A Fire Lookout’s Tale, from Philip Connors (Review)

If there’s anything we’ve learned from the books on the subject, it’s that the life of the fire spotter is what you make of it. Kerouac, Abbey, Mclean, Snyder–all have taken their crack at a government-sponsored mountain-top hermitage, and come down with different reports.

“Oil the saws, sharpen axes,” wrote Snyder in “Things to Do Around a Lookout”: “Learn the names of all the peaks you see and which is highest–there are hundreds.” Kerouac, as Philip Connors tells you in Fire Season: Field Notes from a Wilderness Lookout, went a little batty, whipsawing violently between wild blue detachment and acid pools of loneliness.

Since Connors is well aware of the rarefied company he’s keeping, he sets your expectations lower:

Gary Snyder practiced calligraphy and meditation. Edward Abbey pitched horseshoes with his pa on the rim of the Grand Canyon. Jack Kerouac studied the Diamond Sutra, wrote an epic letter to his mother. If I were a more dutiful son I’d do the same. Instead I shoot Frisbee golf.

Today’s modern world continually lowers the bar for what’s considered remarkably solitary behavior, so the notion of purposefully spending months out of range of internet and cell phone is, I’m sure, worth a book in itself, even without the soul searching, environmental sermonizing, and fire spotting thrown in.

But after eight seasons in the Gila National Forest, Connors has more than enough story to spare (a late-in-the-book detour to 9/11, when he was a lowly copyeditor at the Wall Street Journal is jarring and is at best tenuously relevant). And he’s wise enough to know that he’s there in time to see history–”Ninety percent of American lookout towers have been decommissioned, and only a few hundred of us remain, mostly in the West and Alaska.”

Fire Season is a lot of things–a history lesson on the Forest Service’s fire fighting, its motivations and methods; a geography lesson that takes in the Southwest’s last redoubts of wilderness; an investigation into what wilderness is; a cranky, visionary memoir from a cultural dropout; a negotiation between the self-for-others and the inward self.

By page 39, you’re embarking into the politics of fire suppression and letting it burn, and the tension that exists today as people, much as they do in flood zones, insist on edging their way into wildfire zones and settling down. The cast of characters–the literary forebears already mentioned, Aldo Leopold, Gifford Pinchot, John Muir, firefighters, drop-in hikers–would obscure the fact that Connors is mostly alone in the middle of nowhere, but for the fact that he celebrates solitary confinement:

For most people, I know, this little room would be a prison cell or catafalque. My movements, admittedly, are limited. I can lie on the cot, sit on the stool, pace five paces before I must turn on my heel and retrace my steps. I can, if I choose, read, type, stretch, or sleep. I can study once again the contours of the mountains, the sensuous shapes of the mesas’ edge, the intricate drainages fingering out of the hills. On windy days in spring I turn my gaze upon the desert, a feast of eye on country if you like your country sparse.

72-mph winds, cold days of clouded sight, lightning strikes, and run-ins with bears do little to shake Connors in his conviction that he’s got a pretty sweet deal going in his aerie. Yet he knows it can’t last–his wife has been more than tolerant of his annual vacations from their relationship–and it’s this bittersweet undercurrent that lend import to little hikes in the area, and drama to the week that he learns he may be called down early.

“I don’t remember when I started thinking of this place,” writes Connors of a ridge he visits, “as a shrine to those I’ve loved and lost, but that is what it has become, a spot where I gather detritus from the living world, reminders of the transitory paths we trace on earth, memento mori.”