Fire Season (29 page)
Authors: Philip Connors
Tags: #Nature, #Animals, #Wildlife, #Biography & Autobiography, #Personal Memoirs, #Sports & Recreation, #Outdoor Skills
This, I’m afraid, is another version of the fires that will plague us in the future.
I
n the first week of August I wake each morning to a world bathed in smoke, the contours of the land softened by the haze. More than half a dozen fires still burn to my north and west, all of them exhibiting only mild activity. Overnight the drift settles in the low places as a layer of cool air flows downslope from the mountains, drawing the smoke down with it. Daytime heating produces gentle breezes and thermal currents that allow the smoke to lift once more. The Meason Fire holds steady at 7,055 acres, burning only in the interior. The Diamond Fire continues at a modest pace, edging beyond 20,000 acres—a crew of seven monitors its growth, mapping the one small length of active perimeter and collecting field data. The Wily moseys along, burning a few dozen acres a day, now 270 acres in all. The Turkey (430 acres), Trigger (390 acres), Cougar (150 acres), and Hightower (140 acres) each do their thing, growing slightly every day, firefighters camped nearby to monitor fire behavior. Other, smaller burns find wetter conditions or sparser fuels and black-line themselves at a few dozen acres, no one having viewed them up close, the grueling hikes required to reach them judged not worth the bother. (The smokejumpers are long gone, shipped off to California and the northern Rockies as fire season has marched inexorably north.) A crew rides horseback into the Rainy Fire, initially thought to be a promising candidate for fire use. The crew is so deep in a canyon they have no radio contact with anyone but me, so I relay their supply orders and fire updates to the dispatcher. After four days of scouting the country, assessing fuels and working trails as potential outer boundaries, the crew gives up when the fire fizzles at the foot of some bluffs, having burned less than two acres. They ride nine miles back to their truck at the trailhead and immediately get a call to help on a new smoke that threatens some radar towers over near the Arizona line. The last big suppression fire of the season on the Gila, the Radar Fire will burn 367 acres before firefighters corral it.
On August 6 wicked storms light up the sky all over the forest, and when the rains clear, I call in what will turn out to be
my
last smoke of the season—a little puffer near the crest of the Black Range on the upper end of Lost Canyon. Surrounded by aspen, the Lost Fire burns a single snag down to its roots overnight and is never seen again.
With the fire danger diminished, I get a full four days off for one of the few times all summer, and when I return on August 12, I’m told this will be my last ten-day hitch.
The season has come full circle. I revert to my April routine, climbing the tower a few times a day for a quick look around. The rest of the time I nap, bake cookies, take long walks with the dog. We visit the pond, which is filling up again after going dry in June. We look in on the hidden sheepherder’s shack where a frying pan still hangs on a nail inside the door, though no one’s lived here in sixty years and the roof has caved in. We seek out wild raspberry patches where the last of the year’s fruit is turning ripe; I pluck a handful to accompany my evening treat of chocolate, leaving the rest to the bears. On days of heavy rain, hail drumming on the metal roof, I cloister myself in the cabin, drink hot tea, read in my sleeping bag with a fire going in the woodstove. Tattered flags of fog drift past the mountain when the rain breaks. Sometimes I pause in my reading, copy a line in the commonplace book I keep:
Multitude, solitude: identical terms, and interchangeable by the active and fertile poet.
—Baudelaire
The idea of the contented hermit who lives close to nature, cultivates his garden and his bees, is trusted by animals and loves all of creation, is some kind of archetype. We think we could be like that ourselves if somehow things were different.
—Isabel Colegate
A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.
—Henry David Thoreau
Walking is the great adventure, the first meditation, a practice of heartiness and soul primary to humankind. Walking is the exact balance of spirit and humility. Out walking, one notices where there is food.
—Gary Snyder
I wake one morning to find myself alone above the clouds—pure blue skies overhead but below me what looks like a vast ice sheet stretching in all directions, the whole world white and sparkling in the sun, blindingly radiant, the peak rising up like an island in a glacier. Then the storms come once more, the fog moves in, and in the evening the lights of all the distant towns are lost to me. Cut off from all evidence of human settlement, alone in the starless dark, I light the propane lamp and sit down to write last letters to friends. I tell of the armored stink beetles taking shelter from the rains in the outhouse, and of how the mule deer now sport healthy russet coats, much different from their ragged, pale, early-spring selves. I tell of calm mornings sitting on the porch shirtless with coffee while the hummingbirds hover. I tell of the movements of ravens, and the thrill of spotting an elusive red-faced warbler. I tell of how I’ve come to know and live Wordsworth’s “calm existence that is mine / When I am worthy of myself.” I choose in the final days to sleep on the cot in the tower overnight, so as not to miss the coming of the dawn. No one calls me on the radio anymore. No hikers appear. My time is my own and so are the moods of the mountain.
My walks now tend to focus on the near-at-hand. I trace the ridge to the west where it drops like stair steps off the peak. I hunt for the precise place on the east slope where the ground moisture becomes sufficient for the aspen to thrive. I circumnavigate the edge of the open meadow on top, which has a shape like a boomerang, the tower in its center near the apex. I visit favorite trees both living and dead, the biggest of the Douglas firs older than the founding of the republic, the fallen ponderosa stripped of bark and bleached almost white in the sun. The spring, reduced to a trickle in mid-June, runs in a steady stream again. Spider threads glint like delicate trip wires in the light of sunrise.
One evening I’m cooking dinner over the stove’s blue flame when I look up and see, through the west-facing windows, two bull elk with their muzzles to the ground in the meadow. They are massive, majestic, the muscles in their hindquarters rippling as they shift their weight. One of them lifts his regal head and seems to look at me, his antlers stark against the gray sky; he shakes his jowls and returns to his grazing. I slip out the door and sneak around the corner of the cabin. When they hear me coming they look up, crouch slightly, then bolt, their hooves thundering down the mountainside. My blood races. Their musk hangs heavy in the air.
I
take Alice on one final hike to the north. We drop off the peak and follow a series of ridges and knolls through aspen and fir, locust and Gambel oak, tracing the Ghost Divide where the McKnight Fire made its easternmost runs. Lavender fleabane are blooming everywhere, Mexican silene too. On a windswept ridge I pause and sit, looking out over the Rio Grande Valley to the east, the deep Black Range canyons north and west—the latter clearly country for horse people or the hardy afoot, country to be humbled in. Among some stones on a ledge of the ridge I’ve tucked discoveries from my evening walks over the years: elk antlers, turkey feathers, snake skins, dried mushrooms, pieces of charred pine shaped like a woodpecker’s head, a mule deer’s pelvic bone, a bees’ nest I found on the ground beneath a tree shattered by lightning. I don’t remember when I started thinking of this place 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. I do not visit often. I do not linger long. I add a mule deer antler, shed a few hot tears on the rock, then retrace my steps to the top of the peak.
Sunset brings colors to make a man tremble, colors without names—names would only defile such colors. I sit in the tower mute as a stone. The light in its going, in its disappearing act beyond the Mogollons, does preposterous things to the clouds in the sky. An almost imperceptible breeze blows smoke my way off the few remaining fires, harmless little smokes burning at most an acre a day. For a moment to get beyond language, beyond words—no worries, no yearnings, nothing but the colors of the sky received on the retina and channeled to the brain by the optic nerve. The sweet smell of burning pine duff permeates the air. I sit in the tower mute as a stone.
The very last of the light rouses me from my stool, pulls me to the window like a miller moth to the moon, so close my breath fogs the panes. I turn and there again are the names of lookouts past, memorialized in pencil in all four corners of the tower. Names hinting at stories, names begging questions, things I’ll never know: How did you entertain yourself on fogged-in mornings, Eddie Cosper? Were you sweet with each other in the moonlight, Kent and Deanie Carlton? Did you play cards in the off hours, Gary and Jerrie Ruebush? How many bears did you see, Carol van Kirk? Was that you who buried your empty beer cans in the meadow, Tuffy Nunn? What were the names of your fires, Gail Stockman? Did the wind drive you half mad, Bill Head? Were you ever in the tower for the sunrise, Jim and Deborah Swetnam? Did you hang a feeder for the hummingbirds, Fred Weir? What secrets of the mountain were known only to each of you?
The questions—unanswered and unanswerable. I stare at the endless dark north and west, the big wild, more than a thousand square miles unlit by a man-made light, and I let the questions go and think instead of a line from the poet Richard Hugo:
If I could find the place I could find the poem.
I have found the place. This is my poem.
T
hanks to: my editor, Matt Weiland, who teased a book out of a slender diary of one fire season and whose editorial guidance was invaluable; the good folks at Ecco, who supported this book right from the start; my agent, Jim Rutman, whose patience and persistence proved legendary; M. J. Vuinovich, the original friend in a high place; Toby Cash Richards, for taking a chance on a greenhorn in the beginning; Dave Foreman, for sharing his voluminous files and vast knowledge on the history of the Gila National Forest; Thomas W. Swetnam, professor of dendrochronology and director of the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research at the University of Arizona, for deepening my understanding of the Gila’s fire history; Dennis Fahl, Jean Stelzer, Jim Apodaca, Willie Kelly, and Anthony James, for teaching me about fire on the Black Range; Jim Swetnam, for sharing stories of his years on Apache Peak; Stephen Fox, for correcting my grammar and helping me understand Aldo Leopold; Chris Adams, for sharing his knowledge of the Warm Springs Apache; Stephen Crook, librarian at the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature at the New York Public Library, for facilitating my access to the Jack Kerouac Papers; Les Dufour, Shane Shannon, Kameron Sam, Ricardo de la Torre, and Jack Doyle, for packing in my supplies all these years; Sara Irving, Razik Majean, Mark Hedge, John Kavchar, Jean Stelzer, and Rob Park, for teaching me how to be a lookout by example on the radio; Sue Abel, Ellen Roper, and Brenda Hubbard, for helping me get paid without my ever showing up at the office; Alexandra Todd and Karen Latuchie, for reading and commenting on portions of the manuscript; Larry McDaniel, for enlivening my explorations of the Gila; and above all Martha, for friendship, adventure, forbearance, and love.
Abbey, Edward.
Black Sun
(New York: Dutton, 1971). Abbey’s “fire lookout novel,” an autobiographical story of a cranky wilderness hermit and the woman he loves and loses.
———.
The Journey Home
(New York: Dutton, 1977). In “Fire Lookout: Numa Ridge,” a diary of the season Abbey spent watching for smoke in Glacier National Park, he notes that “the technical aspects of a lookout’s job can be mastered by any literate anthropoid with an IQ of not less than seventy in about two hours.”
———.
Abbey’s Road
(New York: E.P. Dutton, 1979). The short essay “Fire Lookout” looks back on Abbey’s four years in a lookout on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon.
Abolt, Rena Ann P. “Fire Histories of Upper Elevation Forests in the Gila Wilderness, New Mexico, Via Fire Scar and Stand Age Structure Analyses” (Master’s thesis, University of Arizona, 1997). Abolt’s study lays out the effects of fire suppression in the high-elevation forests of the Gila Wilderness and makes the case for allowing some high-intensity fires to burn once more in spruce-fir and mixed-conifer forest types.
Ball, Eve.
In the Days of Victorio: Recollections of a Warm Springs Apache
(Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1970). Ball was a dogged collector of Apache oral histories, and this “as told to” narrative by James Kaywaykla is the fullest and most gripping account of what it was like to be an Apache child during the Victorio War.
Callicott, J. Baird, and Michael P. Nelson, eds.
The Great New Wilderness Debate
(Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998). In this raucous anthology, environmental historians and philosophers beat defenders of the wilderness idea about the head with truncheons of deconstructionist academic-speak, while wilderness defenders reiterate the case for a basic level of respect toward the nonhuman world. It was followed a decade later by a companion volume,
The Wilderness Debate Rages On: Continuing the Great New Wilderness Debate
(Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2008).
Chamberlain, Kathleen P.
Victorio: Apache Warrior and Chief
(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2007). I drew on this sympathetic (and sometimes speculative) biography of Victorio for my thumbnail recap of the Victorio War.
Colegate, Isabel.
A Pelican in the Wilderness: Hermits, Solitaries, and Recluses
(London: HarperCollins, 2002). This is surely one of the most charming books ever written on solitude; Colegate writes in a lucid and discursive style about hermits ancient and modern, religious and secular.
deBuys, William. “Los Alamos Fire Offers a Lesson in Humility.”
High Country News
188 (July 3, 2000). An early essay on the disaster that was the Cerro Grande Prescribed Fire.
Egan, Timothy.
The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire That Saved America
(New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009). Egan’s book recounts with narrative panache the events leading up to, and including, the Big Blowup of 1910. I found here the quote from the
Idaho Press
about clear-cutting the northern Rockies as a defensive measure against wildfire.
Erdoes, Richard, and Alfonso Ortiz.
American Indian Myths and Legends
(New York: Pantheon, 1984). A valuable source for my discussion of Native American fire myths.
Flader, Susan.
Thinking Like a Mountain: Aldo Leopold and the Evolution of an Ecological Attitude Toward Deer, Wolves, and Forests
(Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1974). As it says right there in the title.
Foreman, Dave.
Confessions of an Eco-Warrior
(New York: Harmony, 1991). The cofounder of Earth First! recounts his career in conservation and the major ideas that drove it—a must-read for eco-freaks, wilderness lovers, devotees of deep ecology, and redneck patriots of the fecund world. Foreman once told me that his greatest achievement as the Southwest field representative for the Wilderness Society in the 1970s was fighting to keep the boundary between the Gila and Aldo Leopold Wilderness areas at one mile; the Forest Service had argued for a ten-mile buffer between them, five miles on either side of the North Star Road.
Fox, Stephen.
John Muir and His Legacy: The American Conservation Movement
(New York: Little, Brown, 1981). One of the first books to make use of Muir’s personal papers, it beautifully recounts the early history of American conservation and Muir’s central role in it.
Gott, Kendall D.
In Search of an Elusive Enemy: The Victorio Campaign, 1879–1880
(Fort Leavenworth, Kansas: Combat Institute Studies Press, 2004). This monograph argues that the Victorio campaign is analogous to the so-called “war on terror,” but since Victorio was never actually defeated by American troops—he was killed by Mexican militias—the comparison is perhaps unintentionally apt as a study in U.S. military failure.
Hugo, Richard.
The Real West Marginal Way
(New York: Norton, 1986). Hugo’s essay “Some Kind of Perfection” contains the line of his I quote, “If I could find the place I could find the poem,” and the fuller context is something I’ve considered many times as an impermanent caretaker of a permanent (by human time scales) landform: “Sometimes it seemed the place was more important than the event since the event happened and was done while the place remained.”
Hurst, Randle M.
The Smokejumpers
(Caldwell, ID: Caxton Printers, 1966). An entertaining memoir of jumping fires on the Gila in the mid-1950s.
Kerouac, Jack.
The Dharma Bums
(New York: Viking, 1958). Kerouac and Gary Snyder (known here as “Japhy Ryder”) wander the West Coast as early pilgrims in a rucksack revolution. Good times.
———.
Lonesome Traveler
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1960). As it says right there in the title.
———.
Desolation Angels
(New York: Coward-McCann, 1965). This novel represents the truest account of his lookout days outside the pages of his journal, from which he borrowed heavily.
———.
Book of Blues
(New York: Penguin, 1995). Contains the dozen “Desolation Blues” poems.
Kittredge, William.
Owning It All
(St. Paul, MN: Graywolf, 1987). I took the quote about his dreaming of marrying a nurse from his terrific and timeless essay “Redneck Secrets.”
Leopold, Aldo.
A Sand County Almanac
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1949). Still the one great American book for students of the natural world and a human land ethic.
———.
Aldo Leopold’s Wilderness
, eds. David E. Brown and Neil B. Carmony (Harrisburg, PA: Stackpole, 1990). Brown and Carmony gather a fascinating collection of Leopold’s early writings on the Southwest, which chart his evolution from gung-ho Pinchovian to first-rate natural historian. It appeared later in paperback, from the University of New Mexico Press, under the title
Aldo Leopold’s Southwest
.
———.
The River of the Mother of God
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991). See in particular Leopold’s fascinating and groundbreaking essay, “Some Fundamentals of Conservation in the Southwest,” in which he first discusses “conservation as a moral issue” at length.
Maclean, Norman.
A River Runs Through It
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976). Although the title novella sparkles as an incomparable gem of American literature, the other long autobiographical story in the book, “USFS 1919: The Ranger, the Cook, and a Hole in the Sky,” is also first-rate and contains some lovely meditations on being a fire lookout in the early Forest Service.
———.
Young Men and Fire
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). This meticulous reconstruction of the Mann Gulch blowup remains the only literary masterpiece ever written on the subject of American wildfire.
Manning, Richard.
Rewilding the West: Restoration in a Prairie Landscape
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009). I took his quote about the West’s commanding views from this intriguing study of an effort to rewild a Montana grassland ecosystem.
Meine, Curt.
Aldo Leopold: His Life and Work
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988). An exhaustive biography, Meine’s book was an invaluable source of information on Leopold’s Forest Service career and the evolution of his thinking about ecology, conservation, and land health. I relied on it heavily for all things Leopold.
Muir, John.
Nature Writings
(New York: Library of America, 1997). Collects the best of his work between two hard covers.
Nash, Roderick Frazier.
Wilderness and the American Mind
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1967). Revelatory when it appeared four decades ago, it remains the starting point in any syllabus of books about wilderness and American culture.
Oelschlaeger, Max.
The Idea of Wilderness
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991). Among much else, Oelschlaeger’s book explores the evolution in Aldo Leopold’s thinking, from a strictly “imperial ecology” to a more “arcadian ecology,” as he formulated his land ethic.
Pinchot, Gifford.
Breaking New Ground
(New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1947). The memoir of the man who put his permanent stamp on the Forest Service, it contains the wonderful story about Muir and the tarantula.
Pyne, Stephen J.
Fire in America: A Cultural History of Wildland and Rural Fire
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982). Pyne is the granddaddy of fire historians, and this was his first entry in the field. His section on fire in the Southwest was particularly useful, and from the books of his listed below I gleaned most of what I understand about the history and cultural context of wildland fire in America.
———.
Fire: A Brief History
(Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001).
———.
Year of the Fires: The Story of the Great Fires of 1910
(New York: Viking, 2001).
———.
Smokechasing
(Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2003).
———.
Tending Fire: Coping with America’s Wildfires
(Washington, DC: Island, 2004).
Russell, Sharman Apt.
Kill the Cowboy: A Battle of Mythology in the New West
(Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1993). A scrupulously fair-minded account of public-lands ranching in the modern West from all points of view, Russell’s book offers the ranchers’ dubious defense of their livelihood so I don’t have to.
Scheese, Don.
Mountains of Memory: A Fire Lookout’s Life in the River of No Return Wilderness
(Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2001). This is the finest addition to the literature of lookouts in decades, recounting Scheese’s years as a fire watcher in the mountains of Idaho.
Snyder, Gary.
The Practice of the Wild
(Washington, DC: Shoemaker & Hoard, 1990). The passage of Snyder’s about walking, which I copied into my commonplace book, comes from his essay “The Etiquette of Freedom.” This and all of Snyder’s works are beautiful meditations on wildness, ecology, humility, and the search for meaningful play and meaningful work.
———.
Mountains and Rivers Without End
(New York: Counterpoint, 1996). Snyder’s poem “Things to Do Around a Lookout” can be found in its entirety here.