Fire Season (9 page)

But not today. Today is May Day, the international day of worker solidarity, and in honor of my hard-toiling brethren everywhere I choose to remain prone with a book. On the clock, to be sure—a paid holiday of sorts. As it should be.

Now and then I lift my head to watch the local bird life. Turkey vultures soar and swoop on the thermals, a fairly constant presence here. A red-tailed hawk whistles on the north slope. In the afternoon, three dozen violet greenback swallows circle and dip over the ridge to my north, foraging for insects. A Stellar’s jay perches on the top of a fir. An Audubon’s warbler hops from branch to branch in a white pine. One of my favorite little birds, conspicuous for its yellow rump and crown and the yellow patches on its breast, it makes sorties from the same tree, gobbling bugs as they pass.

A fine piece of luck for my work and my leisure to be one and the same.

For most people I know, this little room would be a prison cell or a 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’ edges, 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. In early afternoon I follow the formation of dust devils through my field glasses. Their manic life and sudden death seem to me a fruitful field of inquiry when the mind bogs down in solipsism. Far off on the desert floor, where once a great inland sea bubbled, the earth rises to the dance. Scorched by sun and scoured by wind, the ancient seabed surrenders itself to points east, eventually to be washed to the Gulf in the current of the Rio Grande.

Amid a forest that burns and a desert that dances—20,000 square miles of cruel and magnificent country—I turn back, at the end of the day, to the earth beneath my feet. As May begins, wild candytuft bloom beneath the pine and fir, the first of the season’s wildflowers to show their color. A relic turns up one evening in the dirt, not far from the base of my tower: a Mogollon potsherd, white with black pattern, well more than 800 years old. I am given to understand that the people once gathered in the high places and brought with them their crockery. They sacrificed their pots by smashing them to earth in hopes the sky gods would grant rain. Clearly I am not alone in my communion here with sky. Far from it. The ravens and the vultures have me beat by 200 feet, the Mogollons by most of a millennium. And who’s to say the motes of dust don’t feel joy, if only for a moment, as they climb up into sky and ride the transport winds?

L
ike all lookouts, I pursue diversionary measures, little games or physical routines or time-devouring hobbies that give form to the days and let me escape the holding cell of my own thoughts, particularly when those thoughts begin to circle on the metaphysics of whirling dirt. 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.

The shape of my mountain invites the game. Not many peaks in the Gila offer as much flat open space as mine. On some you’d toss a Frisbee and never see it again. That can happen here on the windiest of days, so I pick my moments. My four-hole course begins and ends at the outhouse. The par five first goes over—or around—the cabin and all the way across the meadow to a big lichen-covered rock. A short par three takes me from the rock to the elevation sign next to the trail. (
APACHE PEAK LOOKOUT. VISITORS WELCOME. ELEVATION 10,010 FT.
) From there I embark on a difficult par four into thick trees on the south edge of the meadow, down to the tack shed by the old corral, now in disrepair from decades of neglect. Then I wing the disk back up the hill to the outhouse (par four again). Though I’m not competing against anyone, I thrill to a fine toss and cringe when the Frisbee goes astray. To this day I’ve never birdied all four holes in a row.

The game resembles the act of writing in that you can’t help but compete with yourself: no one is watching, but you still desire perfection, even if such a thing is unattainable. In fact, the toss of a Frisbee is a bit like the writing of a sentence. Each must move along a certain line to keep the game going forward. Each can go astray, spin out of control. At times what is called for is a long, unspooling line, a toss that slices and circles and hovers in the wind, feinting one way before turning back in another, just as a sentence can move in spirals around a central idea, curving ever closer to the center, the heart, the rock. Other times you need a direct approach. Straight and crisp. A shot from short range. It helps me to think to move like this, spinning the Frisbee with the torque of my arm and then following its path through the meadow grasses, allowing my mind to play on the walk between throws, moving between noticing and imagining, memory and wish, concentration and daydream. I often find three or four rounds lead me back to the typewriter, so that the dance of the Frisbee has become a kernel of thought, thought has become a run of sentences in the mind, and the words emerge at last as ink on paper:
Time spent being a lookout isn’t spent at all. Every day in a lookout is a day not subtracted from the sum of one’s life.
At which point, having rendered the mood of an entire day in a derivative twenty-five-word aphorism, I pour myself a glass of bourbon on ice.

I never touch the stuff on the clock, although I can’t say the same for all of my fellow lookouts. One summer a young woman from the state of Texas came our way to work the relief lookout gig on two different mountains, in which fashion she could string together ten straight days of work like the rest of us regulars, with a day and a half of that involving travel between posts. She moved between Loco Mountain, attainable by a five-mile hike, and Monument Mountain, reachable by truck on a long dirt road, and perhaps the incongruity between two different peaks tweaked a nerve. One day she got into the sauce early and began to call around, looking for a partner in conversation. Problem was, she used the main forest frequency, becoming audible to several dozen or even a hundred different people, smack in the middle of the afternoon. Firefighters, trail crews, dispatchers, other lookouts, anyone with a radio scanning “forest net,” as it’s sometimes called, were privy to the slurred meanderings of her search for human contact. She did not rejoin us the following season.

Once, on my days off in town, I was warming to the feel of the pool table in the Buffalo Bar—Silver City’s finest purveyor of adult beverages—when my next opponent, after feeding his quarters and racking a game of eight-ball, extended his hand and said, “Buddy Nunn. Pleasure to meet you. What do you say we play for a beer?” That surname struck me, because not long before I’d spent an afternoon copying into my notebook every name penciled into the corners of my tower. Stretching back to 1939, each man or woman who’d worked the peak had followed tradition and left a name and year for posterity. Including a certain Tuffy Nunn, 1968.

“Yessir,” Buddy said, when I asked if he counted the man a relative. “That there’s my old man. You’re right, it was sixty-eight. I was just a kid back then, but I remember riding horseback to visit a couple times. What a view from there, about the best view in all of southwest New Mexico. He only worked it one season but he sure loved it.”

I asked him if he recalled anything in particular from his father’s season on high. “By God,” he said, fingering the feathered corners of his mustache, “the old man did have himself a time.” Seems one summer evening a few friends of Tuffy’s paid a visit from the world below. They packed in on mules, brought a bunch of steaks and a few cases of beer. The drinking began that night and continued into the next day. By midafternoon the party was in full swing, but the beer was gone. Tuffy got on the radio, ordered a helicopter for an urgent resupply. All was quiet on the forest, so the chopper arrived in short order. The pilot landed in the meadow. Tuffy climbed aboard.

“Down to the ranch, I presume?” the pilot said. He knew the Nunns owned a ranch on the south end of the Black Range, up White Earth Creek, nine miles away as the crow flies.

“Hell no, son,” Tuffy told him. “You steer this ship to the Pine Knot Bar in Truth or Consequences, and I’ll take her from there.”

The pilot was just back from a tour in Vietnam. He was happy to be flying the forest with no one shooting machine guns at him. What did he give a damn where the mission led? He pointed the nose of the chopper northeast, toward the valley of the Rio Grande. Twenty minutes later they set down in the bar’s parking lot, which was then, as it is now, a slightly sloping swath of gravel around a wooden building a little ways west of the river. Dust rose in a great cloud. Shards of rock flew in all directions, bounced off the sides of pickup trucks. Tuffy ducked and ran. Five minutes later he emerged from the bar with all the beer he could carry. He was gone from the party less than an hour.

“Things were a little bit looser back then,” Buddy told me, his blue eyes twinkling beneath his cowboy hat. “I’m not saying the bigwigs didn’t mind. They gave the old man hell all right, and they sure as shootin’ didn’t ask him back the next season. You’d be hauled off to jail for a stunt like that now. And the pilot—he’d never see his flyin’ license again.”

One way to read this story is as a picaresque example of the fact that every lookout has something he cannot live without. For Jack Kerouac it was cigarettes; two weeks into his stint on Desolation Peak, in the North Cascades in 1956, he radioed his boss and begged him to bring a tin of tobacco and a sheaf of rolling papers across Ross Lake by boat, to a trailhead five miles from his mountain. Kerouac gladly made the ten-mile round-trip hike to pick them up. For some of the rest of us, maybe our weakness is spirits, or pudding, or mystery novels. Maybe it’s Major League Baseball on the AM radio. Often, nowadays, it’s a cell phone.

I manage to subsist without one, though most of the lookouts I know have been packing theirs along for years. Presumably anyone calling a lookout already knows the answer to the first question a cell phone compels us to ask:
Where are you?
I do my part for social harmony face-to-face across a bar top seven months a year, which leaves me about talked out for the other five. No acquaintance of mine would intrude on my life here except under power of her own two legs; all my friends know quite well the reasons I love it, and I’m happy to share the place with them, but only in person.

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 from your wristwatch, it becomes possible to break through to a state of equilibrium, to reach a kind of waiting and watching that verges on what I can only call the holy. One indisputable charm of being a lookout is the sanction it offers to be shed of the social imperative of productivity, to slip away from the group hug of a digital culture enthralled with social networking, the hive mind, and efficiency defined as connectedness. I often think of a line from Aldo Leopold: “Nothing could be more salutary at this stage than a little healthy contempt for a plethora of material blessings.” I want to lengthen, not shorten, my attention span, and most of the material splendors of the twenty-first century bully me in the opposite direction. The fault is mine, I’ll admit. I’m too slow-witted, reluctant to evolve, constitutionally unable to get with the program. I can’t afford the newest gadgets and I’m not a natural multitasker.

Whether by solitary temperament or sheer cussedness or some unholy amalgam of the two, I prefer to live, at least part of the year, out here on the edge, where worship of the material recedes and acquaintance with the natural becomes possible, and where I carry on my most important conversations through the United States Postal Service, a month elapsing between missives from one side or the other. That seems about right for most things worth saying. For laughs I sometimes try to imagine the horror Henry David Thoreau would feel were he to fall from the sky today, the man who looked with disdain on the invention of the telegraph: “We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas, but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.”

In the world below I tend toward the attitude of the bemused spectator. I use landline telephones, I answer e-mail, and I’ve yet to renounce my wintertime access to a high-speed Internet connection. (Hypocrite!) But I can’t in good conscience apologize for the fact that for a few months a year I choose not to choose anything but what I read, what I eat, and when I sleep. My interests aren’t tracked, aggregated, and commodified, sold back to me in a digital feedback loop requiring no more effort than the click of my finger. Up here I’m not a six-foot-tall billboard or a member of a coveted demographic; I’m a human being, and as such I find it restorative to be in the presence of certain mysteries our species once knew in its bones, mysteries ineffable and unmediated. If I were a committed technophobe or a purist, I’d forswear even my typewriter and my AM/FM radio, with its faint and fuzzy night sounds of baseball from Phoenix or Denver, tunable some days after dark. But unlike a telephone, the radio lets me listen without demanding a response, and the typewriter’s staccato music bothers no one but the birds. Even they don’t appear to mind all that much. Perhaps I’m not prolific enough.

There’s a seduction to solitude in a stretch of the world as we were given it, a seduction that stretches across all human cultures and all human history. It may be mocked as foolish, childish, antisocial, misanthropic, retrograde, reactionary, fuzzy-headed, and sentimental, but it exists in the human heart and will endure as long as
Homo sapiens
survives in even so much as one tribe. Out here, the kin in which that feeling thrives is among the lookouts on the wilder, south half of the Gila. This may be true in other places where our kind still exist, but it’s undeniably true here: whoever works the full-time shift among us tends to return, year after year, while the relief lookouts drop away after a couple of years at most, a couple of days or weeks in some cases. Which may just prove you need a good stretch of alone to really fall in love with it. I’ve been here eight summers in a row, and I’m still the greenhorn on the south half of the Gila. Up on Loco Mountain, Jean has worked nine years. John has logged a decade on Cherry Mountain. Over on Monument Mountain, Hedge is now a veteran of eleven summers. And on the biggest and wildest lookout in the whole forest, Snow Peak, Razik has worked nineteen years and Sara a remarkable twenty-eight. Most of us, if we could change one thing, would either make our seasons longer or forgo days off, the longer to enjoy our state of grace and the quicker to attain it. Once you can sit on a stool for an afternoon, unmoving and unmoved by anything but light on mountains, you have become a sensei of the sedentary and need answer to no one for it, except perhaps your husband or your wife.