The Devils Highway - Luis Alberto Urrea [53]
The people most at risk from hyperthermia are the elderly. That’s why Midwestern heat waves feature dead Chicago retirees by the score. But the wicked genius of Desolation is that it makes even the young old so that it can kill them more easily.
Heat Stress.
Everyone has been tired, or even dizzy, from walking in the heat. Everyone has been sunburned, sometimes quite badly. And many people have suffered the swollen fingers, feeling like sausages, and the funny stumbling at the tail end of a hot hike. This is where it begins. General discomfort, nothing heinous.
A little heat rash. Headache from the glare. Thirst.
The Wellton 26 felt this immediately upon climbing their first hill. They were already tired before they began, perhaps slightly dehydrated from all their journeying and restless sleep. Some of them may have had diarrhea from the bad food and water on their long bus trip. When one of the brothers from Hidalgo said, “This heat is killing me,” he was telling the truth.
The heat becomes personal.
Heat Fatigue.
As you walk, the relentless heat makes your warm spots wet—your armpits, your crotch. Your head sweats, your neck, your skin blows a fine mist like steam to regulate your heat. You’re a big swamp-cooler, with water passing through your membranes and keeping the meltdown at bay. Most of your heat comes out through your head—your head is a chimney. Most of you didn’t think to bring a hat. If you’re from Mexico, your hair is probably black. The sun encounters body heat on a dark field. Heat wrestles there, rising and descending and meeting itself.
Your scalp burns along the part in your hair, or where your hair is thin. Your cheeks, your neck burn. Your eyelids burn, too. And the tips of your ears. Your lips are not only burned by sun, but by wind; they become dehydrated, and they get rough and flaky, and you keep licking them to try to wet them, and they get sanded until they crack and bleed. Minor trouble.
But you still have water, so you’re okay. If you brought beer, you’re an idiot, because alcohol makes you thirstier. The ground is burning your feet—it’s 120 degrees through the soles of your shoes. If you wore sandals, and many do, you are getting sunburns on the tops of your feet. Hither thither is getting in your sandals and giving you minor burns. You might have blisters—water goes through your system to fill them. And now your jug is getting hot—your drinking water is starting to get as hot as coffee.
The desert’s air, like you, is thirsty. It’s sucking up your sweat as fast as you can pump it, so fast that you don’t even know you’re sweating. But you’ve been walking across rough terrain for a couple of miles now, and you are breathing hard. The air comes to your lips and pulls water from you. Every breath dries out your nose, your sinuses, your mouth, your throat. Your tongue: you drink more hot water; your tongue, you take just one more gulp of hot water; your tongue. Desolation drinks you first in small sips, then in deep gulps.
Your spit turns to paste. Your mouth tastes nasty, so you take another little drink. You tell yourself you’ll only sip a couple more times, but to hell with it—you take a big pull off the bottle. Your lungs, now, are leaking moisture to the vampire air. Your tears leak into the sky—eyes dry and scratchy.
The fluid in your lungs helps transport oxygen through the tissues into the blood. Less fluid, less oxygen. You breathe harder, you get drier.
Heat Syncope.
You have a fever, though it’s a fever imposed from the outside. Oddly, your skin is getting colder. Your face, even if you’re a Mexican mestizo, turns pale.
It gets a little hard to talk. When you go to lick your cracking lips, your tongue is dry and sticky. Words break; you speak in half-consonants, chunks of thought. Your tongue! You would have trouble saying “tongue” at this point. Lengua, the word in Spanish, is almost impossible. You talk like a stroke victim.
Your mind is circling a couple of ideas, and you