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Outside Magazine April 2002
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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

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
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.


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Mark W. Moffett is an ecologist at the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at the University of California, Berkeley