe, also two feet away.

Joe looked over at his Burmese field team leader.

"Poisonous or nonpoisonous?"

Dong and Guin remember differently what was said next.

Guin said a Burmese man told Joe, "I don't know."

Dong thinks the man said, "not poisonous."

Joe stuck his hand into the bag. Something happened.

"He looked up," Guin said.

"It was a look so strange I can't even describe it: Surprise mixed with something else."

Joe pulled his hand out of the bag. They saw a snake hanging from one of his fingers.

The snake was a juvenile, not more than 10 inches long. Joe tried to pull it off. He couldn't get it off right away; it took at least 10 seconds, Dong said.

Everyone stared. They could see the snake was a multi-banded krait, a relative of the cobra, one of the more deadly serpents in creation.

Joe looked at the Burmese men. One told Joe this same snake had bitten him when he caught it the night before; nothing had happened.

Joe seemed reassured.

Guin remembers Joe saying, "My skin's thick. I don't think it got a fang into me. I'll be fine."

Joe walked away, and Dong reached out and put his hand on Joe's neck.

"You gonna be all right, brother?"

"Yeah. I'm gonna be all right."

Dong looked at him. Joe shook his head.

"No, brother, I'm not going to die."

Joe told everyone he wanted to go to his tent.

"I'll call you over if I start to feel symptoms," Joe said.

He went to his tent.

He sat down.

Hours later, in Lawrence, Kan., retired KU professor Joe Collins received a phone call that made him sit up straight.

On the phone was Joe Slowinski's father, Ron, calling from Kansas City, Mo.

Ron said his son was somewhere in Burma, he'd been bitten by a snake, and Burmese army helicopters were trying to get him out, and the U.S. embassy in Rangoon was calling all over Asia trying to find antivenin and the right hospital to fly him to.

Ron wanted to know: What is a krait? And what can be done to help my son?

Collins is the founder of the Center for North American Herpetology, a snake expert.

This can only be considered a very serious bite, he told Ron.

Joe needs to get to a hospital because antivenin can be as dangerous as venom, Collins said.

Call the zoos in Atlanta, Ga., and San Diego. They have kraits and might know best how to help, he said.

Ron hung up.

He called the zoos. He made many calls that day. One was to New York, to tell Joe's mother, Martha Crow.

When he reached her, she was watching the World Trade Center disaster on television. The planes had struck the buildings only a few hours before, only miles from her office.

Ron told her that Joe had been bitten. He said Joe might be all right. She didn't believe it. She thought, "That was it."

But in the jungle at that hour, Joe's team had not given up.

Half an hour after the Krait bit him, Joe called everyone together.

Guin said he looked nervous, but sounded calm.

Dong said Joe told him that he was all messed up, only he used the f-word.

Joe explained to his friends that krait venom is a neuro-toxin that shuts down the nervous system.

There will be no pain, he told them.

"First my eyelids will drop; I'll not be able to hold them up."

After that, he would lose speech, he said.

Everyone stayed calm, Guin said. Joe seemed confident.

He said he would stop breathing.

He said his lungs might restart after 48 hours. In those 48 hours, he said, "You'll have to breathe for me."

He said they would have to give him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation for those 48 hours or get him to a hospital where doctors could put a tube in his throat to feed him air.

The team was many miles from help; they had no telephones or radios because Burma's government doesn't allow foreigners to carry them in the field. They would have to send a runner to the nearest village.

No one flinched, Guin said later: "Every person there said they would make this happen."

That might sound fantastic, Guin said. But the men and women standing around Joe at that moment were people who picked up poisonous snakes before breakfast, who walked fearlessly in jungles. They weren't afraid of leeches, sand flies, sweat, heat, or the hardest questions of science. If necessary, they could go days without beer. They weren't afraid of kraits. They weren't afraid of this.

"We just told him: Whatever it takes," she said.

Joe was slipping.

Guin said he wrote out notes about how to cut his throat for a tracheotomy, and to look for a plastic tube in the camp gear to intubate him.

They could find no tube.

A Burmese runner took off for the nearest village to summon help. It would take him hours.

Guin thought they'd be able to breathe for him until the helicopters came.

When Joe stopped breathing, Moe took over. She knew a bit of CPR, and she began to give Joe mouth-to-mouth. She did it for hours. When she began to tire, she told people between breaths that she must show them how.

Guin took over for Moe. She blew breaths into Joe every two to three seconds, breathing herself, letting him exhale, then breathed for him again.

When she tired, Moe took over again. They traded off until they tired.

"My lungs felt frayed," Guin said.

Moe told Dong to get ready.

Joe could not talk, but he was conscious and he could squeeze their hands to tell them what he wanted. One squeeze meant he needed more air. Shaking someone's hand from side to side meant "no."

When Joe heard that Dong was going to put his mouth on his, he shook hands vigorously.

"No, no, no."

"He was such a macho man," Guin said.

So she and Moe kept blowing into him. They blew until they could not do it anymore.

Dong took over, put his mouth on Joe's mouth, and breathed. And when Dong wore out, others took over.

The helicopters did not come.

They breathed for Joe for 24 hours, one by one.

Guin said Joe probably died long before they stopped.

Ron Slowinski said there will be at least one memorial service for his son.

That will be at the California Academy of Sciences, where Joe was associate curator of herpetology. They have told him that his son was a brilliant man. In addition to the Burma project, Joe had received word, just before he went to Burma in August, that his team had been awarded a $2.4 million grant from the National Science Foundation to continue his other big snake project in China.

There might be another gathering, sometime later this year, near Lawrence.

Ron said it would probably involve a small gathering of friends. Maybe a picnic. Maybe Stan Rasmussen could come, and herpetologists Joe Collins and Travis Taggert, and paleontologist Larry Martin, who said there is no difference between a scientist and a child.

"It's the adults who stop asking questions," Martin said last week. "It's adults who assume they know all we need to know.

"Joe never assumed that."

Perhaps they will walk outdoors.

"Maybe out where Joe used to walk with Stan," Ron said.

Stan Rasmussen, now an environmental lawyer with Black & Veatch, said he knows where he'd like to lead them.

It would be to the banks of the Kaw River.

Out there, on sandbars west of Bonner Springs, Joe and his mom had once dug an elk antler out of the sand with their fingernails. Out there, Stan and Joe used to hunt snakes in the woodlands, and they used to walk all the sandbars, looking for bones, while they mimicked voices and lines stolen from Bugs Bunny cartoons.

They found chunks of mammoth tusks, and arrowheads and old bones. They found a chunk of mastodon skull.

"And when we'd find this stuff, we'd yell," Stan said. "We'd dance around like wild Indians, and we'd yell."

Back