Fire Season

by Connors, Philip

  Satisfied with the extent of my elbow room, I drop back through the trapdoor, shimmy down the steps, hurry back to the warmth of the cabin. I feed the potbellied stove with pine I split last August. For an hour or more I lie awake in the dark, listening to the howl of the wind in the trees, resisting an urge to call the dog back to the bed and thereby spoil her beyond reckoning.

  It’s a lot of work setting up to be lazy.

  For seven months I surrender the cabin to the creatures, if they can get in. This winter they’ve been aided by a citizen user of the national lands who decided to break a window in the side door, for reasons unknown and unknowable. (Five miles afoot seems a long trip to commit a petty act of vandalism.) Every surface is covered in dust from the winter winds working their way through the crevices, blowing in through the window. Not even the dishes in the cupboards are spared a fine grit. All must be washed; I heat some water in a basin for just this purpose. While I wait for it to warm I cover the window with plastic sheeting and duct tape, measure it for a Plexiglas replacement to be hauled up later.

  Next all evidence of the rodents must be expunged, especially the smell. I pry the dead deer mice off the floor and throw them in the fire. Dustpans full of moths meet the same fate. The pack rats have made nests in the bedroom cabinets, filthy conglomerations of pine needles, plastic spoons, Band-Aids, pages torn from magazines, random playing cards. These too I burn. The rats have the unfortunate habit of urinating in the corners and defecating where they sleep, filling the cabin’s atmosphere with a bitter, ammoniac stench—redolent of certain New York streets I have known. To ward off hantavirus I spray the floor with a solution of water and bleach, then mop with water and pine-scented soap, and finally mop once more with just water.

  Once the place is somewhat livable I figure I’d better test my radio, let the below world in on the fact that I’ve arrived here safely. Not that anyone’s all that concerned. Once we’re sent up our hills, we lookouts are largely forgotten, which is just the way we like it. Until we see some lightning, we tend to follow the model of Victorian-era children: do not speak unless spoken to. An exception is this courtesy call to let the office manager know I’m alive and that my tower withstood another winter of battering wind. I climb a ladder and affix a magnetized antenna to the cabin’s roof. I plug a handheld mic running from the antenna into the side of my Bendix-King radio. A red light blinks on when I press transmit.

  “Black Range District, Apache Peak.”

  “Go ahead Apache Peak.”

  “Just letting you know I’m on the peak safely. All’s well here.”

  “Copy. Anything you need?”

  “Affirmative. Some joker broke off a key in the lock to the cistern. I’ll need a bolt cutter for the old lock and a new lock to replace it.”

  “Copy that. We’ll send those up with the packers.”

  “Tell them to wait two weeks or they won’t get their animals through the snow on the north slope.”

  “I’ll let ’em know. You stay warm up there if you can.”

  “Copy. Apache clear.”

  I rather like the laconic style of these conversations, which results, I often feel, from a kind of mutual incomprehension. The person on the other end can’t fathom why I’d spend most of the summer alone in a little tower, far from running water, cold beer, and satellite TV. I cannot conceive of why you’d join the Forest Service only to spend your days shuffling paper under banks of fluorescent light. To him I must seem a little crazy, even something of a masochist, a perception I do nothing to dispel on those rare occasions—a couple of times a year, to pick up my radio and turn it back in—when I visit the office.

  Some years ago, when forced to undergo a “training and orientation” session prior to the beginning of fire season, I raised my hand in protest at having to sit through a seminar on sexual harassment in the workplace. The only conceivable way this affects me, I pointed out, is in my choice of whether to harass myself with my left hand or my right. This heresy was greeted with a gimlet eye and a stern word—not to mention a few muffled chuckles—but it had the desired effect. I was not invited to attend such a session again. The less normal I can make myself appear, the less likely I am to be drafted into some sort of nonlookout work, or any task involving contact with the public in an official government capacity. I must act the part well enough—a goofy hermit with a weird beard and a faraway look in his eyes—because for most of my season I am left utterly and blissfully alone. My radio contact is where he wants to be, I’m where I want to be, and in this fashion we preserve a bit of the diversity of our human experience. Not unlike the vigorous diversity of the forest out my window, where the ponderosa at their healthiest grow in open parklands, the trees spaced fifty or a hundred feet apart, while the aspen cluster in dense groves with a shared root system.

  I am not unfamiliar with his world. In fact, I once inhabited a more extreme version of it: four years at a desk, in front of a computer, enclosed by the steel and glass colossi of lower Manhattan. He at least has a view of mountains out his window, far off in the distance, which trumps the view I once had of Jersey City. I found rather quickly during my peonage in newspapers that I did not have the requisite temperament for such work—the subservience to institutional norms—and that I gained very little in the way of psychic ballast from the attachment of my name to that of a well-known brand in American journalism. Maybe it was a case of egocentricity, but I discovered I had things to say that could not be said in the pages of a daily newspaper. Plus, when the weather cooperates, I prefer to work shirtless.

  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 ab
out 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.

  There 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.