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tissue.” How many minutes or hours

elapse before you get a dose of anti-

venom determines your fate: an after-

noon in the ER if help comes quickly;

amputation if a bite goes untreated for

a few hours; or perhaps, in my case,

death on a remote stone bridge.

We had no cell service to call for

help, so Garrett took off running back

toward El Portal, about three and a

half miles away. He’d run about half

a mile before he was able to call 911.

The dispatcher ordered a rescue

helicopter and an ambulance, then

asked Garrett to run about two miles

to the town of Foresta, where he

would meet the incoming paramedics

and guide them to me.

I threw up every few minutes, in

intensifying waves. Rivulets of blood,

thinned by the venom, ran from the

puncture wounds. My leg burned. I felt

the same way I had after eating bad

fish in Laos—except I was terrified.

“Get Bridger out of here,” I told Tu-

rin. I couldn’t stand the thought of

them watching me die. She carried

him down the road and watched from

a distance as I gripped my parents’

hands.

G

arrett had sprinted about a

mile when he reached Crane

Creek. But it was flooded, and

the bridge was burned out except

for four steel girders, each about

eight inches wide and 45 feet long.

They were wet and shaking from the

thundering water 20 feet below. My

we arrived. We spent that first night
passing Bridger around and telling
stories. The next morning, April 23,
broke warm enough to wear shorts,
and Garrett suggested a family walk
in the wildflowers above town.
“They’re peaking,” he said.
We climbed for three miles, through
meadows and granite blocks, toward
the 50-foot-high Foresta Falls. It felt
like hiking through a Renoir. Gar-
rett and Erin named off blooms of all
colors, and we snapped pictures of
the valley. At 11:45 a.m., we reached
a bridge that crossed a waterfall.
Bridger chirped his need for milk, and
Turin stopped to nurse him.
Erin was the only one besides me
who saw the snake. “Brown and big”
is how she remembers it. I recall see-
ing a dust-red coil in new grass, but to
me the snake was more of a sensation:
a light tap just above the sock on my
right ankle. Then I passed out.

W

hen I awoke a minute or
two later, and after I’d fin-
ished my first bout of violent
vomiting, I heard my parents talking
through the options to get me out. My
mom had been an emergency room
nurse and a physician assistant for
35 years. She and my dad had con-
ducted some 700 missions as volun-
teers for the search-and-rescue team
in Bend, Oregon. Neither had ever
dealt with a rattlesnake bite.
I didn’t know it then, but the rule
about rattlesnake bites is “time is

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Drama in Real Life