Fire Season (13 page)

The essentials of my current line of work—anonymity, discretion, watchfulness—are not so different from those demanded of a copy editor, minus the need for efficiency. The lookout life fell into my lap, no effort required. It came to me, in fact, on vacation—seemed like one long vacation itself. I surveyed my past and saw only blind striving; I played out my future and saw an abyss: day after day, the guillotine of an evening deadline, stretching into the murky distance. I looked long into the abyss and I jumped. This is where I landed. How could I refuse such a sweet summer sinecure? That, at its essence, is the story of my talent for sloth. I tried it for the first time in my life. I liked it. The plague of Midwestern Catholic guilt on my conscience notwithstanding, I often feel I could work this mountain as long as I walk upright on earth.

But I won’t. I know I won’t. Other priorities must be accounted for, among them Martha’s long-term career goals—she’d like to be a nurse practitioner someday, and the schooling for that will take us out of state. She will be here tomorrow, her first visit of the season. Her arrival is the impetus I need to rouse myself from squalor. In the evening I sweep the outhouse, heat three pans of water for a bath, haul the tin tub onto the porch. A rudimentary bath, the water maybe two inches deep, but satisfying: most of the cleaning action results from splashing water on myself. There will be fresh occasions to let myself go completely feral and to wallow in my own glorious stink, but this is not one of them, not when Martha is driving forty miles and hiking five more to see me. I emerge from the tub feeling cleansed, rejuvenated, though perhaps I should sport a temporary tattoo in a sleek sans serif font as I shiver in the breeze on the porch: Objects Between Legs Are Larger Than They Appear.

A
couple of times a season a day hiker works up the nerve to ask a personal question, and the exchange usually goes something like this:

“So, son, just curious—you’re not married, are you?”

“In winter I’m married. In summer I have a girlfriend who pays an occasional visit. Lucky for me, they’re the same woman. Simplifies matters. Keeps me out of trouble.”

The hiker chuckles uncertainly, trying to wrap his mind around my riddle.

I met Martha in the spring of 2003. After my first half-season in the lookout, I returned to New York with the notion that I could make a living as a writer. This notion proved false, so I cashed out my
Wall Street Journal
401(k), paid the punitive tax penalty, and lived for five months on what was left. By the time March rolled around, I was selling my books for cash at the Strand bookstore and counting the days till I returned to New Mexico—this time, I thought, for good.

Silence, cunning, exile: I would make that mantra my own.

There was a bar down the street from my apartment in Queens where I liked to sit alone and drink a couple of beers after a day’s work at the typewriter. I didn’t go there for conversation or companionship, though I always mimed pleasantries with the bartenders, who’d come to know me as well as circumspect people separated by a bar allow themselves to be known in a city of 8 million people, which is to say hardly at all. I went there to watch, to eavesdrop, to slip the cage of the self for a while. Since I’d begun my career as a scribe-for-hire, I hadn’t missed office life at all, but reading and writing and thinking all day did have the potential to make me socially strange, and I knew it wasn’t advisable to shun human contact altogether. Not just yet, anyway: I’d be alone soon enough. In the meantime, watching and listening allowed me to keep my equilibrium, avoid going around mumbling to myself like so many other lost souls in the city.

I took a seat at the end of the bar on the only empty stool. I’d brought a book, having forgotten it was Friday and the bar would be loud with music and talk, too loud to read. I ordered a beer, pulled out a cigarette, fished in my pocket for a lighter, without success. As a purely recreational smoker, I often left home without one. The woman next to me was smoking, so I asked if I could trouble her for a light.

“No trouble at all,” she said. One glance revealed her as painfully beautiful, with dark brown eyes half hidden by stylish glasses, and an easy, slightly crooked smile that made me blush and turn away. I stared into my beer, unable to think of a thing to say. She let me off the hook by leaning over and whispering, “See that guy?” She tilted her head toward a voluble, intoxicated man who gestured and held court in a booming voice at the corner of the bar. I nodded. “He latched on to my roommate an hour ago and won’t let her go. I think he might be the town drunk.” She paused, looked over at him gesticulating, turned back to me. “Not so good in a town this big.”

For the next three hours we talked about religion, family, baseball, movies, books. She was the first smart person I’d ever met who shared my loathing for
Crime and Punishment
—Raskalnikov’s endless, infernal pacing back and forth in his little hovel, the maddening profusion of ellipses that were Dostoyevsky’s punctuation of choice.

“I wanted to throw the book at the wall,” she said.

“I quit reading with eighty pages left,” I said.

“Reading it to the end is its own form of punishment,” she said.

“Maybe I read it too young,” I said.

“Maybe I read it too old,” she said.

“Maybe we’re a couple of philistines,” I said.

“Maybe we need a better translation,” she said.

Out of an instinct for self-protection, I resolved to believe she must have a boyfriend. A woman like her couldn’t possibly leave her apartment in New York without drawing the attention of every sentient man. This intuition—that her romantic affections were spoken for—relaxed me somewhat, but I still didn’t feel quite myself.

Around midnight, her roommate, an aspiring actress with a lilting British accent, pried herself free of the village drunk and got up to leave. I figured Martha would leave with her, and that would be the end of it—but no, the hugs were commencing, the goodbyes and are you okays and I’ll see you tomorrows, and then Julia was gone but Martha was not. She took a sip of her drink, turned to me with a serious look on her face, and I thought, Okay, here it comes, the moment when she says she’s really enjoyed our conversation, asks if it’s all right if we just be friends, and I’ll say,
Yes, of course
, and if I’m lucky I’ll get to be the indulgent, sweet-natured, unaggressive guy with whom she has coffee every other month or so.

“I have one question,” she said.

“By all means.”

“Is there going to be any kissing?”

I was stunned; I hesitated for an unconscionably long moment, and by the time I began to stammer in reply, she was so mortified she’d grabbed her purse and excused herself to the ladies’ room. She was gone several minutes, long enough for me to move through the proverbial five stages of grief. First came shock and denial—I couldn’t have been that clumsy, could I? This was followed by pain and anger—what a moron I was! Then came the shift to bargaining:
If only I can have one more chance, I’ll get it right, I’ll seize the day
. . . A period of depression ensued, during which I became certain I’d blown my only opportunity; eventually I achieved a measure of acceptance and even a slim measure of hope.

When she returned, she settled her bill, which was not her bill at all but her roommate’s, and then she turned to leave with a mumbled goodbye. I’d composed myself sufficiently to utter the words I’d been practicing in her absence. I told her I had an extra ticket to a jazz show but no one to go with me: two nights from now, on Sunday. Dave Douglas at Blue Smoke, potential to be magical. Would she care to join me, maybe have dinner beforehand?

“Sure,” she whispered, turned to go.

“Wait,” I said. “I don’t have your phone number, or any other way to reach you.”

She scrawled it on a napkin. I tucked it in my wallet, looked up, and she was gone.

Mercifully, she answered my call the next day, and we spent most of that month together, every spare moment we had—laughing, walking the city, eating, drinking, rarely sleeping, telling stories, laughing some more, listening to jazz. We exchanged exquisite novels with complicated titles. I gave her
So Long, See You Tomorrow
by William Maxwell. She gave me
The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse
by Louise Erdrich. Halfway through that whirlwind month I broke the news of my impending departure to a land without telephones. I expected her to say that was the end of it. I was so gaga-gone I’d even prepared a rebuttal: I would give up my fledgling career as a lookout. I would stay in New York. I would find another job. I would do anything, in fact, to be with her.

“I’ll be here when you get back,” she said. “We’ll write letters. It’ll be deliciously Victorian. All the old-school restraint and coded language.”

The language wasn’t all that coded, but the restraint imposed by a distance of 2,000 miles was quite real. On my days off I hustled down the mountain and into town to pick up my mail. Amid the many letters I often found an overnight FedEx box, aromatic with Irish soda bread or peanut butter cookies, even once a batch of
bizcochitos
, the state cookie of New Mexico. Our correspondence became epic, as much as four letters a week, each of us attempting to amuse the other with picaresque tales—Martha’s involving the absurdities of office work and city life, mine of a seasonal job in the United States Forest Service. Hers were entertaining, often touching, and always beautifully written. I took the opportunity, once I got rolling, to unburden myself of seven years of thinking about my brother’s death by self-inflicted gunshot. How liberating it was not to have to go through his whole story face-to-face with a potential romantic interest, a story I’d often cut short the moment I detected a look of pity forming on the listener’s face. “All families of suicides are alike,” the writer Janet Malcolm has claimed. “They wear a kind of permanent letter S on their chests. Their guilt is never assuaged. Their anxiety never lifts. They are freaks among families the way prodigies are freaks among individuals.” In my letters I flaunted my S to Martha, practically forced her to trace it with her fingers as she traced my words on the page, and to my good fortune she did not back away in fright.

The following summer Martha quit her job in the corporate office of America’s premier provider of theme park entertainment to join me for most of a season in the lookout. That we could survive both a summer of contact only by letter and a summer stuck together in a two-room cabin in the wilderness indicated that we might have been destined for each other, so we returned to New York, packed our belongings into a big Penske truck, and moved to New Mexico for good. The next spring I used the occasion of her first visit of fire season, during her spring break from nursing school, to genuflect on one knee in the tower at sunset and propose she marry me. Her own knees were still raw and bloodied from a scramble through the snow to reach the mountaintop; she likes to say I proposed when I realized there couldn’t be many women on earth willing to crawl on all fours to enjoy my company.

Over the years she has gracefully tolerated my desire for a season of solitude, visiting the mountain when time and energy permitted as she reinvented herself as a registered nurse. Aware that my summer work allows me to nap on the job, my winter work invites me to drink on the job, and that neither provides health insurance or retirement savings, she undertook the task of providing for our partnership those perquisites of modern living. If there’s a wife more indulgent of husbandly eccentricity, I do not know of her.

Each spring she reminds me I once vowed I’d find a proper line of work that didn’t require my disappearance for ten-day stints all summer. I know my long absences aren’t easy for her, and we’ve had our share of pained conversations on the subject. My career, once so novel and romantic, becomes, for her, a little less so with every passing year. While I’ve found a pleasing symbiosis between my summer job and a summer vacation, she’s made known her preference for a slightly more high-class getaway, to Vancouver maybe, or Paris, someplace with museums, nice restaurants, running water. In moments of frustration she’s even been known to call my lookout work and backpack trips “little boy games,” a charge for which I have no ready defense. Ultimately, though, she offers me her blessing every spring, and I marvel at my good fortune to have found both the job and the woman of my dreams.

I
n mid-May the forecast finally calls for rain—and with it a chance of lightning. With the coming of storms an almost unseemly expectation of fire arises in my optic nerves. A tingle begins in the backs of my eyeballs and radiates out to the tips of my fingers and toes. I become less a passive watcher of clouds than a partisan—I want massive cumulus buildup, dark-bottomed thunderheads, my radio antenna sizzling in the supercharged air. I want lightning and I want smoke.

The moment of truth fails to materialize. Instead there are showers, mild and muffled thunder, mostly of the cloud-to-cloud variety. A cool drizzle all day and little in the way of lightning. By midafternoon my rain gauge measures a quarter inch. Mist rises up out of canyons south and east, drowning the mountain in fog. The stealthy hush of it would have startled me once, but having studied weather here for going on eight summers I can see it coming now, a swift-moving glacier of water vapor gathering and charging uphill. All of a sudden the world is gone, my service to the U.S. government rendered moot. I abandon my post without remorse.