Heat (5 page)

Sedan lifted a dome of desert earth thirty stories into the air. Beneath the ground, the earth was vaporized, leaving a cavity of heated gases. The gases cooled and contracted, lowering the pressure within the cavity. The ceiling of the cavity collapsed, chimneying, and the desert fell inward. The crater is as unnatural as rock art. At one-fifth of a mile across and more than three hundred feet deep, it is the ultimate graffiti.

Four years after the explosion, fifteen pounds of Sedan’s radioactive soil were boxed up, shipped to Alaska, and spread on the ground at a place called Ogotoruk Valley, above the Arctic Circle, thirty-two miles from the tiny village of Point Hope, at a location where the federal government once planned to dig a harbor using hydrogen bombs. Upon hearing this, Ogotoruk Valley becomes another place I must visit.

In Hiroshima, half a world away and more than a half century ago, survivors of the world’s first atom bomb attack fell ill. Most survivors who had been within a half mile of ground zero, near the Gokoku Shrine, died within hours or days of the blast. At first doctors thought that they were dying from burns or from injuries caused by the shock wave. The doctors were moving quickly from one victim to the next, treating burns and lacerations and broken bones in what had become, in an instant, a ruined city. But very quickly a pattern emerged: nausea, headache, diarrhea, malaise, massive hair loss, and fever. What is now called acute radiation syndrome (ARS) was killing off survivors. Among other things, the radiation attacked blood cells as they were generated in bone marrow. A few days later, when these damaged blood cells entered the bloodstream, survivors fell ill.

At Hiroshima, two key symptoms became apparent: high fever and low white blood cell counts. Patients with fevers that remained high or with white blood cell counts that dropped below one thousand generally died. Fevers could climb as high as 106 degrees.

In Old English, fever was
fefor,
said to have come from the Latin word
febris,
which itself may have come from the Latin word
fovere,
meaning “to warm” or “to heat,” as in warming a kettle of tea or heating a bowl of soup.
Fovere
can be traced to an earlier word, something like
dhegh,
from the hypothetical proto-Indo-European language of nearly six thousand years ago, where it may have meant “burn” and may have led in other directions to mean “heat” and then “day,” recognizing that daylight brought warmth. There is also a possible link to the Sanskrit
bhur,
meaning “to be restless.” In German, it is
fieber,
and in Swiss it is
feber.

Ancient Egyptians, Chinese, and Mesopotamians had dissected enough bodies to understand anatomy, but fever was attributed to evil spirits.

Pliny the Elder, Roman soldier and scholar, completed his thirty-seven volume
Natural History
in AD 77, filling it with observations and anecdotes, covering topics from astrology to agriculture. He wrote of fever: “Some persons are distressed by a perpetual fever. Such was the case with C. Mæcenas; during the last three years of his life, he could never get a single moment’s sleep. Antipater of Sidon, the poet, was attacked with fever every year, and that only on his birthday; he died of it at an advanced age.” Pliny wrote that all men experienced fever, with the exception of one particularly healthy specimen, Xenophilus the musician, who lived to be 105. Pliny knew about malaria and recognized its pattern of high temperatures coming and going, cycling through as if driven by a clock.

Years after writing about fever, Pliny died during the eruption of Vesuvius.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, in the time of Faraday, the German physician Carl Wunderlich grew interested in fevers. Over sixteen years, he compiled data on twenty-five thousand patients. He used a thermometer that could require twenty minutes to stabilize. Wunderlich promoted the reality of fever as a symptom of illness rather than an illness in its own right. In 1871 he wrote, “All abnormal temperatures denote a disease, but all diseases do not show an abnormal temperature.” From another passage: “The temperature may be determined with a nicety which is common to few other phenomena. The temperature can neither be feigned nor falsified. We may conclude the presence of some disturbance in the economy from the mere fact of altered temperature.”

Wunderlich was not interested in why warm-bloodedness and certain sicknesses were accompanied by the fever response. “And though theoretical questions as to human temperature and kindred subjects must not be overlooked,” he wrote, “my purpose has been to prepare from these notes a practical book.”

Fever arises when a foreign substance, such as a lipopolysaccharide in the cell wall of a bacterium, triggers the release of cytokines from white blood cells. The cytokines signal a part of the brain just above the brainstem and straight back from the bridge of the nose—a part of the brain called the hypothalamus—to turn up the heat. Muscles tense, the body shivers, and veins constrict near the body’s surface. The body generates more than the normal amount of heat and sheds less. The white blood cells’ response to bacteria resets the body’s thermostat. The set point moves from just under 99 degrees to 101 or 102 degrees. Or dangerously higher.

The fever, under some circumstances, helps the patient. White blood cells proliferate when the body is warm. As a consequence, certain disease-causing microbes suffer. Under other circumstances, fever is one more discomfort along the short road to death. At 103 degrees the patient begins to lose the normal sense of self and starts to drift into a haze of fading self-awareness. The patient’s set point—the normal temperature of the warm-blooded creature—has been reset, the internal thermostat turned up. The patient, forehead burning, cannot feel warm.

Between 1348 and 1350, one-third of Europe’s population succumbed to bubonic plague, with fever and swelling in the armpits, groin, and neck. Another sickness known as the Sweat, perhaps a form of hantavirus, struck England in 1485, 1508, 1517, and 1528. It left patients at first very cold, then suddenly hot and sweating, and then often dead. In the 1520s, smallpox brought by Cortés’s thugs overwhelmed the Aztec empire, bumping up their thermostats, killing millions, leaving behind stories of the dead abandoned in their homes. Near the end of the eighteenth century, yellow fever took about one in twenty New Yorkers: fever and chills, internal bleeding, headache, backache, slow heartbeat, vomiting, jaundice, all followed by a short intermission and apparent recovery, but in the final act a return of the symptoms and ultimately death. Deadly influenza visited the world in 1732 and 1733, in 1761, in 1775 and 1776, in 1847 and 1848, in 1850 and 1851, and again and again, each time bringing fever and death, especially in naive populations, those without previous experience of the influenza virus, populations like those of Hawaii and Alaska.

From an Alaskan narrative written during the Great Sickness of 1900, which seems to have been a strain of influenza accompanied by measles and smallpox that came into the region with gold prospectors and miners:

From the famous Alaskan missionary doctor Joseph H. Romig:

In my Death Valley hotel room, I listen to the air conditioner and read about Kuda Box. Born in Kashmir in 1905, he became a firewalker at age fourteen. At thirty, he walked for Harry Price, a well-known psychic researcher in England. Price called the walks “experiments.”

In the experiments, Box walked across a fire pit that measured eleven feet long, six feet wide, and nine inches deep. The fire, made from “some seven tons of oak logs,” as well as charcoal, ten gallons of paraffin, and “fifty copies of the
Times,
” was ignited at 8:20 in the morning. Box walked at three in the afternoon, when the surface temperature in the fire pit was 800 degrees. The temperature within the bed of coals was higher, reportedly at 2,500 degrees. Kuda Box walked through twice.

“He was quite unharmed,” Price wrote.

The experiment did not end there. “Some amateurs who attempted to duplicate the feat were burned,” Price reported, “but not severely.” Price could not explain why Kuda Box could walk through unharmed, while the amateurs, presumably volunteers, could not.

“Firewalking,” he wrote, “was in no sense a trick.” He thought it might be an act of faith or the result of short contact with the hot coals or “that there was a knack in walking.”

If it was an act of faith, it was a faith I envied. If it was the physics of short contact time, so be it. If it was a knack, it was a knack I could develop.

I find a video clip about Tolly Burkan, another firewalker. Burkan was born in New York City in 1948 and later moved to California. Since the 1970s, he has promoted the benefits of firewalking: confidence building, spiritual renewal, healing, team building, something to break the tedium of day-to-day life.

In the video clip, Burkan talks to students of the Firewalking Institute of Research and Education. “The next time you’re in a situation that used to intimidate you,” Burkan tells them, “you will remember, ‘I walked on fire, and if I can do that, certainly I can go in there and ask for a raise!’”

Burkan, slender, balding, wearing a tie, talks to the camera from a stage of sandy ground in a clearing surrounded by scrubby trees. “When you are in the right state of mind,” he says, “the blood flows through the soles of your feet and takes the temperature away from the tissue.”