Heat (4 page)

Heatstroke kills hundreds of people every year. In the hot summer of 1980, thousands died. The heat wave of 1988 took thousands more.

Among weather-related events that cause death in the United States, heat waves outdo hurricanes, tornadoes, and floods. The elderly and the young are most susceptible. City dwellers, surrounded by concrete, are more susceptible than rural residents. In a typical year, seven hundred Americans die in the heat.

The numbers will go up. The number of elderly people increases every year, the number of city dwellers increases, and the temperature rises. Air-conditioning, en masse, triggers blackouts. Without air-conditioning, building temperatures skyrocket.

Researchers pull numbers from computer models. They predict that the average number of heat-related deaths in America will increase from about seven hundred per year to more than three thousand per year in the next four decades.

Pablo Valencia did not experience heatstroke. He avoided the sun, walking at dawn and dusk and at night. He hunkered down when temperatures pushed ninety degrees. And he dumped heat by sweating, his meager water supply evaporating on his skin, taking heat with it. In this way, Pablo Valencia did not allow his body to reach the temperatures at which heatstroke occurs, at which systemic failure rips through the body, spiking the core temperature and killing the brain.

But he could not avoid dehydration and heat exhaustion.

Sweating or not, water is lost. Water moves through the lungs to be expelled with exhaled air. It moves through the nose. Water moves through the skin. Insensible water loss—water lost not as sweat but as vapor seeping through the skin—continues even in death. In the desert, a human corpse dries into a mummy within days. Pablo Valencia, when he collapsed near McGee’s camp, was alive but in the early stages of mummification.

Sweating differs from insensible water loss. The body warms, and the hypothalamus triggers hidrosis. Put another way, the hypothalamus triggers sweating. Sweating dumps water through pores. We notice sweat. We sense it. We feel its wetness, and we feel the cooling of evaporation.

A well-hydrated 155-pound man—a man the size of Pablo Valencia before he went into the desert—can be thought of as a semiporous animated membrane containing forty-two quarts of water. About half that water is inside cells, and the other half is between the cells. About three quarts of the man’s forty-two-quart total is blood plasma.

In the desert, it is possible to dump more than a pint of sweat in a single hour. Stay long enough to dump a little more than nine quarts and face shock.

After exhausting his canteen, Pablo Valencia, by the time he collapsed near McGee’s camp, had lost well over two quarts of water. He drank his own urine until it became very bad, “mucho malo,” as he reported it. He chewed on insects. He sucked water from plants. He found a green scorpion, ground off its stinger with a rock, and dined on its fluid-filled carcass. And all of this kept him alive long enough to leave him groaning on the ground, sending a hoarse moaning call through parched desert air and up the canyon to McGee’s campsite, to rescue, to water.

Sweat contains salt. Dump heat by losing water, and dump salt. A person accustomed to the desert—a person like Pablo Valencia—produces sweat with as much as twelve times less salt than a person new to the desert, but the person still loses salt. K. N. Moss, working with miners in 1922, was the first to link hot conditions to the symptoms that come from an imbalance in the body’s salts. The heat in which the miners labored was the heat of the earth, the heat found in the lower reaches of deep coal mines. The men worked short days at the coal face—only five or six hours—but during those short days they drank little, believing that too much water in hot conditions was bad for them, that they could suffer from water poisoning. They ignored their thirst and in exchange accepted fatigue, disorientation, and muscle cramps. Moss called the cramps “miner’s cramps.”

In the heat, with little water, with the body’s salt levels out of balance, heat exhaustion becomes inevitable. The symptoms: fatigue, headache, pale skin, clammy skin, mild fever, nausea and vomiting, cramps, dizziness, fainting. And thirst.

During his first day without water, Pablo Valencia may have been talking to himself, babbling about ice cream or a stream from a childhood memory or a canteen. By August 20, 1905, three days before reaching McGee’s campsite, Pablo’s strength failed. His fatigue was so severe that he would sit for a while and then crawl. His vision blurred. The mountains and the creosote bushes and the mesquite jumped around, moving back and forth, as if seen through a layer of water. His eyelids by this time were stiff, and the tip of his tongue was hard enough to feel odd against his teeth. His face and lips dried into an unnatural smile, a monstrous fixed grin beneath glazed and staring eyes. At times, Pablo found his way with his hands, feeling the trail as he crawled. He believed that his partner, Jesus Rios, had abandoned him in the desert. Pablo kept going, motivated, he later said, by the desire to knife Jesus Rios. Pablo’s lips dried further and split open and for a time oozed thickened blood that dried and resplit, eventually leaving his lips curled outward. His gums, too, dried and bled, for a moment giving a sensation of moisture in the mouth.

Unable to see or think clearly, Pablo crawled past a guidepost marking the direction to a spring. When he tried to walk, he fell, and getting up, he fell again. His tongue, by now entirely stiff and badly swollen, extended past his dried and curled lips into the open air. His eyelids, previously stiff, were now cracked. Buzzards landed next to him, within reach. He imagined, in vivid hallucinatory detail, his own death.

McGee saved Pablo and then used him as a case study. McGee described the phases of desert thirst as disease. Pablo was very close to McGee’s final phase. “In this final phase,” he wrote, “there is no alleviation, no relief save the end; for it is the ghastly yet possibly painless phase of living death, in which senses cease and men die from without inward—as dies the desert shrub whose twigs and branches wither and blow away long before the bole and root yield vitality.”

Had Pablo Valencia wandered in Death Valley instead of the higher and cooler desert near Yuma, he would have died.

William McGee ended his paper on Pablo with a note about Death Valley. On August 31, 1905, on the same day that Pablo was “deliberately and methodically devouring watermelons,” McGee read a press dispatch announcing a thirst-related fatality in Death Valley. It was the thirty-fifth thirst-related fatality in Death Valley that year.

My companion and I move north, onto the Nevada Test Site, a desert weapons-testing ground the size of Rhode Island. A group of forty-niners passed this way, taking a southern route to California and a supposed shortcut that turned deadly. They later became known as the Death Valley Forty-niner Party, but at this point they were only starting their desert hardships. “We had been without water for twenty-four hours,” wrote one of them, “when suddenly there broke into view to the south a splendid sheet of water, which all of us believed was Owen’s Lake. As we hurried towards it the vision faded, and near midnight we halted on the rim of a basin of mud, with a shallow pool of brine.” That faded lake, that mirage, were it real, would sit here in the middle of the Nevada Test Site.

Today the test site is secure, closed to casual wanderers, to forty-niners. We are here under the care of a guide. Our guide spent his career testing nuclear weapons. For a time he lived here, within the test site, in the government town of Mercury, Nevada. He claims to have once witnessed the creation of a fireball three miles wide. He is retired now, uninterested in ethics debates, dead certain that powerful bombs and the threat of mutual destruction saved the world. He is short, talkative, amicable, a wearer of cowboy boots, a bantam rooster with thumbs hooked into his belt. He is gray haired and wiry and dried out from years in the desert, years immersed in government bureaucracy, but he is as energetic as an antelope squirrel.

We pass simple wooden benches lined up in rows, bleachers in the desert. Our guide talks of watching tests from these bleachers. He talks of a nuclear artillery round that was shot six miles from the muzzle of a cannon, landing in the distance with a fifteen-kiloton explosion—an explosion equivalent to that of fifteen thousand tons of TNT. He shows us pens where pigs, monkeys, and cows were caged at increasing distances from ground zero. He claims that he once barbecued a survivor. He shows us the remains of bomb shelters, domes of concrete blown open to expose metal reinforcement. We stop at the remains of a railroad trestle, its I beams sheared.

Trees were stuck into the ground to form artificial forests. Slow-motion photography developed for bomb tests shows the trees steaming as the radiation hit, then igniting. Then the shock wave came, extinguishing the flames like a child blowing out birthday candles, and the tops of the trees bent hard away from the blast, then back toward the blast, back and forth, reverberating with the shock wave.

We visit the remains of a doomsday town, a mockup of suburban America, where cars were parked and mannequins were stationed doing what suburban Americans did in the 1950s, washing dishes and playing in the yard and carrying briefcases. With unabashed delight, our guide says that one of the workers assigned to the creation of a doomsday town positioned two mannequins, naked, man on top, in a second-story bedroom.

The mannequins would have seen a flash of light. They would have felt sudden heat. Those far enough removed to survive the heat would have seen dust racing toward them across the desert floor. When the blast struck, it would have felt at first like a strong wind but would have increased suddenly, sweeping entire houses away, killing mannequins by the score. Farther out, cars parked broadside to the blast tumbled sideways, rolling across the desert. Cars parked toward the blast survived the shock wave, but the heat blistered their paint.

Our guide talks of sitting five miles from a test, where he felt the shock wave and the extreme heat. The shock wave passed, bounced off the mountains behind him, and returned. He crouched in a trench as the shock wave and its hot wind passed overhead. He was sunburned.

After several hundred nuclear bomb detonations, in 1963 a treaty ended above-ground testing. The government learned how to dig. Dig a shaft, lower a bomb into the shaft, plug the opening, and set off the bomb. Eight hundred and twenty-eight bombs were set off below ground. Each shot was named: the Uncle, the Bandicoot, the Gerbil, the Stones, the Pleasant, the Ticking.

Now we are sixty-five miles from Las Vegas, in Yucca Flat, the most bomb-blasted and irradiated piece of real estate on earth. We drive past crater after crater, some in groups, others standing alone on the desert floor.

In Area 10, we stop to look at the Sedan Crater. On July 6, 1962, the government chose to test a thermonuclear bomb—a hydrogen bomb—in a shaft 636 feet deep. Sedan, exploding, generated temperatures around twenty million degrees. In contrast, the surface of the sun, at a mere ten thousand degrees, would seem air-conditioned.