Outside Magazine

The day Mike Posner was bit by a baby rattlesnake in eastern Colorado was the best one so far. He had been awake since 3 A.M. and had already walked 16 miles along a thin, two-lane highway with no shoulder when he felt a stab of pain and waited for the shh-shh-shh of confirmation. It was around noon on August 7, 2019. In front of him loomed the Rocky Mountains, which had only materialized on the horizon the previous morning. Behind him an imaginary dashed line led back to Asbury Park, New Jersey, where the writer and singer of the hit “I Took a Pill in Ibiza”—yes, that Mike Posner—had started his walk across America 114 days before. He scanned the gravel beneath the RV, his support vehicle for the trip, which had pulled over with him for his lunch break, and saw nothing. But then he heard it: the unmistakable rattling that made all the warnings he’d received that day from passing strangers feel like dark omens. 

For most long-distance hikers, this would have been a low point, a venomous brush with death signifying the end of the road. But Posner had already dipped into the darkest places his mind could go on his 2,851-mile journey, and now he was just thrilled to have a helicopter ride, some air-conditioning, and life-saving medical attention. After weeks of trudging on stiff, aching feet across Missouri and Kansas, through 90 percent humidity, he says his five days in the ICU of a Colorado hospital were like a luxury hotel stay. But it wasn’t just that. The Grammy-nominated pop star also had the sense that he’d found the struggle he’d left Los Angeles in search of, or some sense of validation—the journey was real enough to have almost killed him. 

Posner posted a photo of his venom-engorged leg with a buoyant caption: “Shout outs to this rattlesnake that bit me—he only made me that much harder.” In other photos from his recovery, he’s inching a walker across a hospital room in a gown and no-slip socks and beaming at medical caregivers from behind a full amber beard, curly hair untamed, blue eyes crinkled at the corners in a characteristic look of glee. Never mind the fact that Posner would spend three more weeks in crippling pain, trying to relearn the basics of how to walk (heel first? toe first?)—the rattlesnake bite had been a good day. “I was really in the trenches,” he says, laughing as he recounts the story. “This experience put me in the hospital, but I was proud because I was living my life, maybe for the first time.”