Heat (6 page)

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 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 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 thirsty. “Some of the guys been drinking salt water by now, and they were going berserk,” James recalled. “They’d tell you big stories about the
Indianapolis
is not sunk, it’s just right there under the surface. I was just down there and had a drink of water out of the drinking fountain and the Geedunk is still open. The Geedunk being the commissary where you buy ice cream, cigarettes, candy, what have you. ‘It’s still open,’ they’d tell you. ‘Come on, we’ll go get a drink of water,’ and then three or four guys would believe this story and go with them.”

Three hundred and seventeen men—one-third of those who had survived the sinking itself—were rescued. Of these, about a hundred had survived those four days without freshwater. Of these hundred, none had drunk seawater. A medical officer reported that those who drank seawater became sick, delirious, and combative. They drifted away from the group or swam away, apparently maddened. No one who drank seawater survived.