A Passion Beyond Fear
The Snake Charmer
A Life and Death In Pursuit of Knowledge
By Jamie James
Hyperion
260
The fascination with nature’s most unpredictable beasts has often persuaded some people that they are so well equipped with mastery of their subjects to be in any peril. We have seen, however, with the recent deaths of Steve Irwin, the wild life expert, who was stung by a giant stingray off the Great Barrier Reef, and Timothy Treadwell, a bear enthusiast, who was devoured by one or two grizzly bears in Alaska, how misguided this belief can be.
Jamie James’ The Snake Charmer gives an engrossing account of a maverick that fell victim to his own fatal attraction with nature. In the monsoon season, in the remote location in the jungle of Burma, a herpetologist called Joe Slowinski, met his death by the subject of his study, a many-banded krait, a species of snake found mostly in the jungles of India and Southeast Asia. The circumstances of his death are still heatedly debated among witnesses and various experts. Some blame his Burmese assistant who informed Joe that the specimen in the bag was not poisonous. Joe reached into the bag, an imprudent act considered by the experts unlikely to have been committed by a recognized authority, and the bite that he received was not that of Dinodon septentrionalis, a benign dead ringer of the krait, but that of the real thing, the many-banded krait. As soon as he had been bitten, Joe described to his colleagues in eerie precision what would happen:
As his friends gathered around, Joe calmly explained what was happening to him. No one in the world knew more about the venom of Bungarus multicinctus than Joe Slowinski. He described the effects of a slowly deepening paralysis: the snake’s venom works on several different parts of the nervous system simultaneously, blocking the nerve impulses that transmit instructions to the muscles, including those required to maintain life. There will be no pain, he told them. “First my eyelids will drop; I won’t be able to hold them up.” Soon he would lose the ability to speak and move his limbs, he said. Within a few hours, his respiratory system would shut down: The paralyzed central nervous system would be unable to instruct the diaphragm to breathe, causing a swift death by asphyxiation.
Jamie James’ immersion into his subject is so total that as we read this book, we cannot help feeling that there’s bondage between Jamie James, the writer, and Joe Slowinski. The connection I suspect is through both men’s passion for the pursuit of knowledge. In all the years I’ve known the writer, who is an acclaimed international journalist and novelist who has written such diverse subjects as madness and strangeness, music of the spheres, exotic landscapes and currently resides in Bali between stints that take him to various places in the world, I’ve never heard him talk about snakes. My personal impression of Jamie as an affable and soft-spoken sensitive soul suggests to me that he might even suffer from Ophidiophobia, fear of snakes. Chapter after chapter, we follow the writer as one would an expert guide in a foreign terrain. Jamie James’ tenacity in the pursuit of his subject greatly matches his subject’s. Joseph Bruno Slowinski’s first encounter with snakes began when he was merely five years ago. Raised in a family of artists, his father, a devout Catholic, is a painter teaching in a college, his mother, an atheist and an artist in her own right, Joe shocked his parents one sunny morning:
Dropping paintbrush and charcoal, the young parents ran toward their children on converging paths through the tall weeds that fringed the orchard. They found Joe surrounded by a knot of distraught adults, enjoying himself enormously as he brandished a writhing black snake over his head – a snake longer than he was, and as thick as his own little arms.
Joe’s father, Ron, says this about his son, “Joe always thought of himself as a critter, not a person.”
The Snake Charmer is Jamie James’ seventh book. His patient and passionate work for this book has paid off tremendously. Various acclaimed reviews have started to crop up from various quarters. Jamie James has brought into lasting memory a man whose passion for nature and knowledge has exceeded his fear of death.