Fire Season

by Connors, Philip

  In 1924, as an assistant district forester in New Mexico and Arizona, Leopold drew a line on the map encompassing four mountain ranges and the headwaters of the Gila River, a line beyond which nothing motorized or mechanized would be allowed to travel. In 1980 another roadless area was preserved alongside it, this one named in honor of Leopold: more than 200,000 acres running along the crest of the Black Range and down its slopes to the east and west, into the foothills and mesas in its shadow. This would seem an appropriate homage to a man who not only conceived of and drew the boundaries of the world’s first wilderness, but founded the field of wildlife management, helped pioneer the study of tree rings for evidence of fire history, and articulated a philosophy—the “land ethic”—that inspired subsequent generations of environmental thinkers.

  The Gila Wilderness served as a guiding example for that capstone of the American preservation movement, the 1964 Wilderness Act. By leaving a big stretch of country unroaded and unpopulated, it also removed the major obstacles to large-scale burns: the presence of private property and the existence of communities impacted by smoke. For we must acknowledge a simple fact: smoke and flames make people nervous, whether they’re watching from the front porch of a mountain cabin or from the back deck of a home in town. The two wilderness areas at the heart of the Gila give forest officials a buffer of safety between humans and fire. In many places throughout the West, no such buffer exists between wildlands and the “urban interface,” to use the jargon of our day. It is from those places where most Americans get their images of wildfire—the drama of the fight, the tragedy of the charred home. This book, I hope, will offer another view of fire and its place in nature, a view too little glimpsed on our television screens.

  What follows, then, is more than just a personal drama—though living alone on a high mountain, in the company of abundant wild creatures, surrounded by a landscape prone to burn, does provide an impressive stage set for a drama of the self. I often think that if there’s such a thing as the oldest story on earth, it is a story of fire, the marriage of fuel and spark. Despite all the vitriol we’ve directed at it, despite all the technology we’ve deployed to fight it, wildfire still erupts in the union of earth and sky, in the form of a lightning strike to a tree, and there is nothing we can do to preempt it. The best we can do, in a place like the Gila, is have a human stationed in a high place to cry out the news. If this gets to sounding borderline mystical, as if I’ve joined the cult of the pyromaniacal, all I can say is: guilty as charged.

  1

  April

  Oil the saws, sharpen axes,

  Learn the names of all the peaks you see and which is highest—

  there are hundreds—

  Learn by heart the drainages between

  Go find a shallow pool of snowmelt on a good day, bathe

  in the lukewarm water.

  —Gary Snyder, “Things to Do Around a Lookout”

  Into the Black Range * thwarted by snow & saved by snow * a view from on high * unsettled by solitude, troubled by wind * some walks with the dog & bears we have seen * cutting wood the old-fashioned way * the symbiosis of grass & fire * a visit from the mule packers * smoke in Thief Gulch

  Approached from the valley of the Rio Grande, the Black Range is only modestly impressive, a low dark wall of irregular height seventy miles long, rising above tan foothills. All around are mountains more exposed in their geology, more yielding of their ancient secrets. The muted shapes and dark color of the Black Range give it an appearance of one-dimensionality, perhaps even unreality, as if it were a painted backdrop in a low-budget Western. These are not picture-postcard peaks, serrating the sky with shark-tooth shapes of bare rock. Instead they’re a doubtful chimera on the edge of the desert, a sky island seeming to shimmer in an April haze.

  The Black Range was once a part of Apache country, one of the major reasons it was slow in coming under the domain of the American government. Geronimo was born to the west near the forks of the Gila River; his fellow chief Victorio, of the Warm Springs Apache, made his home just to the north, at Ojo Caliente, though he knew the Black Range intimately, having used it as a hunting ground and refuge from the summer heat. He and his Chihenne followers fought the U.S. cavalry here as late as 1880, and a number of Buffalo Soldiers and their Navajo scouts did not have the luck to leave the Black Range alive. Their graves can still be found if you know where to look.

  For me, the first leg of the trip to the crest is simple and comfortable: a climate-controlled pickup truck, Satchmo on the stereo, my dog Alice on the seat beside me. We glide across the bed of an ancient inland sea, which locals call the flats. Beyond the little town of Gaylord the road curves to contour with Trout Creek, a stream with sources high in the mountains, denuded in the lower elevations by decades of overgrazing. At Embree, population three dozen, the road leaves the creek to begin its climb through the foothills. For fifteen miles there’s not a straightaway long enough to allow me to pass a slow vehicle. Locals, if they see me come up behind them, will pull into one of the gravel turnouts and offer a wave as I pass, but if I find myself behind tourists, I will dial down my speed and practice the virtues of charity and patience. It is a magnificent drive, and I can hardly fault them for taking it leisurely.

  I can’t help but hurry, despite the sweeping views. Where I’m headed the views are a whole lot better, and besides I’ve been gone too long. Seven months of hustle in the world below provide more than sufficient acquaintance with the charms of my winter career. But that is behind me now—or rather, I should say, beneath me. Norman Maclean once wrote that “when you work outside of a town for a couple of months you get feeling a lot better than the town and very hostile toward it.” I felt hostile and superior before I even left. Tending bar will do that to a man, although it also allows him to leave on short notice, and in so doing hurt no one’s feelings but those of the regulars who’ve come to depend on his ear.

  More than one winter has found me working in a Silver City dive that beckons to the thirsty with a classic neon sign of a cactus in the foreground and a horseman drifting alone into the distance. My most reliable customer was an Oklahoma hillbilly with a Santa Claus beard, whose wit and wisdom is best exemplified by a statement I’ve heard more than once from his beer-foamed lips: “Thing about them Aye-rabbs, they breed faster’n we can shoot ’em. Kinda like them Kennedys.” Weekend entertainment brought the biggest crowds and the best money, courtesy of heavy-metal bands with evocative names such as Dirtnap, Bowels Out, and New Mexican Erection. It all makes for an interesting counterpoint to summers spent alone far from town, but I’m tired of playing the role of enabler-priest in an unholy chapel.

  At Wright’s Saddle my drive is over, though the real pleasures of the journey have just begun. In a supply shack cluttered with helicopter sling nets and cases of military-style MREs (Meals, Ready-to-Eat), I leave eight boxes to be packed in later by mule, each box marked with its weight, to help the packers balance their animals. The boxes contain books, dry and canned food, dog food, two cases of double-A batteries, a Frisbee, a mop head, a bow saw, an ax bit. I double-check my own pack for all the immediate necessities: maps, binoculars, handheld VHF radio, freeze-dried food, my typewriter, some magazines, some whisky. Certain I’ve left nothing vital behind, I begin the final stretch of what has to be one of the sweetest commutes enjoyed by any hardworking American anywhere. Alice leaps about, wagging her question-mark tail. She feels the same way I do.

  Five and a half miles await me, five and a half miles of toil and sweat, nearly every inch of it uphill, with fifty pounds of supplies on my back. I can feel right off that winter has again made me soft. My gluteal muscles burn. My knees creak. The shoulder straps on my pack appear to want to reshape the curve of my collarbones. The dog shares none of my hardships. She races to and fro off the trail, sniffing the earth like a pig in search of truffles, while from the arches of my beleaguered feet to the bulging disk in my neck—an old dishwashing injury, the repetitive stre
ss of bending forward with highball glasses by the hundred—I hurt. Not many people I know have to work this hard to get to work, yet I can honestly say I love the hike, every step of it. The pain is a toll I willingly pay on my way to the top, for here, amid these mountains, I restore myself and lose myself, knit together my ego and then surrender it, detach myself from the mass of humanity so I may learn to love them again, all while coexisting with creatures whose kind have lived here for millennia.

  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.

  Five 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 uninhabite
d 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.