Heat by Bill Streever Read Free Book Online Page A

uses bonfires. Other times he uses railroad fires, long corridors of flame through which his students parade barefoot.
    “Firewalking,” he tells me, “is one of those things you don’t think you can do.”
    I do not argue this point. Instead I ask about injuries.
    “There are some,” he answers. “Usually no more than hot spots and blisters like you might get from a long walk in new shoes. It’s a mind-set. Tell yourself you’ll get hurt, and you will.”
    The temperature of the hot coals through which a firewalker walks, he tells me, is between 700 and 1,500 degrees.
    From my 1963 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica : “The interesting part of firewalking is the alleged immunity of the performers from burns. On this point authorities and eyewitnesses differ greatly.”
    Through the telephone I hear a truck engine. I hear highway noise. “I’m on my way to Malibu,” he tells me. In the truck, he carries firewood. After Malibu, he will teach a course in Dallas, and then in Spain, and then another in Dallas.
    It is hard to talk over the highway noise. I ask if he ever teaches in the desert.
    “We teach wherever people want to learn,” he tells me. “But in the desert we have to be careful about fire restrictions.”
    He is thinking of deserts wetter than Death Valley, about deserts with abundant fuel, about dry chaparral, about places where outside fires require a burn permit, places where there is a lot more to burn.
     
    Our first walk in Death Valley threw my companion and me off, pushed our electrolytes out of balance, leaving us worn out, on the edge of debilitation, two Alaskans sick with heat, feeling slightly feverish. We do not suffer from miner’s cramps, but even now, two days after our first walk, we feel the sense of disorientation that miners once described. Sweat, in the unacclimated walker, is as salty as the blood and plasma and other fluids. It is likely that we lost close to a quart of sweat during our four-hour walk, and with it we lost salt. Upon returning, we drank water. We drank water to a fault. We pushed ourselves toward hyponatremia, toward water intoxication. We pushed ourselves toward a sodium imbalance associated with nausea, headaches, confusion, lethargy, fatigue, appetite loss, vomiting, convulsions, and comas.
    The mechanisms of hyponatremia are complex and confusing. Fluid levels within cells change and fluid levels between cells change. The plasma becomes salt poor. The kidneys grow confused.
    It takes time for the body to regain balance. We drink enough to be hydrated, but we pay for our walk through the desert. The water has to find its way through the body, into cells and between cells. Salts have to be redistributed.
    Acclimatization is possible, but not in a way that conserves water. The opposite happens. Humans adapt to heat by sweating more, not less. After days and weeks in the heat, sweat becomes more dilute. The acclimated body conserves salt. Blood plasma levels increase, and with that increase comes an increase in performance, an apparent tolerance to the heat. More importantly, there are behavioral adaptations. People learn to move slowly. They learn to stay in the shade. They learn to orient their bodies so as to expose as little surface as possible to the sun. They learn not to hike in open deserts in the early afternoon with only a gallon of water to share.
    My companion and I adapt by heading to cooler elevations, into the mountains above the desert to a place where we can look down into Death Valley. We drive to the Panamint Range, stopping at an elevation of seven thousand feet. Here we find trees, junipers with fresh pale berrylike cones and pinyon pines with spreading shade-tree branches, cones the size of baseballs, and needles pointing upward as if in constant prayer. There is Mormon tea, Ephedra cutleri, known for its medicinal properties. There is cactus, too, twelve-inch-tall Mojave prickly pear with inch-long gray spines. Chickadees are busy in