Fire Season (10 page)

M
ay is relentless with wind. No matter the length or sweetness of a reprieve, the wind always returns, gales to test the endurance of anyone exposed in a high place. Trees that elsewhere grow a hundred feet tall here hug the ground like shrubs, shrunken, gnarled, and twisted, as if cowering from an invisible foe. In spring, though, the foe is briefly visible: out of the desert to the south the sandstorms encroach like a thing alive and malevolent. There’s no place to hide. My tower rises up like a taunt. I search my innermost self for a haven, a hideout, a moment of remembered thoughtless bliss. For long periods—minutes that feel like hours, hours that feel like days—I cower like the trees, stunned and borderline cataleptic. The guy-wire cables off the corners of the tower twirl like jump ropes, and every so often they cut a gust in half and make it scream; I startle from the cocoon where I’ve been hiding. I stand, look around, make sure there’s no smoke to be seen. I glass the distant hills being swallowed in dust. Now and then a cloud rises off one of the open-pit copper mines thirty miles southwest, beyond the edge of the forest; immediately my eye is drawn that way. The detection of such shapes is, after all, my purpose in life. Five seconds, though, and I’ve ruled them out. Their color and their movement don’t jibe with a smoke. Too yellow, too stationary; one minute here, the next minute gone. Early smoke is almost always white and almost always lingers.

Throughout the afternoon the visible world shrinks. Air takes on texture and color. A pine needle cluster the size of a squirrel’s tail darts past the window so quickly my eyes can’t follow it, although I’m sure I saw it there briefly, sixty feet above the peak and soaring like a bird. I begin to wonder if I’m hallucinating. I know for sure I’m vibrating, along with the floor and the walls of my tower; I feel as if I’m standing on a dance floor built on springs.

The radio squawks. I have to turn it up to hear it.

“Dispatch, Snow Peak.”

“Snow Peak, dispatch.”

“A weather update for you. I have winds of fifty-five to sixty-five, gusts to eighty, out of the southwest. Steady like that for the last half hour.”

“Copy that. Thanks for the update. Dispatch clear, sixteen to twenty.”

Snow Peak is usually windiest, being 800 feet taller than its nearest competitor—my peak—for tallest lookout on the Gila. My gusts reach only seventy-two miles per hour, with a steady breeze at forty-five to fifty. I try my damnedest, but—curled in the fetal position on my cot, listening to the snap and howl of the guy wires that anchor my tower in bedrock—I can’t find much consolation in knowing it could be worse.

Some nights 6:00 p.m. comes and I find myself reluctant to leave my room with a view. This time of year the hammered mesa tops glow pale blond in the low-angled light, and glades of aspen can be seen greening up here and there in a kind of mosaic where the old McKnight Fire burned, each dense cluster at a slightly different pace—one vegetation type, a dozen different shades of green. Under the evening sun they have a fluffy look to them. But on windy days such as this I bail a few minutes early, pack a sandwich and a bottle of water for the trail. The roar has driven me to a deep disquiet. I need to get off the mountain.

Of all my evening destinations, the pond may be my favorite. Tucked out of the prevailing winds in a kind of alcove, a mile and a half below the peak, it holds water most of the year and is visited by elk, deer, bear, and turkeys; their tracks are often visible in the mud. Alice loves it here too. Usually she opts for a soak in the pond’s fetid water—unless she finds a pile of bear scat to flop in first, in which case she rolls around on her back, kicking her legs in the air as she smears herself in the stink. Few things make her happier than finding something dead or dungish in which to roll. The reek of it is a kind of talisman for her. It says,
Beware, all ye who travel here: I am as mean and nasty as I smell.

Around the pond this time of year, the spearlike leaves of
Iris missouriensis
—commonly known as the Western blue flag—poke through the mud, straining toward the sunlight. The most drought-resistant of wild irises, it sings the song of springtime in the high country. Out of the hundreds of flowers forming pregnant buds, precisely one has burst, exposing three delicate petals traced with threadlike purple veins. I sit cross-legged next to it and rest awhile. High on the cliffs above me I can hear the wind roar, but here in my watery bower all is calm. For the first time all day I’m able to hear myself think, were I to have a thought. The wind has left me hollowed out, though. I haven’t spoken a word since I called in the weather ten hours ago.

H
uman contact here is the more cherished for its rarity, and my favorite encounters have been with that peculiar subspecies known as the thru-hiker. Their aim: 3,000 miles on foot in five months, a hike along the Continental Divide Trail (CDT) from the Mexican border to Glacier National Park before the snow flies in October. Twenty miles a day, every day. I know them instantly by their fancy walking sticks, their sunburnt skin and general air of dinginess, and the scratches on their shins if they’re wearing shorts, which come from having bushwhacked through the thorny brush to my south. By the time they arrive on my peak they’ve walked a hundred miles on a shortcut from the Mexican border, headed for a junction with the Continental Divide just northwest of me. The actual divide runs north out of the bootheel of New Mexico, but that way lies desert, road walking, and a land of dangerously scarce water. By heading straight north from Columbus, New Mexico, site of Pancho Villa’s 1916 raid across the border, the thru-hikers save perhaps forty miles—two days of walking—and can reach the true divide within a day of seeing me. There’s no such thing as a day off in their lexicon, only what they call a “zero day.” For these people walking is joy, not work, yet daily mileage remains an axiom of progress. Their resupply points have all been planned in advance. Falling off the pace can mean going hungry. Sometimes friends or family back home will mail them boxes of good trail food, which await at rural post offices spaced between seven and ten days of walking apart. Others take side trips or hitch rides into little towns near the divide, restocking on gas-station food: Doritos, beef jerky.

I find these folks unfailingly gracious and cheerful, with their lightweight equipment, their hard legs and big smiles. They’re a self-selected bunch, at ease in the out-of-doors, but for people who’ve been walking close to a marathon every day they appear almost goofily invigorated. Within moments of their arrival they shed their packs and ask to climb the tower. They’re a week into their five-month journey and want to see where they’ve been and where they’re headed. I’m always happy to show them what I can: a couple-hundred-mile stretch of their walk, from the Mexican border to the country up beyond the Middle Fork of the Gila River. It’s a land of stark vistas and rough country they’ve traversed—dry, wind-scoured, humming with ancient mystery, dotted with hidden petroglyphs.

With most CDT hikers I find a sort of mutual envy. I admire their courage and stamina and sheer gumption, their tolerance for every sort of backwoods discomfort. They admire my solitude, my view, the countercultural weirdness of my job. Each of us has a taste for wild country. I sit above it, letting it come to me in color and shadow and light. They pass through it on calloused feet, stopping to make camp each night in a strange new slice of the world. Their challenges are profoundly physical: rattlesnakes, biting flies, blisters, screaming Achilles tendons, thunderstorms, extremes of heat and cold, all the pleasures and pitfalls of life outdoors on the move. Mine are existential: time, space, the sweep of geologic epochs written on the view out my windows, which remind me I’m but a mote in the grand saga of Earth’s history.

When they leave, I often wish I could go a little ways with them.

The CDT is one of the three long north–south walks in America—the others being the Appalachian Trail and the Pacific Crest Trail—and by far the most difficult. For those who undertake these cross-country treks, nicknames are virtually obligatory. The first to greet me this year are a pair who go by the names Reno and Slouch. Reno is a slim woman, dark-eyed and olive-skinned; Slouch is a tall, pale, sunburned Brit with a growth of bright red beard. They are amiable visitors, grateful for fresh water, happy to step inside the cabin and drink a cup of coffee from my French press. I offer a snack of crackers and grapes. Reno reciprocates with some hand-rolled cigarettes. Slouch says he’s from Southampton, in the south of England, and because he has a bookish look I offer him a recent copy of the
London Review of Books
, for which he seems both shyly grateful and a little bit stunned. “If you had told me, before I began this queer odyssey, that I’d meet someone in the middle of the woods of New Mexico with a subscription to the
LRB
, I’d have told you you were stark raving mad,” he says.

Having seen no one in days, they are eager to tell me the story of how they were shadowed by a Border Patrol agent on the very first day of their walk. He came crawling out of the brush in the desert behind them, just as two guys in a Border Patrol vehicle pulled up ahead, all of them armed with pistols and wearing wrap-around shades. The agents took one good look at their quarry and realized their error; they expressed bafflement that anyone in right mind would take a stroll to Canada for pleasure. Earlier Reno had taken a few pictures of the Mexican town of Palomas from the American side of the border. This aroused the suspicions of the authorities, and she and Slouch were forced to show papers despite not having crossed into Mexico. Reno worried about her passport smelling of marijuana, having kept the two together in the same little bag. She hadn’t expected an ID check in the lightly inhabited desert of the American Southwest. Luckily, the border agent did not have a first-class sniffer, or her journey might have ended before it began.

“We’re not going to see any more of them, are we?” she asks, and I tell her that from here on out they should be in the clear.

A few days later a CDT hiker appears at 9:00 a.m., another red-bearded fellow, this time named Dave. I know what he’s up to before he even opens his mouth, partly because of the week-old beard, which is de rigueur for male thru-hikers. Dave camped the previous night at Wright’s Saddle, not far from my truck. Like most of his kind, his first question is:
Have you seen any others?
They’re always interested in the progress of their fellows, whom I’ve seen and when. Many announce their intentions over the winter on Internet forums, asking for advice on routes and logistics, so a certain camaraderie exists among people who’ve never met but are undertaking the same grueling journey. When I mention Reno and Slouch, he smiles and says, “I bet I can catch them within the week. One person’s always quicker than two.”

Dave is the most philosophical of the thru-hikers I’ve talked with. He tells me how he worked on an organic farm in Hawaii with a woman he loved deeply until their relationship curdled for reasons he did not understand. Having been with her some time, having lived in a little hut with her, built a life with her, the sudden loss of it all was like a punch to the gut. He set out on the Pacific Crest Trail last year seeking—he knew not what, exactly. A connection with wilderness. A means of forgetting. A means of remembering. A means of making peace with pain. The metronomic quality of walking allowing him to feel or not feel as he wished. The attainment of a state like a trance. Coming down off Fuller Ridge in California, over a landscape charred by a wildfire, he felt himself overcome. He leaned against a dead tree, gripped it for balance. The tears began. His nose ran. He felt every emotion at once: sadness, anger, joy, horror, love, hope, despair; every cell in his body quivered in anguish and ecstasy. He both lost himself and felt himself more intensely than at any other moment in his life. And in the aftermath of this moment—this vision, this transcendence, this coming into the world, this death and rebirth—he felt emptied and calm. Ready to begin his life anew. Open to mystery and beauty, reconciled in some ineffable way to loss.

“It was as if I had tapped the source of some divinity,” he says. “Our language does not contain the words to describe it. Perhaps a better way to say it is that some divinity coursed through me; I became the conduit. I was holy and I was nothing and I was inseparable from the world around me, no boundary marking the charred landscape and my self and where they met and merged. I’ve never experienced anything like it without the aid of psychedelics. Now I can’t imagine doing anything else but walking in the wilderness. I’ve shed every worldly and material ambition; I have no desire for anything but that complex register of feelings I can only get on a months-long walk alone in the desert and the mountains. Boredom, ecstasy, hunger, thirst, blisters, sunburn, mania, longing—the whole crazy carnival.”

And then, having bared his soul to a stranger in the middle of the woods, having queried me about good sources of water in the miles ahead, he shakes my hand, wishes me well, marches across the meadow, and disappears into the trees.

N
ot everyone who wanders into this corner of the forest is a thru-hiker—far from it. Most folks are simply out for a day hike. Then again, there are others embarked on even stranger and less definable journeys than the quest to trace the CDT. One evening I meet a peculiar woodsman of the American West, a roving packer by the name of Dane, from Montana. I am on my customary evening stroll when I hear a bell and a voice. The bell turns out to be strung around the neck of one of Dane’s horses. “In case a bear comes around and she runs off, I can find her again,” he explains. I sit with him at his camp next to the pond. He tells me he moved from Michigan to Montana eighteen years ago, bought a horse and a book about breaking horses, and now rides through the West 300 days a year with his saddle horse and two more for packing. His girlfriend mails him food so he can ride pretty much freely for months on end, detouring to the nearest post office when necessary. He goes home a couple of times a year but always strikes out again, for Wyoming, Idaho, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, California, Oregon, and Washington. This year he wintered on the Rio Grande, thirty miles east of here, while one of his horses recovered from an illness. Now that she’s healthy they’re back on the move.