Fire Season (3 page)

Despite human efforts to the contrary, it remains pretty wild out here.

Along the path to the peak the trail curves atop the crest of the Black Range first to the west, then back to the east, always heading eventually north. Despite the wild character of the country, there is evidence of the human hand all along the way, not least in the trail itself, an artificial line cut through standing timber. The wilderness boundary too speaks of a human imprint: a metal sign nailed to a tree suggests you leave your motorized toys behind. Halfway to the top the trail passes an exquisite rock wall, handiwork of the Civilian Conservation Corps of the 1930s, when the New Deal put thousands of Americans to work on the public lands of the West. The wall holds the line against a talus slope above it, keeping the loose rock from swamping the trail. Seventy years later the wall is as solid as the day it was built, as is the lookout tower where I’m headed, another CCC project that replaced the original wooden tower built in the 1920s.

For a while thereafter the trail follows an old barbed-wire fence, a relic of a time, not that long ago, when cattle grazed these hills. High on the trunks of old firs and pines hang a few white ceramic insulators, which once carried No. 9 telephone line down from the lookout. Having spent something like a thousand days in this wilderness over the past decade, I’ve noticed all of these features of the hike many times. And yet there are always surprises: a tree shattered by lightning, a glimpse of a black bear, the presence, in a twist of mountain lion scat, of a tiny mammalian jawbone—evidence of the dance of predator and prey.

The surprise this time arrives a half mile below the peak: a stretch of hip-deep snow. It swallows the trail amid an aspen grove on the north slope, and there is no shortcut from here, nothing to do but slog on through. For a few steps I’m fine. The crust holds. Then it collapses beneath me, and I posthole to about midthigh. I try to lift one leg, then the other, but I feel as if I’m stuck in quicksand. I’m not going anywhere unless I lose my pack.

With its weight off my back I can extricate myself, but there remains the problem of how I’m going to get both it and myself through the next 800 yards. Upright on two legs, 220 pounds of flesh and supplies on a vertical axis, I will continue to sink and struggle. The snow is wet and granular, melting fast; in just a few weeks it will be gone. But not yet. There is nothing to do but become a four-legged creature, distribute my weight and the weight of my pack horizontally, and crawl. Alice looks at me as if I’ve lost my marbles—she even barks twice, sensing we’re about to play some kind of game—but now when I punch through the surface crust I don’t plunge as deep, and with the aid of my arms I can drag myself along, bit by bit, crablike up the slope. Alice runs ahead, returns, licks my face, chews a hunk of snow, bolts away again—she’s delighted by my devolution to four-legged creature, though I can’t say I feel likewise. All I can see from this vantage is an endless field of white broken only by tree trunks, and I possess neither her agility nor her lightness of foot.

After a twenty-minute crawl I reach the clearing at the top. Normally I would rejoice in this moment—home, home at last, mind and body reunited on the top of the world—but my hands are raw and red and clublike from the cold, and my pants are soaked from crawling in snow. The sun is dropping fast and with it the temperature. If I don’t change clothes and warm up, I’m in trouble.

The cabin is filthy with rat shit and desiccated deer mice stuck to the floor, dead moths by the hundreds beneath the windowsills, but these are problems for later. I start a fire using kindling gathered late last year with precisely this moment in mind. I strip off my pants and hop into dry ones, never straying far from the pot-bellied stove.

Once I’m warmed through, I tend to the next necessity: water. Just outside the cabin is an underground tank, 500 gallons of rainwater captured by the cabin’s roof and funneled through a charcoal filter into a surplus guided-missile container. It’s the sweetest water I’ve ever tasted, despite what holds it, and to keep it that way I lock the ground-level lid for the off-season. This winter, I discover, someone tried to get at it and broke off a key in the lock. Why a visitor thought he could open a U.S. Forest Service padlock—it is stamped
USFS
, unmistakably—is difficult to fathom, but I’ve spent enough time here to know that people do strange things alone above 10,000 feet. Maybe it’s simple lack of oxygen to the brain.

My water supply shall remain, for now, inaccessible. The snow I so recently cursed is my savior. Melted in a pan on the woodstove, strained of bits of bark and pine needle, it tastes nearly as sweet as I remember the cistern water, with just a tincture of mineral earth. My thirst quenched and my hands warm, I heat some snowmelt and freeze-dried minestrone to head off the roiling in my stomach.

The sun drops over the edge of the world. The wind comes up, gusts to near forty. I jam the stove with wood, unroll my sleeping bag on the mattress in the corner, and free-fall into untroubled sleep.

F
ive hours later I wake to find Alice has joined me in the bed. I can’t say I mind the added warmth of her next to me. It is still only 2 a.m., but the stove has burned out. I revive the fire from the ashes of itself, drink some more snow water. Outside the wind screams in the night, gusting now to fifty, buffeting the cabin like some rude beast up from the desert. I pull on an extra pair of wool socks, a down vest, a stocking cap, gloves. Time for a look around.

Some of my fellow lookouts live in their towers, spacious rooms with catwalks around the exterior. My tower is small and spare, seven-by-seven, purely utilitarian—more office than home. It can hold four people standing, assuming they’re not claustrophobic. At fifty-five feet tall, it is one of the highest lookouts still staffed in the Gila. It had to be built high to offer sight lines over the trees—my mountaintop being relatively flat—and in my more poetical moods I think of it as my mountain minaret, where I call myself to secular prayer.

Near the top the wind grows fiercer. I grasp the handrail, climb the last flight of stairs, shoulder my way through the trapdoor in the floor, and there it is: my domain for the next five months, a stretch of earth cloaked in the mystery of dark, where the Chihuahuan and Sonoran deserts overlap and give out, where mountains 35 million years old bridge the gap between the southern Rockies and the Sierra Madre Occidental, and where on the plains to my north the high-desert influence of the Great Basin can be felt. I am perched on the curving southern spine of the Black Range, with a view all the way up its east side. The range runs almost straight north and south and for much of its length marks the Continental Divide. The waters on the east flow to the Rio Grande and eventually on to the Gulf of Mexico, while the waters to the west join the Gila River on its 650-mile journey to the Colorado at Yuma, Arizona—a journey it rarely completes, thanks to thirsty Arizonans.

Even to drive the circumference of country I can see from here by daylight would take two full days—plus an international border crossing. It is a world of astonishing diversity and no small human presence. To the east the lights of Truth or Consequences twinkle like radioactive dust; in the southeast, just beyond the horizon, El Paso and Juarez glow like the rising of a midnight sun. Along an arc to my south are the lights of other, far smaller towns, lights that remind me I sit at the juncture of more than one transition zone, not just the meeting of different biomes but the wildland-urban interface.

The town lights are quaint and even rather beautiful at this remove, but the wildlands are what draw my eye whenever I climb the tower at night. In a quadrant from due west to due north there is no evidence of human presence, not one light to be seen—a million uninhabited acres. A line running northwest of where I sit would not cross another human dwelling for nearly a hundred miles, a thought that never fails to move me.

I say move me, but that doesn’t quite do justice to the feeling. In fact, if I’m to be honest about it, on this my first night back in the tower I find myself hopping around like some juiced-up Beat poet, but instead of shouting Zen poetry and gentle nonsense I start hollering profanities, turning this way and that trying to take it all in but it’s just so huge there ain’t no way. How can I explain this outburst, other than to say no disrespect to the faithful intended? I grew up Catholic, after all. Curse words and states of intense feeling have always seemed to me a natural match.

Satisfied with the extent of my elbow room, I drop back through the trapdoor, shimmy down the steps, hurry back to the warmth of the cabin. I feed the potbellied stove with pine I split last August. For an hour or more I lie awake in the dark, listening to the howl of the wind in the trees, resisting an urge to call the dog back to the bed and thereby spoil her beyond reckoning.

I
t’s a lot of work setting up to be lazy.

For seven months I surrender the cabin to the creatures, if they can get in. This winter they’ve been aided by a citizen user of the national lands who decided to break a window in the side door, for reasons unknown and unknowable. (Five miles afoot seems a long trip to commit a petty act of vandalism.) Every surface is covered in dust from the winter winds working their way through the crevices, blowing in through the window. Not even the dishes in the cupboards are spared a fine grit. All must be washed; I heat some water in a basin for just this purpose. While I wait for it to warm I cover the window with plastic sheeting and duct tape, measure it for a Plexiglas replacement to be hauled up later.

Next all evidence of the rodents must be expunged, especially the smell. I pry the dead deer mice off the floor and throw them in the fire. Dustpans full of moths meet the same fate. The pack rats have made nests in the bedroom cabinets, filthy conglomerations of pine needles, plastic spoons, Band-Aids, pages torn from magazines, random playing cards. These too I burn. The rats have the unfortunate habit of urinating in the corners and defecating where they sleep, filling the cabin’s atmosphere with a bitter, ammoniac stench—redolent of certain New York streets I have known. To ward off hantavirus I spray the floor with a solution of water and bleach, then mop with water and pine-scented soap, and finally mop once more with just water.

Once the place is somewhat livable I figure I’d better test my radio, let the below world in on the fact that I’ve arrived here safely. Not that anyone’s all that concerned. Once we’re sent up our hills, we lookouts are largely forgotten, which is just the way we like it. Until we see some lightning, we tend to follow the model of Victorian-era children: do not speak unless spoken to. An exception is this courtesy call to let the office manager know I’m alive and that my tower withstood another winter of battering wind. I climb a ladder and affix a magnetized antenna to the cabin’s roof. I plug a handheld mic running from the antenna into the side of my Bendix-King radio. A red light blinks on when I press transmit.

“Black Range District, Apache Peak.”

“Go ahead Apache Peak.”

“Just letting you know I’m on the peak safely. All’s well here.”

“Copy. Anything you need?”

“Affirmative. Some joker broke off a key in the lock to the cistern. I’ll need a bolt cutter for the old lock and a new lock to replace it.”

“Copy that. We’ll send those up with the packers.”

“Tell them to wait two weeks or they won’t get their animals through the snow on the north slope.”

“I’ll let ’em know. You stay warm up there if you can.”

“Copy. Apache clear.”

I rather like the laconic style of these conversations, which results, I often feel, from a kind of mutual incomprehension. The person on the other end can’t fathom why I’d spend most of the summer alone in a little tower, far from running water, cold beer, and satellite TV. I cannot conceive of why you’d join the Forest Service only to spend your days shuffling paper under banks of fluorescent light. To him I must seem a little crazy, even something of a masochist, a perception I do nothing to dispel on those rare occasions—a couple of times a year, to pick up my radio and turn it back in—when I visit the office.

Some years ago, when forced to undergo a “training and orientation” session prior to the beginning of fire season, I raised my hand in protest at having to sit through a seminar on sexual harassment in the workplace. The only conceivable way this affects me, I pointed out, is in my choice of whether to harass myself with my left hand or my right. This heresy was greeted with a gimlet eye and a stern word—not to mention a few muffled chuckles—but it had the desired effect. I was not invited to attend such a session again. The less normal I can make myself appear, the less likely I am to be drafted into some sort of nonlookout work, or any task involving contact with the public in an official government capacity. I must act the part well enough—a goofy hermit with a weird beard and a faraway look in his eyes—because for most of my season I am left utterly and blissfully alone. My radio contact is where he wants to be, I’m where I want to be, and in this fashion we preserve a bit of the diversity of our human experience. Not unlike the vigorous diversity of the forest out my window, where the ponderosa at their healthiest grow in open parklands, the trees spaced fifty or a hundred feet apart, while the aspen cluster in dense groves with a shared root system.

I am not unfamiliar with his world. In fact, I once inhabited a more extreme version of it: four years at a desk, in front of a computer, enclosed by the steel and glass colossi of lower Manhattan. He at least has a view of mountains out his window, far off in the distance, which trumps the view I once had of Jersey City. I found rather quickly during my peonage in newspapers that I did not have the requisite temperament for such work—the subservience to institutional norms—and that I gained very little in the way of psychic ballast from the attachment of my name to that of a well-known brand in American journalism. Maybe it was a case of egocentricity, but I discovered I had things to say that could not be said in the pages of a daily newspaper. Plus, when the weather cooperates, I prefer to work shirtless.