, the great mythmaker of the American West, who died earlier this month, described the landscapes of the borderlands, he often turned the heat into a creature that had an almost physical form. The heat is “crenellated,” fashioned into “serried planes”; it rises, waves, blazes, and shimmers; horses and men, living and dead, dissolve or crumble into it.
And those numbers aren’t the worst of it. In Corpus Christi, the heat index, a measure of temperature combined with humidity, reached a hundred and twenty-five—close to the level at which it becomes highly likely that the human body will no longer be able to regulate itself, meaning that heat stroke, with the possibility of coma and death, sets in. A fourteen-year-old boy died last week while hiking in Big Bend National Park, where the temperature was well over a hundred degrees.
Another effect of a heat dome is to fuel a series of storms—where its high pressure meets a low-pressure system along its edge—known as ridge riders or a ring of fire, and last week a spate of tornadoes hit the Central Plains, capriciously destroying homes. Hailstones the size of grapefruits were reported in Nebraska. In a dispiriting convergence, the northerly reaches of the heat were not so distant from the southernmost swoop of the latest plumes of smoke from the Canadian wildfires.
Scandalously, according to a Texas A. & M. report last year, seventy per cent of the state’s prisons do not have air-conditioning in living areas. The temperature inside those enclosed, often windowless spaces can be higher than it is outdoors—a carceral heat dome. Earlier this year, a measure to install air-conditioning passed in the Texas House, only to die in the state Senate, despite the fact that the state has a budget surplus.
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