(By the way. All I want to listen to lately is Bruce Springsteen's "Live in Dublin." I'm not even a huge Bruce fan (despite living 5 years in Jersey). But I can't get enough of it. Can not. Thanks, dude.)
Anyway, I'm nearing a point of being able to leave the house and get back to things, and I'm even feeling pretty good about finishing up some badges I'd started and stopped and started again (I'm looking at you, aviation and business. Speaking of business, there's something about that coming in the next few days. So you know.) But still, really, I'm thinking about heat. Earlier this week, I started thinking about green leaves and wound up dealing with racism a hundred years ago. Today may be more of the same.
See, I continued on into the Handbook's thoughts on what to do if you just couldn't keep cool -- and remember, since air conditioning units weren't commercially available until after the Handbook was written. Prior to about 1914 (when the first air conditioned home was built in, of all places, Minneapolis (buh? really, Atlanta?)), home cooling was largely accomplished via ridiculous setups involving fans blowing across bricks of ice. Useful if you have an iceman and a LOT of ice, but still. Beside the point. Window units weren't available for purchase until after World War 2, and remember, while both of my grandfathers fought in WW2, neither was even born when the Handbook came out. So there was a whole lot of time between those two events.
Clearly, then, it was time to research the Handbook and heatstroke. Full disclosure: I had heat exhaustion once, and it was miserable. I worked at Mystic Seaport on the Sabino, a tiny steamboat that legend has it James Taylor once worked on. While I was supposed to be a deckhand, my duties were a little more expansive -- each morning, I loaded off the previous day's ashes from the boiler, then loaded on 1/2 ton of coal (with a wheelbarrow! I briefly had superdeveloped shoulder muscles, you'd best believe) and wood to make a fire. The captain, a fellow named Stu who lived on his sailboat (in the East River during the year, but for this particular summer in the Mystic River), showed me how to pilot, and the engineer (whose preternatural sense for when an attractive lady walked by taught me more about how many adult men work than, well, being an adult woman has) showed me how to build the fire and shovel the coal.
One night, I managed to sweet talk the engineer into letting me shovel for the duration of a trip down the river. It was a hot summer day (kind of like today, really), and I think a wedding was going on. I wanted to show how tough I was, and I was all suited up in long pants and a workshirt, and I was pretending not to mind that it was 140 degrees in the engine room. And was pretending not to have had a big bowl of hot clam chowder for dinner. I made it down to the first big bend in the river, maybe 20 minutes out, and I was doing a pretty solid job until I started to puke. Oh man. I've been sick since, but it was a bad one. I spent the rest of the trip lying on the top deck, in front of the wheelhouse. (I don't think the wedding guests noticed. I hope. Sorry, guys!) Anyway, it was just a shuddery feeling, the kind of weakness you feel after you're starting to get better from the flu but before you're ready to get up from the couch, or after you get off the roller coaster but before you want to get on another one.
John picked me up from the dock and got me home (I threw up in his car) and into an old-style cold water bath. That's not me in the picture, and I don't actually know who it is, but the internet is great. Besides, that guy has a way better beard than I do. Regardless, he dosed me up with a bathtub, Epsom salt, and Gatorade. (The Epsom salt arrived again later that summer when I nearly impaled my hand on sharp wood, but that's all there is to that story. I'm just real klutzy.)
According the Handbook, John messed up big time (sorry, dude).
He didn't give me any stimulants. I'm not sure what stimulants they're suggesting in the Handbook, but I'm idly curious. Cocaine? (I'm not kidding.) Caffeine? Tobacco? All of them at once, in the craziest cold water bath and drug festival in my own personal history? One can only hope. This is really, though, an example of when old time medical knowledge fails completely. See, stimulants, it turns out, can actually increase dehydration, and can increase the incidence of heat exhaustion. Oops.
Want to know why else I'm thinking about old medical advice that can kill you? Jon Clinch's Kings of the Earth came out last week, and aside from being the single most spectacular book I've read maybe ever (to the point where I have to stop every few paragraphs lest I become totally overwhelmed by it), it also features a hell of a lot of old timey medicine, involving salt pork, snowbanks, and tourniquets made of feed sacks. Yes, Jon's my dad (and WONDERFUL!), but I'm telling you that Kings is the real thing. The LA Times loves it! Oprah loves it! And so do I.
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