Fire Season: Field notes from a wilderness lookout

(NB: Quotes from the book are in italics)

In the early 2000s, Philip Conors spent eight summers serving as a fire lookout for the U.S. Forest Service, stationed in the Gila National Forest in southwestern New Mexico. This book, superficially arranged as a "diary" of one season, is divided into the

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months he spends on duty, isolated from most human contact from April to August. There are lots of great details about the nuts and bolts of how a fire spotter does his job, what the living conditions are like (he doesn't sleep in his lookout tower, though some do; his only companion is his dog, Alice), and his encounters throughout the summer with various wildlife of both the two- and four-legged variety.

It's no wonder our Forest Service brethren think of us lookouts as the freaks on the peaks. We have, in the words of our forebear Edward Abbey, "an indolent, melancholy nature." Our walk home is always uphill. We live alone on the roof of the world, clinging to the rock like condors, fiercely territorial. We ply our trade inside a steel-and-glass room immaculately designed to attract lightning. Our purpose and our pleasure is to watch: study the horizon, ride out the storms, an eagle eye peeled for evidence of flame.

When Connors was writing about the job, the setting, and the wildlife, and musing about why such a solitary existence appeals so much to him (when he has a wife back in town!), I enjoyed this book a lot. He has a gift for expressing his keen observations that made me appreciate a life that other than the solitude sounds pretty terrible to this non-camper. The personal observations are intermingled with some background about the Forest Service, its changing policies toward fighting wildfires (or not), much of which I already knew from reading other books, particularly Timothy Egan's [The Big Burn] but most readers will appreciate the context those sections provide.

Sweet, expansive days of birdsong and sunshine string together, one after another. Through the open tower windows I hear the call of the hermit thrush, one of the most gorgeous sounds in all of nature, a mellifluous warble beginning on a long, clear note. Dark-eyed juncos hop along the ground, searching for seeds among the grass and pine litter. All is quiet on the radio. Not a single fire burns in southwest New Mexico. I swim languidly in the waters of solitude, unwilling to rouse myself to anything but the most basic of labors. Brush teeth. Piss in the meadow. Boil water for coffee. Observe clouds. Note greening of Gambel oak. Read old notebooks for what this date has offered in other seasons.

Less successful were his railings against who he sees as the "villains" who threaten the beauty of our unspoiled lands. Ranchers, and their cattle come in for some particularly harsh treatment, as do commercial entities primarily interested in extracting lumber and minerals, and the governmental agencies that facilitate such commercial uses. Which isn't to say that I disagree with much of what he says, but his harsh tone in these sections is so at odds with the gentle descriptions elsewhere that they come off as jarring. They harsh the mellow, you might say.

Soon I come upon evidence that several cattle have been munching on the grass, their piles of dung still wet. They've strayed several miles out of their owner's allotment on the forest to the west, probably through a broken fence. These four-legged locusts, with their shit-smeared rumps and moon-eyed stares, flies orbiting each of their orifices, have done more than anything else to inflict widespread damage on the public lands of the American West. Yet given the power and persistence of the cattlemen's lobby, they continue to graze on the public domain, trampling riparian areas, hastening erosion, pulverizing wildlife habitat, disturbing the fire regime, and generally wreaking havoc on the land wherever they roam.

If you need an active plot to keep you reading, this probably isn't the book for you. Not much happens here: Some "smokes" get spotted, some fish get caught, some tents get pitched, some bears get spotted, some weather happens. It's all very tranquil and soothing, for the most part, which also meant that I found it hard to read long stretches at a time. I was enjoying what I was reading, but it was just a tad slow-moving. I never quite reached this nirvana that Connors describes for himself:

That thing some people call boredom, in the correct if elusive dosage, can be a form of inoculation against itself. Once you struggle through that swamp of monotony, where time bogs down in excruciating ticks of equilibrium, to reach a kind of waiting and watching that verges on what I can only call the holy. I never quite achieved that holy epiphany while reading this book, but I'm still glad I took this walk on the wild side. And one final quote before I leave you:


Afternoons the turkey vultures circle, indolent and bloody-headed, sniffing out the presence of death. Their arrogant flight reminds me that my time here—on this mountain, on this orb—is short. If I were to slip and fall of the lookout tower, it wouldn't be long before I passed into a new link of the food chain. A not unpleasant fate, perhaps: beats the stuffy prison of the graveyard tomb. So many dreary neighbors. So little sunlight. We're all carrion eventually, whether for birds or for worms. I'd rather my remnants soar over mountains than slither beneath sod.

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