Hot Dry Places - Tracks and Shadows: Field Biology as Art - page 77

whom I've since shared the Inca Trail and so many other adventures (our move to the
Northeast in 1999 ensued when Cornell offered her, then me, profes-sorships).
That night, however, I drove back through Portal in solitude, brooding about snakes
and women, then snapped to my senses dodging Mexican spadefoot toads that hopped
across the rain-drenched pavement. After only a few minutes, barely into the San Simon
Valley's mesquite grassland, I recognized a wriggling serpent in my headlights and
slammed on the brakes, excitement rising as I scrambled out with flashlight and tongs.
The Sonoran coralsnake, hiding its head under writhing red-, cream-, and black-ringed
coils, waved a tightly curled tail, made hilarious popping sounds with its vent, and bit
my forceps. Then for a grand finale the squirming sixteen-inch cobra cousin regurgit-
ated a western threadsnake, as if to say, “You ain't seen nothin' yet!” 28 Later I fell asleep
pondering whether the coralsnake gave up its meal so as to crawl away unburdened or
if vomiting was part of a bizarre, multimedia strategy for repulsing predators.
My first trip to the Chiricahuas led to studies of black-tailed rattlers, but in 1985,
with my fortieth birthday at hand, it amounted to an unexpectedly internal journey. I
searched the slopes for rock and twin-spotted rattlesnakes, encountered them in lively
abundance, yet couldn't escape mortality. One afternoon as I clambered over talus seek-
ing herps, tortured moans drew me to a half-ton Hereford bull that had slipped off a cliff,
hung by his horns between limbs of an oak, and died while I stood back from the flail-
ing hooves. A week later I drove up through New Mexico to be in Rob Colwell's Color-
ado wedding and visited my paleontologist friend Len Radinsky in Utah just days before
cancer took him, two years shy of fifty. Then I returned to Tucson for one last bout of
snake hunting, highlighted by a lavender-and-charcoal banded tiger rattler found crawl-
ing among the saguaros. Another eighteen hours of driving, I was home in Berkeley, sad
but lighter.
My desert travels haven't so much presented crisp epiphanies as an awakening that
began in grad school and first came into focus during my wanderings that summer. No
matter how glorious a Sonoran sunrise nor how mystical a Mohave moon, there are no
natural laws of fairness and mercy, only lives unfolding according to heritage, chance,
and the extent that we rise above them. Reptiles adapt to harsh environments or they
don't persist; we wear the pain of death with varying discomfort. And as ever-optimistic
Ed Wilson said in closing Sociobiology, we've got some time left—by which he meant for
solving environmental problems but also to figure out our own existence. There'd been
Marsha's murder and the toddler I'd failed to save; now the twin challenges of grief and
hope were manifest again with the passing of my dad and kind, generous Len. There
would be more losses too, but also abundant joy and a measure of clarity in the every-
day workings of nature.
For millennia arid lands have inspired humans to look beyond immediate concerns,
seeking wisdom in stone tablets and the solace of wide-open spaces. That summer of
1985, though, I was awash in reckless self-pity, grateful for distractions and reminders
that we mustn't despair. “Attend to matters at hand,” the rattlesnakes and spiny plants
seemed to say, whereupon small black lizards, having survived another day, might chime
in, “Embrace it all, never surrender!” Months later, while I paused for coffee during a
Bay Area drizzle, desolate places flooded my thoughts. I hoped the Pisgah coachwhip
really was fluorescent pink and seven feet long, still reigning over the wildest parts of
the lava flow. I recalled hunting fossils with Len in Wyoming's Bridger Basin, his disdain