Why do I chase the heat?

The heat proves that I exist. The heat proves that I'm alive.

On a chill October morning in 2019, authorities found a dead hiker’s corpse buried under a feet of snow in Mt. Fuji. He was killed by a series of bad decisions, but more literally, hypothermia. The authorities knew where to look, though: the man livestreamedhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJOTOgbGpug his doomed trek up, under the channel name TEDZU. It’s a morbid watch: it’s obvious to anyone paying attention that the man is absolutely unprepared for what lies ahead. Good luck climbing Mt. Fuji in the winter without an ice pick.

The camera stopped rolling midway as the man tumbled down the edge of the summit. It’s likely that an abrupt landing killed him on the spot. Even if it didn’t, though, the cold would probably do the trick.

Granted, the cold is an interesting phenomenon. Heat is a presence, the kinetic energy of molecules escaping as vibration. The cold, by definition, is an absence. It slows down, it deadens. It muffles the air, it darkens the sky, it freezes your cells. It is the process of dampening itself.

As it dampens, however, the cold offers a sort of perverse salvation, as Peter Stark in Frozen Alive puts it. There’s an old adage about hypothermia: “You aren’t dead until you’re warm and dead.” Blood turns into icicles. Your brain turns to frosted slush, but frosted slush doesn’t need oxygen to function. The bacteria that would ravage your body freeze in conjunction with your cells. The cold, in slowing everything down, also preserves. In stasis, nothing can hurt you.

But here’s a different line of thought: The cold preserves, but in only the sense that death does. You cannot preserve life. It’s an oxymoron: life is an active, changing process. To preserve it is to kill it. That’s what the cold does. It preserves, and thereby it kills. Hibernate your way out of the winter; freeze yourself in little sci-fi pods in hopes of some future miraculous medical breakthrough. It doesn’t really matter. The cold killed you already, you’re just hoping for a resurrection.

Did TEDZU feel preserved, lying on the rocky ice of Mt. Fuji? I wouldn’t think so. Sleets of snow preserved his body. His ill-advised livestream preserved his death. Both are proof of his existence, of his life. They are physical, tangible objects that provide testament to him having lived. But there’s the kicker; they’re proof of having lived, not proof of living. His corpse is preserved. That’s all the cold ever preserves. Corpses.

Cold is an absence. Heat is a presence. The presence is the proof. The absence just indicates what there once was.


That said, let’s give the heat some due credit.

On a sweltering day in June, 2019, paramedics rushed an elderly woman dying of heatstroke into the emergency department. Standard procedure was to plunge them into cold water. The hospital, however, didn’t have a bathtub. They improvised with a body bag. It makes for a nice visual: saving a life with a bag meant for corpses. It turned out, however, that this wasn’t just a medical blip or an esoteric case study. The technique ended up being employed later at Seattle’s Harborview Medical Center, as a heat wave smothered the Pacific Northwest for nearly two weeks in 2021. Peak temperatures hit 49.6 °C, as a heat dome enveloped the area, baking bricks and melting asphalt. With more than thousand casualties, body bags quickly became a multi-purpose tool.

Heat affects your body in a number of predictable ways. Sweat glands work overtime trying to evaporate the heat away. The heart pumps blood faster and farther, and blood vessels dilate to maximize flow. The capillaries under your skin fill with hot blood. Your body is well-versed in this; this ain’t its first rodeo. Millions of years of evolution in a hot tropical climate has rendered the human body an astonishingly effective cooling machine.

Of course, your body can’t keep up forever. When the heat kills, it kills violently. Blood flows a bit too fast for your own good. The muscles of your heart strain and tear under its own oscillation. Proteins denature and your enzymes are eviscerated. Colors blur as your brain matter is cooked into a delicacy. In the extreme case, the heat oxidizes your cells directly: fire turns flesh into loose ash ferried away by the wind, leaving behind charred bones. The heat kills with force, and it tries not to leave evidence.

I find that oddly comforting. Dylan Thomas’ Do not go gentle into that good night comes to mind:

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

The cold soothes you in, numbs you and whispers sweet nothings as it saps every bit of life out from your body. The heat kills you by punching you in the face, kicking you in the balls, and calling you slurs. I’d rather rage against the heat than go gently into the cold, frozen night. I’d rather be called a slur than lied to.