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Outside Magazine April 2002

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Bit (Cont.)


	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.

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