Friday 8.21.09: somewhere in Southern California

...or at least further South than I'm used to. The landscape is brown grass, or is it dirt? Brown hills, some kind of green crops growing to the left, some trees shading cars and farm equipment to the right. Wendy just said the thermostat is reading 102 outside, but in the car it's cool, air conditioned and comfortable.

We left at about 10 this morning. I packed my duffel bag and sleeping bag into the roof bag on my friend's car, which they had altered to say "Poof Fag" on the back. Last night was surreal. My normal weekday work exhaustion, brain full of self-preoccupying thoughts, body seeming to expect me to get up and go to work today.

I've been reading The Devil's Highway by Luis Alberto Urrea, a horrifying account of a bunch of men who died near the area I'm going to. Yesterday on the bus I got to the section that describes death by heat stroke. Each stage, in great detail.

Your blood is as low as it can get. Dehydration has reduced all your inner streams to sluggish mudholes. Your heart pumps harder and harder to get fluid and oxygen to your organs. Empty vessels within you collapse. Your sweat runs out.

With no sweat, your body's swamp-coolor breaks. The thermostat goes haywire. You are having a core meltdown.

Your temperature redlines--you hit 105, 106, 108 degrees. Your body panics and dilates all blood capillaries near the surface, hoping to flood your skin with blood to cool it off. You blush. Your eyes turn red: blood vessels burst, and later, the tissue of the whites literally cooks until it goes pink, then a well-done crimson.

Your skin gets terribly sensitive. It hurts, it burns. Your nerves flame. Your blood heats under your skin. Clothing feels like sandpaper.

Some walkers at this point strip nude. Originally, BORSTAR rescuers thought this stripping was a delirious panic, an attempt to cool off at the last minute. But often, the clothing was eerily neat, carefully folded and left in nice little piles beside the corpses. They realized that walkers couldn't stand their nerve-endings being chafed by their clothes. The walkers stripped to get free of the irritation.

Once they're naked, they're surely hallucinating. They dig burrows in the soil, apparently thinking they'll escape the sun. Once underground, of course, they bake like a pig at a luau. Some dive into sand, thinking it's water, and they swim in it until they pass out. They choke to death, their throats filled with rocks and dirt. Cutters can only assume they think they're drinking water.

Your muscles, lacking water, feed on themselves. They break down and start to rot. Once rotting in you, they dump rafts of dying cells into your already sludgy bloodstream.

Proteins are peeling off your dying muscles. Chunks of cooked meat are falling out of your organs, to clog your other organs. The system closes down in a series. your kidneys, your bladder, your heart. They jam shut. Stop. Your brain sparks. Out. You're gone.

I don't know what I'm getting into.