A Song for the River

by Philip Connors

  Thirty-four years later, and a decade into my education in the combustible realities of the Gila, an area ten times that went up in smoke. During the autumn of 2012, I hiked into the southern fringes of the Whitewater-Baldy Fire scar, which I had watched burn for several weeks that May and June from my tower thirty miles away. I had inhaled its downwind smoke, even peered through the scrim of it one evening directly at a solar eclipse, sans protective eyewear—the smokescreen was protection enough. Having spread across nearly 300,000 acres, the fire became by far the biggest in the recorded history of New Mexico. The smoke plume on the day it blew up, when a high-wind event pushed two separate fires together into a roaring monster, resembled nothing I had ever seen in nature, an angry aubergine band smeared across my northern horizon like a brushstroke from the hand of a demented god.

  The burn had been cold twelve weeks by the time I had the chance to backpack up Little Dry Creek, then on toward the high peaks of the Gila Wilderness. The landscape seemed to pulse with color under gray, monsoon-season skies. Rain fell each day, and fog swallowed the better part of every afternoon, but the color palette remained vivid. Whorls of red and gold and silver from various minerals in the soil runoff decorated the rich black mud in the creek bottom. Dead needles on standing conifers shone a brilliant orange where trees had succumbed to the heat of ground fire. Torched snags, some on the ground, some still rooted like candlesticks—casualties of a raging crown fire, the flames having jumped straight from treetop to treetop—loomed eerily skeletal through the mist. Here and there eruptions of green poked through the blanket of black: oak sprouts on south-facing slopes, aspen shoots already hip high on north-facing slopes, New Mexico locust scattered amid both. Wildflowers bloomed in manic profusion from big patches of bare soil, impressionistic daubs of yellow, purple, red, and blue. It was all very beautiful—and still I couldn’t help but feel the loss.

  Our long 20th-century war on fire made big burns such as Whitewater-Baldy so outside the norm they felt like wounds not just to landscapes but also to the human psyche. Partly this was due to the time scale at work. Stand-replacement fires, the kind that burned with high intensity, killing all the living trees across a wide area, had been the rule for the spruce-fir belt in this part of the world. But they tended to happen in any given place just once every hundred years at most, making them outside the course of normal events in a human lifetime—and almost unheard of in the Forest Service era, post-1900. They also tended to be confined to discreet patches of forest, a few hundred or a thousand acres, whereas the Whitewater-Baldy Fire burned at stand-replacing severity over numerous contiguous patches of as much as 5,000 acres apiece.

  Even on the Gila, which stood at the vanguard of letting some burns do their thing, we still suppressed more than 90% of all new smokes each year, out of an excess of caution and adherence to institutional habits. We wanted it to burn “on our terms,” we sometimes said, so when it came time to let loose some fire on the land, we found it easiest to let the mid-elevation ponderosa savannah succumb to flames. It had always burned more frequently than the spruce-fir higher up the mountains, and the big open areas of grass guaranteed easier ignition, faster spread, and sizeable burns, even as fire intensity rarely got out of hand. In the ponderosa there wasn’t enough heavy fuel to let it get out of hand, and containment lines representing the “maximum manageable area” of a burn could be built by improving existing trails across the ridges and mesas well in advance of fire reaching them, and lighting backfires at strategic moments as the main fire approached.

  Allowing fires to burn in the high country took much more patience. They could be slow to take hold in the cool, shaded timber that was snowed in half the year, but the bureaucracy did not reward patience when it came to wildfire. Agency protocol demanded that decisions on whether to suppress or let burn be made quickly upon detection, and the easiest thing to do in the high country was to drop a couple of smokejumpers or fly in a helitack crew to fell a few trees and scrape a quick line and call it victory. This foreclosed the risk of a dry spell setting in and combining with a wind event to set the dense spruce and fir to torching with ungodly flame lengths and eruptions of black smoke—the sort of fire prone to light up the switchboard in the supervisor’s office with calls from a terrified public.

  Playing with fire held risks, of course, but so did suppression. The impulse to fight fires had stunted the evolution of an ever-changing mosaic of areas that were lightly or partially burned in the mixed conifer and spruce-fir. Such a patchwork of forest in sundry phases of recovery from fire, with occasional open meadows and plenty of aspen pockets mingled among the conifers, represented an insurance policy against a megafire. Ask any lookout on the Gila, and she could rattle off a list of fires by name—a dozen or a hundred depending on length of service—that, if allowed to burn, could have helped create the mosiac of forest types that would have prevented Whitewater-Baldy from blowing up as big as it did.

  Another way to think about it is that every single fire ever suppressed in the Mogollon Mountains made Whitewater-Baldy a little bit bigger and a little bit hotter than it would have been otherwise. Others have said it before me, and I have elsewhere borrowed their words, but it’s worth saying again: we thought we were putting out fires when in fact we were only putting them off.

  Later in the autumn of 2012 I visited the burn scar of the McKnight Fire, just northwest of my lookout. For decades it held the record as the state’s biggest fire: 50,000 acres of the Black Range high country, ignited by the spontaneous combustion of sawdust at a logging operation in 1951. At the time it was judged an appalling and irreversible catastrophe, and many in the Forest Service hoped that with rapid detection and overwhelming suppression we would never again see its kind. (Rapid detection and the deployment of more than 700 firefighters made little difference to its final size, but no matter.) Six decades later, with its brilliant display of fall color, this scar was a vivid teaching aid in ecological succession, the process by which one forest type replaces another in the aftermath of a major disturbance. Here and there a standing snag rose like an iron spire, a reminder of the forest that was. Aspen and oak in subtly varying shades of yellow painted the top of the range, encircling remnant islands of unburned conifers. Beneath the aspen—the major colonizing species on the high peaks—young conifer reproduction had begun, on its way to taking over again if the country stayed free of fire for another twenty years. In the limpid light of a New Mexico autumn, the whole top of the range appeared to tremble with a magic aura, a technicolor dream coat of saffron and copper and gold.

  Most of those lovely leaves and nearly all of the young conifers would burn and run black through feeder streams of the Rio Grande before nine months had passed, in a fire I would spot when it was nothing but a single smoldering tree.

  IF YOU HANG AROUND long enough to make it a real vocation, you find that being a conscientious lookout demands a bookkeeper’s attention to detail. The popular image of the work leans on its romantic grandeur, its resplendent solitude, but the dirty little secret is that the job deals heavily in numbers. Radio frequencies, personnel call signs, GPS coordinates, fire azimuths, fire legals, fire acreages, lightning-activity levels, Haines indices, maximum wind gusts, the precise details of crew-supply orders, military time to the minute of any noteworthy event, anywhere on your turf: it all goes into a logbook so a question from a dispatcher or a firefighter can be answered at a glance.

  There are, of course, many days when nothing of consequence happens, and the log shows little more than a weather report. To take one example from my note-keeping, consider June 6, 2013: the day before the lightning strike that started the Silver Fire. Aside from weather observations, my notes for the day consist of the following:

  0700—In service

  1900—Out of service

  No day hikers, no fires, no traffic on the radio: from an official standpoint, the story of this day is nada.

  There was, however, another thread to the day, this
one contained in a different notebook, unconnected with my duties for the US government, and more evocative of emotional weather than of the atmospheric sort. Most evenings I added to this other notebook at the sturdy wood table in the cabin on my mountain, where by the light of a gas lamp I wrote to keep myself company and make myself real—more of a challenge, some days, than one might think.

  That particular evening I wandered the uppermost contours of the peak until the twilight drained over the lip of the western horizon. I began my mosey by visiting a clump of cactus on the mountain’s east slope. From there I moved on to a spruce tree on the north face, a mere ninety steps away. The first was indicative of the shrublands life zone, the second of the subalpine, and their proximity—flora typically found two life zones away from each other—reminded me that I inhabited a unique place of overlapping biomes, where desert life forms coexisted with those more typical of the Canadian boreal forest. Slopes with a southern aspect tended to be more open and more arid, while those with a northern exposure harbored more moisture and, as a result, a denser canopy and bigger trees. Since I lived on a mountaintop, I could move from one to the other in the time it took to recite a couple of stanzas of poetry.

  From the spruce I continued northwest toward a decadent aspen stand. I circled back to visit a bonsai pine tree anchored in cliff rock on the top of a wind-blasted ridge. Over the years I had come to think of this walk as a stroll through a gallery of loved ones. Having more than once been called a tree hugger, I had chosen to ignore the derision implicit in the label and instead accept it as a thoughtful suggestion. On this day, as on many others, I moved through the woods making contact with my favorites, most of them living, a few dead but still rooted: the bushy limber pine, the gnarled old Doug fir, the funky aspen with the split trunk. This was their home. I was merely a seasonal resident. It behooved me to pay my respects, say my hellos.

  When the veil of dark descended, I built a small outdoor fire and laid on my back next to it, looking up at the stars, recalling all I had seen in the day just past—preparing, in a little while, to make it manifest with words by the light of the lamp in the cabin. From the mountain you see the mountain, Ralph Waldo Emerson had written. As spring tilted toward summer that year, I began to believe the gnomic bard had been off by one word.

  From the mountain you see into the mountain.

  Or perhaps it saw into me:

  The tenor of a day can be altered by a surprise glimpse of lemon-yellow lichen on ochre rock. This the mountain has taught me; time then for a walk. No sight of turkeys, but arrow-shaped turkey tracks imprinted on the dust of the trail. A family of claret cup cacti in bloom on a hidden prow of cliff: all of them a brilliant red but for one orange outlier, a freak flying a different flag. Bear tracks along a contour of the north-slope meadow, mule deer droppings among the wild iris blooms—mammalian presences perceptible in their leavings. The limbs of a dead tree cradling the trunk of a living leaner, aspen leaves ashimmer in the day’s last light. Virga drifting from a few fuzzed clouds. A night hawk beginning the figure-eight flight of its dusk-light hunt. An owl just visible in the gloam, circling. Beyond it the first star-winks in the gathering black. These things have the power to redeem the darkest mood. A privileged glimpse of the old, wild world. Tools with which to pick the lock on the cage of the self. The heart of the mountain beats audibly if you know how to listen. I holler from the cliff’s edge. No answer but my echo in the canyon below. Precisely the answer I want.

  One could call it an evening like any other in the life of a Wilderness lookout—solitary, sublime, the culmination of yet another day spent dazzled by the sweep of light on desert landforms—yet such notations from a twilight walk, like the official log entries of the workday before them, only ever tell a partial story. For each relic of the urge to render the experience of living alone on a mountain irrevocably in ink—an urge, as I have mentioned, indulged in part to ward off loneliness and forestall disintegration—there is an unseen context, a sort of background music, in this case the dirge of illness and loss.

  OVER THE PREVIOUS WINTER my marriage had collapsed. I was left disoriented by the fact that my closest companion for a decade had morphed into an enemy with whom I could no longer speak the simplest words without misunderstanding. I had known men in my position, newly bachelors and surprised by the fact, who consoled themselves with the idea that despite everything they had lost, they had also relieved themselves of their one major pain in the posterior. In an effort to distract myself from sorrow and self-loathing—and from any real reckoning with my failures as a husband—I tried that attitude on for size. The universe having a diabolical sense of humor, it turned out that the pains in my posterior had not even begun.

  I decided I needed a change of scenery to match my change in marital status, so I devised a plan to drive to Minnesota and rent a lake cabin close to where I grew up, within reach of all the old ghosts, triggers to the sense memories I hoped to revive as a means of forgetting the present. I loaded up my truck and struck out around eight in the evening, thinking I could make Albuquerque by a little after midnight via back roads. The first 150 miles were uneventful and lovely—a pale moon rising over silhouetted ridge lines dark against a slightly less dark sky. Out north of the little town of Reserve, I encountered a herd of elk crossing the highway. I missed the first one through blind chance. I swerved to miss the second: skill. As with so many things in life, the third time was the charm.

  I have seen many brilliant and breathtaking gymnastics moves in my time, but never in person, and none quite like the double somersault with a twist performed by elk number three as it hit the grill of my truck, twirled up onto the hood, bounced off the windshield, and dismounted over the top of the cab. The truck immediately died by the side of the road. The elk took awhile to die in the ditch behind me. I waited two hours for someone to pass by and offer help. In the meantime I listened to the moaning of the elk and the howling of coyotes who surely smelled blood, and regretted all the while not having packed my gun. My truck spent the next six weeks in intensive care in the town of Quemado, at the auto repair shop of the very kind man who towed me there at two in the morning and put me up on his couch.

  So much for returning to my roots.

  Four months of couch-surfing later, and four weeks before I was scheduled to ascend the mountain for the season that would bring the Silver Fire, I fell ill with a prostate gland so inflamed by infection it felt like an angry blowfish at the center of my being: the perfect manifestation of a deep soul sickness. The pain, combined with fever, gave me nights of agony near enough to unbearable that I found myself looking longingly at my shotgun as a potential source of permanent relief. I lost thirty pounds in thirty days; I couldn’t tolerate the thought of seeing visitors, much less them seeing me. This was not what I had in mind when I imagined my resumption of bachelor living: wandering fruitlessly from urologist to urologist, fearful my erotic life was but a memory.

  One close friend offered to supply me with groceries, and for a month she was the only person I allowed through the door, although not very often, since my appetite had vanished. I quit leaving the house, didn’t bother answering the phone. What was there to say? The first course of antibiotics had caused achilles tendon pain so severe it rendered me unable to walk for two weeks, a not unknown side effect of Ciprofloxacin. The second course of antibiotics had caused a severe allergic reaction after just one dose, a not unknown side effect of Bactrim. The ones prescribed in place of them had failed to have any effect, a not uncommon outcome of throwing Doxycycline like a Hail Mary pass at a prostate infection.

  Having run the gamut on the pharmaceutical options for treating my condition, I was told by the doctors it was now chronic and likely permanent. They had done all they could to help. They wrote me off and wished me luck.

  John called a couple of times after he heard I was sick, but I didn’t bother calling back. All of a sudden, at the age of forty, I had become a man I no longer recognized, and a
t the same time a bit of a cliché—bound up in a dubious mortgage, tangled in impersonal legal proceedings with a soon-to-be ex-wife, and ravaged by untreatable pain in my most sensitive bodily organs—a middle-aged loser in the casino of American life, in other words. I didn’t want to talk about any of it, and John was the last guy in the world you wanted checking in with you if you didn’t want to talk about something.

  I had been avoiding his calls for months by then. He began trying to reach me when he found out I had left my wife. Each time his voice appeared on my answering machine, every two or three weeks, I deleted it without listening to the end of the message. I could not bear the thought of going over the story of the split in the kind of detail he typically demanded. Living through it had been lurid enough, and recounting the story in its totality, I feared, would reproduce the confusion and pain, a pain I wanted more than anything to forget. I knew John would not let me forget. I knew he believed with an almost religious fervor that only by confronting that which caused us pain could we avoid becoming its prisoner. So I ignored him, chose instead to romance my bitter solitude, and thus remained unaware he was going through a similar breakup with his girlfriend Lee, who had shown him love was still possible after the loss of Miquette. My self-absorption blinded me to the fact that he was calling in part because he needed me, not merely because he thought I needed him.

  One day he came knocking unannounced. By then I hadn’t seen him in half a year. He betrayed no disappointment in me, no hard feelings. He held a container of chicken paprika in one hand and two cigarettes in the other, a sparkle-eyed grin on his face even as he winced at the sight of me. “One of them’s good for you,” he said, looking down at the gifts in his hands, “but I’m not sure which. Maybe we should try both.” I smiled in spite of myself, a peculiar contortion of my face I hadn’t felt in longer than I cared to remember.