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Desert Thirst as Disease
This section, “Outside Readings,” includes reprints or abstract
of editorials, features, articles or other published materials that appeared
in various publications and would likely interest readers of the “Arizona
Water Resource” newsletter.
Although written in 1906 the article, “Desert Thirst as Disease”
by W.J. McGee, is still considered one of the most detailed and graphic
descriptions of extreme dehydration ever recorded. The article continues
to be referenced in contemporary works, recently in a book published last
year, “In the Heart of the Sea,” by Nathaniel Philbrick. In
the following excerpt the McGee describes what he calls the “cotton-mouth”
stage of thirst.
The Stage of Functional Derangement. In the incipient phase of pathologic dryness a general febrile condition becomes marked and is accompanied by special local symptoms; saliva and mucus in mouth, throat, and nostrils become scant and sticky, and there is a feeling of dry deadness of membranes extending to the epiglottis and even into the lungs — the sensation of inbreathed air changing from one of refreshing coolness (the chief physical pleasure of life in the desert) to one of oven-like heat; the tongue may cling irritatingly to the teeth, or stick to the roof of the mouth; a lump seems to rise in the throat and starts endless swallowing motions to dislodge it; discomfort and pain run from throat to ears along the eustachian tubes and through the tissues; the tympana may snap and drum annoyingly, while the ear-openings itch and the eyes smart. There is a feeling of fullness in face and head (doubtless due to shrinking of the skin), usually accompanied by headache and throbbing pains in the nape and down the upper spine; the hearing is disturbed and seeing capricious, so that illusions and hallucinations — especially the delectable pictures engendered by the desert mirage — spring constantly unless checked by connected effort; irascibility arises, and companions quarrel and separate, perhaps to reunite for the very satisfaction of further dispute; the solitary sufferer may soliloquize, largely in impassioned invective — though the voice becomes cracked, husky or hoarse, and given to unexpected breaking into high tenor or dropping into an absurd whisper. The intellections are insensibly distorted more and more as the phase advances; prejudices are intensified, unreasoned revulsions arise against persons and things, while water and wetness are subconsciously exalted as the end of all excellence; the victim may gravely, after deliberate discussion in his quavering and ill-controlled voice, discard hat or shoes, — for it is in this stage that Mexicans generally and Americans frequently begin to strip themselves of clothing — or spurn the gold which he has been seeking or the tobacco which has been his solace, or perhaps burden himself with a heavy cask or fragile demijohn. The face grows pinched and care-marked, the eyes bloodshot and perhaps tearful, the movements ill-aimed, the utterances
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capricious, while the temperature rises and the pulse quickens: the sufferer is a walking fever patient, passing or passed into a delirium usually wild and paralyzing in the tenderfoot, but concentrated on a central instinct in the desert habitue — the instinct of the trail, or the way to water. The disordered state of body and brain is often revealed by ceaseless talk: the sufferer strains tongue and throat to “talk and talk and talk, without prevision of the next sentence or memory of the last — and all the talk is of water in some of its inexpressibly captivating aspects. A group of ranchmen, tricked by an earthquake-dried spring, craked and croaked of rivers they had forded in ‘49, of the verdure of the bluegrass region in which one of them was born, of a great freshet in the Hassayamp’ which drowned the family of a friend and irrigated the valley from mountain to mesa, of the acre-inches of water required to irrigate a field seeded to alfalfa, of the lay of the land with respect to flowing wells, of the coyote’s cunning in ‘sensing’ water five feet down in the sand, of the fine watermelons grown on Hank Wilson’s ranch in Salado valley; now and then articulation ceased and lips and tongue moved on in silent mockery of speech for a sentence or two before the sound was missed, when with painful effort the organs were whipped and spurred into action and the talk rambled on and on — all talking slowly, seriously, with appropriate look and gesture, not one consciously hearing a word. When, I was deceived into dependence on the brine of a barranca, in Encinas Desert, thirst came, ... and some of the party babbled continuously of portable apparatus for well-boring, of keeping kine by means of the bisnaga — a savagely spinied cactus yielding poisonless water — and reveling in milk, of the memory of certain mint juleps in famous metropolitan hostelries on the farther border of the continent, of the best form of canteen (which should hold at least two gallons — three would be better); they were bright men, clear and straight and forceful thinkers when fully sane: yet they knew not that their brilliant ideas and grandiloquent phrases were but the ebullition of incipient delirium, and seriously contracted for five gallons of ice-cream to be consumed by three persons on arriving at Hermosillo, and this merely as dessert!” This phase is well known on the range, where many survive it and some delude themselves with the notion that it marks all there is of thirst; and scores of survivors have hit on the same expression to denote it: it is the cotton-mouth phase.
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