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Outside Magazine April 2002
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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.
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