Heat by Bill Streever Read Free Book Online Page B

the juniper branches, and the buzz of hummingbird wings cuts the air.
    Next to the road, we walk along a line of twelve kilns built by Chinese laborers in 1877 to turn trees into charcoal. The kilns stand in a neat row. They are dome shaped, made from brick, each kiln maybe twenty-five feet tall and thirty feet across. A single kiln could be loaded with forty-two cords of wood. The wood would smolder for a week and then cool for a week, leaving behind two thousand bushels of charcoal. The charcoal was light enough to be hauled to a mine in the treeless valley below, where it was used to smelt lead and silver.
    I enter the kilns one at a time. I smell smoke from fires that burned more than a hundred years ago.
    We head uphill, moving slowly, worn out and weak from our days of desert walks. As we move higher, the trees grow more scattered. The forest takes on the appearance of a savanna. Here and there, between living trees, old stumps stand out, monuments to the kilns below.
    In two and a half hours, at nine thousand feet, we reach Wild Rose Peak. The summit, windswept, is more or less treeless. We sit on a rock and look over Death Valley in silence. The salt flats on the floor of the valley appear to be flooded. The uninitiated, looking down on this valley, might believe that it contains a pleasant shallow lake. We drink from our water bottles. It is comfortably cool here, even in the sun. With altitude, temperature drops. A rule of thumb—seldom correct, but often close—puts the temperature drop at about four degrees for every thousand feet of elevation. While our summit just touches 80, the valley below bakes at 116 degrees.
     
    Another day passes, and we drive to Death Valley’s Ubehebe Crater, a half mile across and six hundred feet deep, wider and deeper than the Sedan Crater, but natural and less radioactive. It may have formed around six thousand years ago, but estimates vary by thousands of years. Better known is how it formed: hot magma rose up from the depths of the earth, encountered ground water, and turned the water to steam. The steam, expanding, threw out shattered rock, sand, and ash as far as six miles.
    We hike to the bottom. The crater is less conical than Sedan, with one side rising almost vertically and the other sloping steeply downward, an incline of loose sand and crunchy gravel that fills our shoes.
    At the bottom, desert trumpet and desert holly grow, along with scattered creosote bushes, some ten feet tall and casting long morning shadows. Leaf-cutter ants have made small craters of their own, eight inches across. They move out from their own craters, their nests, and march across the Ubehebe Crater floor, bringing bits of leaves back and toting them down into their tunnels. The tunnels can be twenty feet deep, stuffed with scraps of leaves on which the ants cultivate a fungus. The ants eat the fungus.
    Climbing out of the crater, we see other wildlife. There is a coyote, as handsome as a groomed dog, said to smell water from miles away. In an erosion gully, we see a Gila monster, a foot long and squat. Later, near the crater rim, we see a rodent, a kind of rat, maybe a pack rat. Certain rats, adapted to the desert, produce urine five times as salty as seawater—they could drink seawater and then filter out the salt to survive, peeing what Pablo Valencia would call “mucho malo.”
    The human kidneys, unlike the kidneys of certain rats, cannot extract freshwater from seawater. For humans, to drink seawater is to die.
    In July 1945, the USS Indianapolis delivered the bomb that would be dropped on Hiroshima. Four days later, the Indianapolis was torpedoed. It sank in minutes, leaving nine hundred men floating in life rafts and life jackets. Four days passed before a plane spotted survivors.
    From sailor Woody James: “The next morning the sun come up and warmed things up and then it got unbearably hot so you start praying for the sun to go down so you can cool off again.”
    The men grew