As of today, over 133,000 acres of Gila National Forest (GNF)
in New Mexico is engulfed in a massive wildfire. The Whitewater Baldy Complex
Fire, named after the Whitewater and Baldy Fires joined, has become the largest
fire New Mexico has ever seen. With high winds and low humidity, it is also the
hardest to contain.
Coincidently, I am reading Fire Season: Field Notes from a
Wilderness Lookout by Philip Connors. The author spent eight seasons in a fire
tower above the Gila National Forest searching for smoke. A season starts in
April and ends the beginning of September. He spots his first plume of smoke
while hiking to his assigned tower the last week in April which is the least
volatile time of the season.
Connors radios in as he runs to the top of the trail. The
smoke is rising from Thief Gulch on the east side of the Black Range. Ironically,
he is lucky to have spotted it on his hike. His advantage point in the tower
would have had an opposite effect since the smoke generated deep within its
hidden alcove. Spotters like Connors name the fire and this becomes the Thief
Fire.
Published in 2011, this book won the National Outdoor Book
Award for Outdoor Literature. Reading it you can see why the judges gave this
non-fiction a literary award. Connors channels the many writers such as Aldo
Leopold, Edward Abbey, Jack Kerouac, and “A River Runs through It” author
Norman Maclean. All worked as fire tower employees in GNF or other western parks
in America before becoming famous writers.
What a life! Spending five months in a remote forest tower
with nothing but your thoughts had to be a writer’s paradise, but not for
Connors. He experienced writer’s block from the beginning. Instead, he started
to hand write his experiences in the form of letters to his editor. He then
mailed them and waited for his editor to either say it was interesting or not
worthy of ink.
Do you think you could live in a remote area scanning the
horizon for smoke on a daily basis? Connors answers this or variations of the solitary
theme in every chapter. It is a major concern as lookers leave spouses and day jobs
five months out of the year to attend the forest. Books, hikers, his wife
Martha, and the presence of his precocious dog, Alice, are but a handful of
techniques used to stave off loneliness for these “freaks of the peaks.”
Both editor and writer did an outstanding job as Fire
Season has me craving a tower to man.
2 comments:
I've been wanting to read this book. It takes a certain kind of person to withstand that much solitude!
I love this book Jeane! I love the trivia I learn and his and other's coping mechanisms. :D
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