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The Article That Made Me Want to Become a Journalist

I was a teenager when I read "Bit" in a doctor's waiting room. It would change how I looked at writing, and you can still read it online.

A drawing of a krait (Bungarus sp.). Another snake of the same genus bit Slowinski. Photo: Biodiversity Heritage Library

A lot of journalists remember the article that made them want to take up the profession. For me, it was "Bit," a feature that Mark W. Moffett published in Outside in 2002 and I read as a teenager sitting in a doctor's waiting room. The story recounts in detail Moffett's friendship with herpetologist Joe Slowinski, ending with Slowinski's death from a snakebite during an expedition the pair went on in Myanmar, an event which just happened to take place on September 11, 2001. The way that Moffett talked about what happened — frankly and straightforwardly, neither glossing over the ugly facts of it or getting lost in his own head — was eye-opening. It sounds stupid, but as a 13-year-old in a society that treated death as taboo, I had never realized you were allowed to do that, to be so close to the end of someone's life and be so honest about it.

After spending most of the past two decades practicing journalism, I recognize just how much skill it takes to write about something that traumatic that well — to do justice to the enormity of it without letting it wash out all the details. Thanks to the magic of the internet, you can still read "Bit" today. I did recently, for no particular reason, and 20 years out I still found it as powerful as I did the first time:

"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."

Speaking of powerful stories, we recently published a story in Backpacker by our colleague and former skills editor Corey Buhay about her journey to retrace her mentor, friend, and ex-boyfriend Alexander's final route after he died in an accident in the Tetons. It's a moving exploration of love, loss, and how choosing to take risks — or choosing not to — adds meaning to life.