Fire Season (4 page)

Let there be no illusion about the purity of my solitude. Not only do I see the occasional hiker, but I am here for ten days followed by four days off. This routine will hold for the next four and a half months, give or take a couple of weeks, depending on the fire danger rating, the Forest Service budget, and the timing of the summer rains. My pilgrimage to town every other weekend allows me a restorative dose of civilized pleasures. I rendezvous with my wife, Martha, take a hot shower, drink a cold beer. I catch up with friends and shoot some pool to keep my game from going entirely to pieces. By about the third day, I’m ready to be back in the woods, and come midseason I will often forgo time spent in town and instead—with Martha’s indulgence, perhaps even her company—grab my fly rod and head for trout streams reachable in no less than half a day’s walk.

In most ways I have it easier than my predecessors. Once the lookout lived in an earth dugout and hauled water from a spring a half mile away. When he spotted a fire, he was expected to saddle a horse and ride straight for the smoke, tools at the ready to put the thing out. There was no such thing as a day off. The lookout came in the beginning of the season and stayed until the end. My days off are covered by a relief lookout. I have four sturdy walls and eight windows, a refrigerator that runs on propane, a mattress flown in years ago by helicopter. The entirety of my duties are five: report the weather each morning, answer the radio, relay messages when asked, call in smokes when they show, and keep an eye on fire behavior with the safety of crews in mind. This time of year, in the absence of lightning, a smoke is unlikely. If one appears, it will have been caused by humans—an abandoned campfire, a cigarette tossed from a car—and will appear near a road. The open meadow to my southwest affords me a view, without my climbing the tower, of a good chunk of the roaded country for which I’m responsible; a quick glimpse from the tower twice an hour suffices to cover the country to the southeast, south, and west. To the north there are no roads.

In these early days, as I work on sprucing up the place, I fulfill the command embedded in my job title and “look out” maybe two hours a day—fifteen minutes every hour. That will change with an increase in fire danger, but for now the majority of my time is spent cleaning, cutting wood, sleeping, reading, and cooking, a regime I follow with unyielding discipline. Alice sits in the meadow and gnaws on a mule deer antler she found; she loves indolence as much as her master and appears to feel no pangs of conscience about doing merely what pleases her. More than one visitor has remarked that she must be the luckiest dog in the world. I can’t speak to the experience of all dogs everywhere, but it’s true that Alice finds a great deal of joy here. From the moment my backpack emerges from the closet at home, she begins to pace and pant in excitement, her tail working in figure eights, for she knows what this contraption signals: a trip into the woods.

When Martha and I first laid eyes on her, she was an underfed, eight-month-old puppy, locked up in a cage at the dog pound. She was all black except for a white stripe running from her throat to her chest, a coloring that made her appear as if she were always dressed for a black-tie affair. When we paused to look in on her, she rose from her grimy and pathetic little bed and gently licked the hands we proffered to pet her. From then on it was only a matter of formalities—paperwork and vaccinations and the payment of a fee for having her spayed. Once we’d been licked, everything clicked.

There were the usual difficulties at first. She’d been on the streets of our town for unknown months, a scavenger’s existence, and backed away in skittishness whenever a hand was inadvertently raised above her head. More than once we woke in the morning to find a brown pile or a yellow puddle in the middle of the kitchen floor. When we were gone a portion of the day, she greeted our return by jumping at us with her paws extended, as if she wished to dance; often this resulted in livid scratches on our forearms, marks of her overzealous need for love.

Still, she made steady progress on the path to domestication. She romped agreeably with other dogs in the park, learned to heel and fetch a stick, brought her bodily functions under control. We taught her the other doggy basics: to sit and shake, lie down and roll over, jump and grab a stick in her teeth. She learned what was meant by the words,
Are you hungry?
, and her answer, expressed in upraised ears and a quick pirouette toward her food dish, was never not
yes
.

Nine months into our acquaintance, she learned she had two homes, not one. A summer getaway in the hills. She took to the place instantly, and her change in personality was striking. Whereas in town she’d been a timid creature, afraid to step into the yard and do her business when the wind was up, on the peak she’d lie in the meadow all afternoon in a forty-mile-an-hour gale, nestled on the leeward side of the helicopter landing pad. She recovered a streak of independence, wandering off by herself in search of bones, antlers, small mammals to startle and chase. Mornings when deer came to the meadow she’d run them off. She guarded her territory with a nervy vigilance undermined only by a high-pitched yip almost comical in its lack of menace. Hikers were often startled to hear their approach announced in advance.

I found it amusing and even a little exhilarating to watch her regain a touch of her former wildness, that wildness which lies dormant in the hearts of most domesticated creatures. The way she attacked a mule deer antler with ferocious jaws, the way she marked her presence by dribbling a few drops of urine on a bobcat turd—these spoke of atavistic urges, instincts toward survival and even dominance in a world of struggle and strife. Back in town on my days off, she resumed her sedentary existence, napping on the couch all afternoon, begging for the chance to snuggle between her two softhearted masters. The woods invigorated her, and she intuited the difference between that world and her other, modulating her behavior accordingly.

On the mountain she proves an agreeable companion in more ways than one. She never insists on conversation. She requires only a dish of water, three squares a day, and a scratch now and then behind the ears—the perfect partner in solitude. When I sign off the radio and descend the tower at 6 p.m., she’s immediately at my side, urging me to take her for a hike. Without her here I might be tempted to bag my evening stroll, go straight to dinner and whisky and a ball game on the radio, but her enthusiasm always wins the day, and I’m the better for it.

So is she, for she loves to run, loves the pursuit. If you walk in wild country five miles a night you’re bound to scare up a creature or three. In her time she’s flushed elk, mule deer, wild turkey, quail, grouse, skunks (unhappily), rabbits, squirrels, chipmunks, rats, and mice. More than once we’ve encountered a bear. The first time, she smelled it before either of us saw it; her nose to the ground, her back up like a razorback hog’s, she snorted and growled and offered a lower, more menacing bark than I’d heard from her before. I spoke to her in a soothing tone, using one of the dozen nicknames we’ve given her over the years.

It’s okay little spooky one, little Spookeen. Stick close and we’ll be just fine, you and me, Spooky Groo. Yes, yes. Atsa girl.

Every nerve ending in my body needled my skin as we followed the switchbacks down the northeast slope of the peak, through lovely fir forest and down into aspen, with Alice’s ears upraised just a touch, her tail moving back and forth in the shape of a machete. All of a sudden something crashed like a tree on the far side of a little open meadow—except it kept on crashing after itself, ever more softly as it went, like a domino arrangement of trees, each one smaller than the next. Before it was gone I caught a blurred glimpse of its cinnamon back and black rump.

Alice took off like a shot, yipping her funny yip, racing toward the meadow, and I called after her,
Hey hey hey hey hey hey hey
, and she put on the brakes, skidded in the needle-cast, and responded, twice,
Ruff… . . uhhrrruff.

Good girl
, I said.
Good Spookeen.

She held her ground. After a few more gruffs and growls, we kept on our way.

Just as she smells things I’ve yet to see and never may, so I sometimes see things she has yet to smell. Her nose supplements my eyes; my eyes sometimes preempt her nose. One evening we took the faint path north of the peak, out along the Ghost Divide, a series of knolls and ridges leading into some of the wildest country in the Aldo. Locust and Gambel oak crowded the trail so that every once in a while it disappeared entirely, discernible only by the blazes on the trees. We made it nearly three miles, just above the point where we needed to turn around to make it back to the top by dark, when ahead on the trail I spotted something that looked like a charred stump, except that it was moving and had a tan-colored snout. I turned and looked for Alice, who for once trailed behind me; I softly called her away from her hunt for ground birds. When she pulled up next to me I grabbed her collar, turned her around, and led her back in the direction we’d come, not letting go until I was sure she was with me and understood the seriousness of our intent to retrace our steps. (She much prefers the loop hike to returning over ground she’s already scoured.) By some miracle she neither saw nor smelled the bear; perhaps just as lucky, the bear did not appear to see or smell us.

T
here are times, early each season, when the solitude unsettles me. I have spent my winter kibbitzing with drinkers, after all, a variety of human not known for reticence. Night after night of the usual story: problems with women, problems with men, problems with money, problems with kin. A man grows accustomed to nodding his head in feigned sympathy and reaching for the bottle, two gestures that can only in the end corrupt, especially when performed in unison and for money. Following the drift and weave of my own thoughts is no simple task at first. Like any refined art it begs practice, and I am for the moment out of step. 

The wind doesn’t help. Two days are all it takes for the noise to insinuate itself in my cranium, a fluctuating symphony of sound: whisper and whistle, moan and roar. It gives a texture to the days, gaining power through the afternoon, barreling through the night, easing briefly at dawn. One morning it ceases altogether, and the sudden quiet knocks me out of balance, forces me to recalibrate the terms of the truce I’ve made with solitude. At sunrise I step gingerly into the meadow to piss, and all the world is still; I do not have to take care with my aim for fear of dribbling all over myself. I wonder: Does a snake feel pain when it molts a skin? My shedding of the social world is not without its element of discomfort. Pissing on the naked earth seems, obscurely, to help. So does singing remembered songs by Sam Cooke, Uncle Tupelo, and Hank Williams Jr. On the first calm night I build a bonfire in the stone circle and pace off my unease in the dark, howl a little at the moon, my bottle of whisky perched on a stump. The moon rises out of the desert, huge and orange and leering like a lopsided jack-o’-lantern. Flame and spirits and a weird pumpkin god of the sky: enough, together, to see me through the long cold night.

In the morning, reborn once more, I walk. My options are nearly limitless. Official trails and game trails fork in all directions. Every which way is down, down into variegated forest, trees dead on the ground, dead trees standing shorn of bark, trees corkscrewed by lightning, trees stunted by wind, trees with cankers and knobs, trees clawed by bears, trees grown together from two to make one, giant old fir trees five feet in diameter, aspen groves so thick you can’t walk through them. On this day I choose the path to the spring. On the north side of the peak I hear the strange descending call of the Montezuma quail, otherwise known as the Harlequin quail, for the spiral black-and-white swirl on the side of the male’s head. A queer-looking bird, it often freezes when a human draws near, as if pretending to be a piece of statuary; a person can come within a few feet of it before it rockets into flight. Nearer the spring a turkey gobbles, and I spot two hens lurching away through the trees. Amid a mature aspen grove, just above the spring, I hear the first hummingbird of the season, a broadtail. Time to make some sugar water and spy on the little creatures while they drink.

Time, as well, to cut wood. I figure I have enough to stay comfortable for seven more days, longer if I get good solar heating through the windows of the cabin in the afternoons, but it’s always wise to work ahead. Rain could spoil the cutting for days. Overnight the mercury still drops into the teens. Being situated just inside the wilderness boundary—defined by the Wilderness Act as a place where motorized and mechanized machines are forbidden, “and man himself is but a visitor”—I am forced to use an axe and a handsaw. I’ve come to enjoy the simple rhythms of my arm moving a blade of metal teeth through pine and fir, and later on the thought of my labor will make me frugal with the resource of warmth. Some years a trail crew will fell a dead tree outside the wilderness boundary just to my south, then buck up the trunk into rounds I can split with an axe. Otherwise I cut mostly downed limbs of six inches’ diameter or less, the size of the feeder hole in my stove. In my years here I’ve picked the ground clean a hundred yards in all directions, so the hunt becomes the greater part of the work—the hunt and the haul to the sawhorse.

L
ookouts are the most punctual people I’ve ever known. Each morning we sign on the radio at 8:00 or 9:00 a.m., depending on our set schedule, and because our transmissions are made over a forest-wide frequency, we cannot afford to lose track of time, unless we want to embarrass ourselves to unseen colleagues. Luckily, one lookout’s announcement is a kind of wake-up call for all of us. The beauty of it is we could be naked, bleary-eyed, uncaffeinated, just rolling out of bed—and no one would know, as long as we could speak clearly over the radio the name of our mountain and the words “in service,” at exactly the hour prescribed.