Fire Season (30 page)

Authors: Philip Connors

Tags: #Nature, #Animals, #Wildlife, #Biography & Autobiography, #Personal Memoirs, #Sports & Recreation, #Outdoor Skills

BOOK: Fire Season

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———.
The Gary Snyder Reader
(Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 1999). I found the the lines I quoted from Snyder’s “Lookout Journal” in this grand collection of four decades of Snyder’s writings.

———.
Back on the Fire
(Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 2007). See in particular the essays “Thinking Toward the Thousand-Year Forest Plan” and “Lifetimes With Fire.”

Suiter, John.
Poets on the Peaks
(Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 2002). The photography alone makes this book worth the cover price, but it also tells the fascinating story of Kerouac, Snyder, and Philip Whalen working as lookouts and discovering Buddhism in the 1950s.

Swetnam, Thomas William. “Fire History of the Gila Wilderness, New Mexico” (Master’s thesis, University of Arizona, 1983). Researched and written during the early years of prescribed natural fire, Swetnam’s thesis used dendrochronology to show that, pre-1900, surface fires occurred as often as twice a decade in the ponderosa pine forests of the Gila Wilderness.

Thrapp, Dan L.
Victorio and the Mimbres Apaches
(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1974). A fine account of the Victorio War, it focuses largely on the military maneuvering.

Truett, Joe C.
Grass
:
In Search of Human Habitat
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010). Truett, writing from the perspective of a man who makes his home just beyond the border of the Gila National Forest, makes the intersection of grass and human culture more fascinating than would seem possible.

Williams, Gerald W.
The USDA Forest Service: The First Century
(Washington, DC: USDA Forest Service, 2000). A useful overview of major events and periods in Forest Service history.

Worster, Donald.
A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). A full-fledged biography of the original proselytizer for American wilderness preservation.

Wuerthner, George, ed.
The Wildfire Reader: A Century of Failed Forest Policy
(Washington, DC: Island, 2006). Among other treasures, this anthology contains a marvelous essay by Tom Ribe, “Fire in the Southwest: A Historical Context,” which spurred my own interest in Southwestern fire history.

About the Author

PHILIP CONNORS
has worked as a baker, a bartender, a house painter, a janitor, and an editor at the
Wall Street Journal
. His essays have appeared in
n+1
,
Harper’s
, the
Paris Review
, and the
Best American Non-required Reading
anthology. He lives in New Mexico with his wife and their dog.

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Credits

Jacket design by Allison Saltzman

Jacket photograph © by Deon Reynolds/Monsoon/Photolibrary/Corbis

Author’s note: Some names of places and people have been changed in an effort to protect their innocence.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint copyrighted material:

Oxford University Press for excerpts from
A Sand County Almanac
and
Sketches Here and There
by Aldo Leopold, copyright © 1968 by Oxford University Press. Reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press.

The University of Chicago Press for excerpts from
Young Men and Fire
by Norman Maclean, copyright © 1992 by the University of Chicago. Reprinted by permission of the University of Chicago Press.

Small portions of this book appeared in different form in
n+1, The Nation, The Paris Review, The Indiana Review,
and the anthology
State by State
, the editors of which are gratefully acknowledged.

FIRE SEASON
. Copyright © 2011 by Philip Connors. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

EPub Edition April 2011 ISBN: 9780062078902

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