Fire Season (22 page)

But not just yet. Not this year.

On the porch, in the last of the day’s light, chittering hummers visit my feeder by the dozen, greedy for my simple syrup, goosing each other with their long black bills to force a turn on one of the perches. If the goosing doesn’t work, a more frontal attack, wings outspread in a posture of threat, usually suffices to free up a space. These are just the broadtails, whose jostling looks like an animated church potluck compared with the more aggressive rufous, who tend to arrive in July, buzzing ferociously and driving off all competitors before they can even reach the feeder.

Darkness ends my spectatorship of the various feeding frenzies, invites another nighttime bonfire. I gather dead pine needles and small sticks for kindling, construct a pyramid of fuel—each layer denser than the last—and light a match at its center. Soon the flames play on the tower’s steel frame and throw weird shadows on the trees. Stories come to me, the voices of friends, some of them memories from nights around this very fire pit, nights of ribaldry and revelry, food and laughter, hand-rolled cigarettes, tall tales.

I think of a story Black Larry once told me—having brought to the peak with his wife Christine a feast of wine, whisky, cheese and crackers, chicken tetrazzini, chocolate cake, a pound of fresh strawberries, food we ate with joy and brio, and afterward a fire right here where I sit—how as a junior in high school he saw an installment of
Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom
that changed his life. Hosted by the mustachioed wildlife lover and zoologist Marlin Perkins, the show was a television hit for nearly twenty years; in the episode that captivated Black Larry, Perkins and his crew went to the high mountains of Chihuahua to film the world’s southernmost population of grizzlies. Larry and his best friend decided that’s where they wanted to go for spring break: the Sierra Madre Occidental. Larry’s mother was not convinced this was a good idea. Conveniently, she played in a regular bridge game with Marlin Perkins’s wife in St. Louis, Perkins at the time being the director of the St. Louis Zoo in addition to his television work. Larry’s mother cagily arranged for the boys to meet Perkins and discuss their trip. They were thrilled by the chance to talk to their hero face-to-face. They went to his office one afternoon and found him seated behind a stack of maps. He showed them where his crew had flown into some remote Mexican airport, where they’d caught a bumpy overland bus, and so on. The maps were drawn on with lines and arrows and
X
s—it all seemed to Larry unfathomably exotic. Then Perkins pointed to one of the
X
s. And here, he said, here we were detained for two days by bandits.

Bandits? the boys asked.

Bandits, Perkins said.
Banditos
. They weren’t
federales
but they had some pretty serious-looking guns. They took some of our film equipment. So you should prepare for similar encounters.

How do we prepare? they wanted to know.

You should probably have at least $500 cash on you, preferably in small bills, tens and twenties, Perkins said.

He went on with his account of the journey—
and here we were detained by bandits again
—until he sensed the boys had heard enough. You know, he told them, there’s a place a couple hundred miles north of there in New Mexico, almost as wild, no grizzlies but plenty of black bears, elk, deer, mountain lions, bobcats…

The boys were sold, and in March of 1969 they began their trek up the West Fork of the Gila River. They soon realized they should have brought extra shoes for the innumerable stream crossings. That night, exhausted and soaked from the waist down, Larry cut some pine boughs to sleep on. He’d read somewhere they made a soft bed. In the morning his sleeping bag was sticky with pine pitch. They hiked that day until they saw an old ranger cabin on Blanca Creek. A wisp of smoke drifted from the chimney, beckoning them on. Inside were two Mexican cowboys who spoke not a word of English—illegals, probably, scouting for work with a ranch this side of the border. Images of
banditos
flashed in the two boys’ heads. Since they could not converse, the four of them were reduced to hand gestures, a primitive sign language. One of the Mexicans showed the boys a catalog someone had left in the cabin, probably for fire-starting material. He pointed at a woman in a bra. He made a masturbatory gesture with his hand and laughed. Instead of finding this funny, the boys were terrified. Already scared of being murdered in their sleep, they now began to imagine the brutal rape they would suffer first. Each of them slept that night with a weapon secretly clutched to his breast—Larry a Bowie knife, his friend a small axe. “We were sheltered gringos from the Midwest,” Black Larry admitted. “We thought if you didn’t speak English you must be a criminal or a deviant.” In the morning, alive but sleep-deprived, they continued their hike, over the Diablo Range in three feet of snow, nearly suffering frostbite. By the time their trip was over, Larry was hooked forever on the kicks to be had in the Big Outside. Always, though, he had to have a partner. He couldn’t go alone, couldn’t sleep out there by himself. Thoughts of the unknown crept up on him in the dark, kept him awake all night. With the company of one other human all that went away. Thus my friendly service to him: backcountry companion, the man whose presence in camp makes the night safe for sleep.

By midnight I’ve put the stories to rest once more. My mind is quiet, my fire a pulsing bed of bright red coals. The night air is too gentle for indoor sleeping. I drag my mummy bag out of the cabin, spread it on the ground, crawl inside, and commence to dream.

Even the daytime becomes a part of the dreamscape when you attain that state where you’re nothing but an eyeball in tune with cloud and light, a being of pure sensation. The cumulus build, the light shifts, and in an hour—two?—you’re looking at country made new. This time of year the available spectacles of lightning, hail, rain, and rainbow just continually and freakishly astound. The mountain chains stretch one in sunlight, one in shadow, one in sunlight, one in shadow all the way to the edge of the visible world. The setting sun turns the feathered drift smoke off the Diamond and Meason fires into a whorl of pink cotton candy, and despite the absence of a moon the tower casts a discernible shadow on the silhouetted trees in starlight. On stormy afternoons the lightning steps across the peaks and mesas like the quivering legs of some extraterrestrial spider. When the cumulus gather strength, I start rubbernecking, swivel-necking, watching four or more storm cells with lightning all at once. Almost every evening a rainbow appears to my east before sunset. On the twenty-fourth of June nearly an inch and a half of rain falls on the peak. All of a sudden the sky I love is gone, lost beyond the monochrome gray of a massive downpour. I’m swaddled in fog, incognito in the clouds. No point in occupying the tower; I stay in bed all day and read, rising only to make tea or heat a bowl of soup. More rains follow, a little each day, and I mark them to the hundredth of an inch in my log: .23, .04, .35, .12, .32. The days unfurl in a languor of long naps, multiple meals, a sweetly stolen indolence. After dark: moths and mist. Amid the sudden coolness my breath waves from my mouth like a frayed pennant as I sprint through the drizzle to the outhouse.

By month’s end, the Meason Fire has burned just under 7,000 acres, the Diamond 17,000. Rain has slowed them both to a smolder, mostly interior smokes—downed logs, stump holes. For the first time in eight years I do not spot a single wildfire in the month of June.

Visitors out of the sky
*
dolor & gloom, mist & cigarettes
*
the brief but storied career of Jack Kerouac, fire watcher
*
a call to come down & a code for future lookouts
*
smoke over Wily Canyon
*
high heels & firearms
*
Aldo Leopold & the fierce green fire
*
a fawn alone in the woods
*
fire season lives

O
n the second of July a storm comes over just past dark, lightning on all sides, some within 400 yards. Inside the cabin I cringe every few seconds as the strikes arc and strobe in the smoky-looking fog. They seem to come in a spectrum of colors, blue and pink and yellow and white, and some of them strike repeatedly in the same spot, two or three jolts to a single tree. The thunder sounds like artillery fired from the ridge tops below me. In the morning I find trees on the edge of the meadow shorn of bark in the classic corkscrew pattern, splinters the size of swords nearby on the ground—but not one inch of charred wood. Updates on the progress of the Diamond and Meason fires have been suspended. There is no progress to report; most of the crews have been released back to station.

An oppressive melancholy sets in, gray afternoons of uselessness and curtailed views. Clouds hang in ragged clumps over the mountains, and in the mornings mist rolls out of the canyons to the east. I no longer find my sustenance in sweeping vistas but in the profusion of new color at my feet. All around a fiesta of wildflowers has burst into color: yarrow, fleabane, scarlet penstemon, skyrocket gilia, cliff primrose, Indian paintbrush, mountain wood sorrel, dozens of others. The unease, the sadness, the almost instantaneous nostalgia for events as they happen—each day on the mountain now elicits a wave of feeling centered around the knowledge that my stay here cannot last.

Most years I keep one improvement project in my hip pocket for just this moment: caulking windows, painting the tower, staining the old cabin, securing the roof against the elements. Anything to justify a few extra days or an extra tour. Eight years of such work have left the place in pretty good shape, but there’s always something I can conjure. This year I’ve requested pickets to rebuild the fence around my propane tanks. The pickets, judged by the packers too unwieldy for the mules, require helicopter delivery, and the two choppers on the forest have been tied up for weeks on fires. But not anymore. On July 3 I get word that the helicopter is on its way. I coax the dog into the cabin to spare her the worst of the noise.

“Helicopter 305, Apache Peak.”

“Apache Peak, 305, go ahead.”

“Your winds are two to five, gusting to seven, out of the southwest.”

“Copy that.”

With a tremendous roar the whirlybird approaches the peak, circles, turns its nose into the wind. It sets down next to the tower on the landing pad, another military relic—a square sheet of Marsden matting developed for use as mobile runway matériel in World War II. Two helitack personnel duck out of the chopper and step away. When they give the all clear, the chopper lifts off for Wright’s Saddle. There it will hook a net holding my pickets to a longline rope and ferry them back to the peak.

I greet my colleagues, both younger than me, one male, one female, handshakes all around. They have a bored look about them. Delivering supplies to a lookout is about the least exciting thing they’ve done all season—not much more than an hour’s work and utterly lacking in the excitement of descending on a fire. And no hazard pay or overtime.

“Looks like it’s winding down for the season,” I say.

“Yeah,” the guy says, “it’s pretty soggy out there.”

“They say we might be headed for California by the end of next week,” the woman says. “If they get some fires. Things are pretty slow all over the country.”

When people show up on my peak, I usually take the chance to exercise my vocal cords, revive my withered social skills, but I can’t think of anything else to say, and neither can they. We fan out with rolls of bright orange tape, flagging the discreet hazards on my mountaintop for safety’s sake—the clothesline, the tower’s guy wires. The helitack each light a cigarette. Their posture is impeccable, their dress identical: bright yellow fireproof shirt, dark green fireproof pants. They wear sturdy utility helmets and their boots are top-notch.

Soon the helicopter is back, hovering overhead, easing the net onto the ground. One of the helitack gives the all clear over the radio, and the helicopter turns again toward Wright’s Saddle, where it will touch down and remove the longline, then return to the peak to pick up the two crew members.

“Hey, man, think you can spare a smoke?” I ask the guy.

“Hell yeah,” he says. “You want a few? I’ve got a whole pack and you’re a long ways from a store.”

“No,” I say, “I’m pretty much quit. But every once in a while a smoke still sounds good.”

He hands me two.

“Keep a spare for tomorrow or the next day.”

We move the pickets onto the porch to keep them out of the rain. They roll the cargo net into a ball and cinch it tight. The helicopter returns, settles onto the pad. I tune my radio to air-to-ground.

“Helicopter 305, Apache Peak.”

“Go ahead, Apache Peak.”

“Thanks for the supply drop. Much appreciated.”