Heat by Bill Streever Read Free Book Online

feat were burned,” Price reported, “but not severely.” Price could not explain why Kuda Box could walk through unharmed, while the amateurs, presumably volunteers, could not.
    “Firewalking,” he wrote, “was in no sense a trick.” He thought it might be an act of faith or the result of short contact with the hot coals or “that there was a knack in walking.”
    If it was an act of faith, it was a faith I envied. If it was the physics of short contact time, so be it. If it was a knack, it was a knack I could develop.
    I find a video clip about Tolly Burkan, another firewalker. Burkan was born in New York City in 1948 and later moved to California. Since the 1970s, he has promoted the benefits of firewalking: confidence building, spiritual renewal, healing, team building, something to break the tedium of day-to-day life.
    In the video clip, Burkan talks to students of the Firewalking Institute of Research and Education. “The next time you’re in a situation that used to intimidate you,” Burkan tells them, “you will remember, ‘I walked on fire, and if I can do that, certainly I can go in there and ask for a raise!’”
    Burkan, slender, balding, wearing a tie, talks to the camera from a stage of sandy ground in a clearing surrounded by scrubby trees. “When you are in the right state of mind,” he says, “the blood flows through the soles of your feet and takes the temperature away from the tissue.”
    A close-up shows Burkan’s smile. The smile involves not just his mouth and teeth but his cheeks and eyes and even his ears, which pull back and flatten as the smile stretches across his face. The smile is almost goofy. It is certainly disarming. It is the smile of a man who would be impossible to dislike.
    Burkan’s clients stand in the soft twilight around a fire pit similar to the one that Kuda Box walked through eight decades earlier. The clients clap rhythmically—two claps slowly, a pause, then three quick claps. They chant the word “Yes!” The chanting matches the beat of the clapping, the first two yeses delivered slowly, the last three in rapid succession: “Yes!—Yes! Yes!-Yes!-Yes!”
    Burkan is the first through the fire. He is barefoot. Like his students, Burkan chants, “Yes!—Yes! Yes!-Yes!-Yes!” He walks through the fire, his hands stretched upward, the gesture of a supplicant. His pace is ginger, but certainly not panicked. His slacks—business casual—are rolled up at midcalf, well clear of the fire.
    His students, one by one, follow.
    “It was pretty hot,” one young woman tells the camera.
    “Whether you’re a physicist and you believe in these laws of physics,” Burkan says, “or whether you’re someone who just believes in me because you trust me, as soon as you walk into the fire with a belief that you are not going to burn your feet, you are in a different physiological state than the person who thinks they’re going to get burned.”
    Burkan believes there are three million firewalkers in the world and three thousand firewalking instructors on six continents.
    Another Burkan quote: “I’ve seen people horrifically burned.”
    Tolly Burkan’s enthusiasm convinces me. I must become one of the three million. I need to walk through fire. I telephone the Firewalking Institute of Research and Education, the organization that Tolly Burkan started. I talk to an instructor. He tells me that Burkan is retired, not available.
    “I’m a writer,” I tell him, “and I want to give it a go.”
    The institute is in the business of walking corporate types through fire as a team-building exercise, but it also offers instructor training. “Become a Firewalking Institute of Research and Education Certified Firewalking Instructor,” reads the advertisement, “and learn so much more than firewalking.”
    “I may want to become an instructor,” I say.
    “Things in life,” the instructor tells me, “are a lot easier than they seem to be.”
    Sometimes the instructor