Fire Season

by Connors, Philip

  For the first time in years he embarked on a long stretch of sobriety—completely off booze, though he did bring with him a small amount of amphetamines—and the results were not always lovely. Within the first week he would write, “Here I am on Desolation Peak not ‘coming face to face with God’ as I sententiously predicted, but myself, my shitty frantic screaming at bugs self—There is no God, there is no Buddha, there is nothing but just this and what name shall we give it? SHIT.” All through the coming months he would alternate between states of euphoria and states of despair. “Feeling, now, happier than in years—Is it solitude or the absence of liquor?” The very next day he plunged into a funk after killing a mouse; it had raided the food basket Kerouac had rigged from the ceiling. Finding it there nibbling on green pea powder, he’d bashed it over the head with a flashlight. The murder violated his Buddhist principles and left him feeling guilty and morose.

  His response to Buddhism—he was reading the Diamond Sutra almost daily—would fluctuate wildly as well. On July 12 he wrote: “I’m not going to be taken in by any ideas of transcendental compassionate communication, for it’s just a nothing… . I’d as soon go back to Jesus & keep my mouth shut, as spin their fucking wheel (of the ‘Buddhas numberless’).” Three days later he wrote of meditating on a ridge, pondering “exuberant fertility and infinite potentiality” and of how he woke to “another beautiful morning above the sea of flat shining clouds.” He was thrilled to see a pair of car headlights tracing a mountain road across the line in Canada. The joy, however, did not last: “Hot, miserable, locusts or plagues of insects, heat, no air, no clouds,” he wrote on July 19. “For the fuck of me I’d like to get the fuck out of here—No cigarettes—NOTHING.” Whatever else you may say about him, the man never left a doubt about the way he felt when he held a pencil in his hand. “I’m always deciding something & writing it down as tho it were the final word and then contradicting it later,” he admitted. “I’ll write it down anyway:—because it may win me.”

  Fourteen days into his season of solitude, he gave in to craving and radioed his boss to have a tin of tobacco delivered across the lake to the trailhead. Two days later he hiked down, spent the night on a Forest Service barge, floated around the lake while the other men fished, ate steaks with them, drank liquor with them, and, carrying a pound of tobacco and a sheaf of rolling papers under his arm, hiked back to the lookout in the morning. The company seemed to have done him good. He began writing late into the night, working on a novel about the years he’d lived in the Queens neighborhood of Ozone Park. He drank hot milk and honey in the evenings. He did push-ups and sit-ups, performed yoga head stands in the meadow. He played canasta, smoked, sang old show tunes he remembered, smoked some more, watched the northern lights over Mount Hozomeen. (“Hozomeen, Hozomeen, most mournful mountain I ever seen,” he would write in The Dharma Bums.) He read a biography of John Barrymore. He planned and made lists, including one under the heading “List of Things for My New Life”:

  1. Wear soft-soled canvas shoes & slacks (chino grays) & sports shirts—& a new black leather jacket

  2. Make plays for women young & old

  3. Take money from homosexuals (that’s a joke, son)

  3A. Stand on my head

  4. Drink

  5. Take long walks in cities (Mexico City, Venice, Paris, London, Madrid, Dublin, Stockholm & Berlin)

  6. Write the Duluoz Legend in Deliberate Prose without stimulus, spontaneous prose with stimulus (muscarine and benzedrine)

  6A. Smoke roll-your-owns

  7. Simply know that it makes no difference

  7A. Write plays off tape recorder

  8. Have fun

  Day by day he kept a tally of the money he was making, $9.50 a shift, $350 as of August 1, money he would use for travel when his gig was up. Some days all he could do was yearn for the place he wasn’t. He thought of Mexico City, where he’d stay in bed on weekend nights eating chocolate. He dreamed of Venice, good Italian food, reading outdoors along the canals. Or New York, where he’d live with his mother in the Village and work as a sportswriter. Then a storm would blow over, the looming peaks of Hozomeen would pierce the clouds, and he’d return to raving in ecstasy. He copied long transliterations of the Diamond Sutra into his journal. He sought the Void. “Wait, wait,” he wrote in early August, “who wants to die in bitterness?—duck takes to water, man takes to hope… ”

  Decades before the Forest Service amended its fire policy, he perceived the futility and hubris of attacking every smoke. “As for lightning and fires,” he wrote in Desolation Angels, “who, what American individual loses, when a forest burns, and what did nature do about it for a million years up to now?” He went the whole summer without calling in a single smoke. The one time he was the first to see a fire, his radio failed in a lightning storm. Later he ran out of batteries and had to have extras dropped by parachute. The cargo chute got hung up in a fir tree on a precipice, and Kerouac had to crawl on all fours to retrieve it. He heard a fire crew make a request for resupply—including a fifth of whisky, a case of beer, and two gallons of ice cream. The radio chatter amused him so much he copied some of it down. (“I wrote him a letter last fall and told him where I was and all”; “I’m back here in the middle of nowhere—At least I think so”; “But the Lost Creek Trail they don’t believe is in existence any longer.”) He found bear sign at his garbage pit, a hundred yards down the mountain—old milk cans punctured by claws. Swinging from despair to mania, he counted down the days he had left, complaining of boredom, lack of energy, lack of booze.

  I wonder sometimes if, like me, he’d been given every other weekend off in town to hit the bars and mail some letters and fish the lake and check the baseball scores, or maybe, if he’d simply had an AM radio, whether he’d have thought, Hell, I can do this—this is the sweet simple bhikkhu life, and then come back each summer to escape the fame that threatened to swallow him after On the Road and maybe even live a few extra years, since, as we know, every day spent in a lookout is a day not subtracted from the sum of one’s life. A period of distance from the demon lightning, a chance to clear the mind and calm the nerves. Futile speculation, I know. Presumptuous too: If only the poor bastard had been more like me… But I can’t help it. His story is too sad; it begs for an ending other than the one he found, in which he drank himself to death in 1969 while living with his mother in Florida, raging in spastic bitterness.

  And anyway the lookout’s life was probably not for him, not for more than one summer. “I’d rather have drugs and liquor and divine visions than this empty barren fatalism on a mountaintop,” he wrote toward the end of his stint. These words are especially poignant when you consider that two years earlier he’d written to Allen Ginsberg: “I have crossed the ocean of suffering and found the path at last.” For Kerouac, the path of Buddhism proved too difficult, too alien to his temperament, and he eventually retreated into the mystical French Catholicism he’d known as a boy. Its fascination with the martyrdom of the Crucifixion jibed with his sense of himself as a doomed prophet destined for self-annihilation. The essential Buddhist ethic—do no violence to any living being—was a principle that tragically eluded him in his treatment of himself.

  For most of his last month on Desolation he was eager to get the call that it was over. He vowed to get back to a life of adventure, complained he had nothing to write about alone on a mountain, even as he scribbled furiously. Never did man nor woman make more of sixty-three days alone on a lookout, recycling and revising the experience across multiple books and literary forms. He reworked a few observations from his journal in writing the final pages of The Dharma Bums, mostly passages that captured the brighter side of the experience; he wrote a calm and sentimentalized version of that summer in a reminiscence for the essay collection Lonesome Traveler; he went deeper and darker in the opening section of Desolation Angels, by far the most honest account of his lookout experience in its highs and lows, with many long passages borrowed almost verbatim
from his journal; and he wrote a dozen “Desolation Blues” poems gathered posthumously in his Book of Blues. He also exaggerated the length of his stay to more than seventy days and fudged on the austerity of his solitude, neglecting to mention his trip down the mountain for tobacco and the resulting night of revelry on the float.

  Though he was not yet known as “the avatar of the Beat Generation,” he believed he would make his mountain famous, foresaw that streams of hikers would one day undertake the trek to Desolation Peak as if to a holy shrine: “Such places (where the scripture is observed), however wretched they may be, will be loved as though they were famous memorial parks and monuments to which countless pilgrims and sages will come (to Desolation Peak!) to offer homage and speeches and dedications. And over them the angels of the unborn and the angels of the dead will hover like a cloud.” More than fifty years later the “little Pagoda Lookout” still hugs the top of the peak; the pilgrims come singly and in groups to see the view that Kerouac saw, sit in the shack where Kerouac sat, pace the meadow where Kerouac paced, and generally try to soak up a little of the dharma perceived to hang over the place where Kerouac tried and failed to put his demons to rest. And at least one lookout on the other end of the Rockies reads his journal sometimes late at night or on days of mist and rain, swept up in the turbulent energy of his prose, awed by the naked force of his honesty, the depth of his longing, the doomed quest of his search for lasting peace.

  On July 4 I sometimes think I should feel a deep patriotic thrum, maybe go berserk with small incendiaries, start early on the lager; that’s what my neighbors will be doing back in town, and may the fates bless them in their pursuit of happiness. But I prefer to swaddle myself in solitude and watch the fireworks forty miles away in both the east and west, blooming like tiny flowers in a sped-up time-lapse film, their elegance accentuated by the distance and the silence of their parabolic choreography. If I’m honest about it, I have to admit that my most enjoyable national holidays have occurred in the company of friends and loved ones: the summer Martha and I recorded twenty minutes of ourselves on a cassette tape, oohing and aahing in the tower at the fireworks shows in Elephant Butte and Silver City, twenty straight minutes of only the two words ooh and aah, varying their length and tone to impart gradations of meaning, breaking down from time to time in wheezy belly laughter; or the year Mandijane and Sebastian showed up with wine and steaks and some kind of hybrid of bottle rocket and Roman candle that we aimed at the tower from a hundred feet away, contra Forest Service rules and regulations. Frivolity and nonsense ought to be a part of anyone’s pursuit of happiness, and they’ve certainly made for my most memorable Fourths of July.

  Lucky for me the holiday falls roughly midway in my annual twenty-week hiatus from rather too obsessively following the folly and farce of what passes for our politics. By a quirk of schedule—the shape of fire season in the American Southwest—I feel, by the first week of July, almost nothing but love for a country that would produce even one human being with the idea to preserve a forested commons from the onrush of our most destructive tools. Most of our best ideas have enlarged our definition of small-d democracy: one human, one vote; public schools for all our children (desegrated, of course); the creation of what the great Bob Marshall, founder of the Wilderness Society, called “the people’s forests.” Yes. To America, then—to our forests, our Founding Fathers, our Bettering Mothers, our magnificent flora and fauna diverse and healthy in its native element: of thee I proudly sing. Alone, this year. And thank goodness. I do not sing well. A fine reason to keep the song short.

  John on Cherry Mountain, Hedge on Monument Mountain, and Sara on Snow Peak each spot new smokes on July 6—tiny fires, little snags and logs on the ground, all of them smaller than a tenth of an acre and none of them a threat to get big. Lightning hits all around me, but no smokes show in my corner of the forest. Hail bounces in the grass like bingo balls. Rain collects in pools amid the rocks in the meadow. Alice can’t sit still. She paces the cabin, a pensive look in her eyes. She curls up on the floor at my feet for a while, rises and returns to her bed, then comes to my side again when lightning stabs a couple hundred yards away, the thunder like some celestial gong crashed above our heads. I roll a new sheet of paper in the typewriter and stare at it for several minutes, my attention repeatedly disrupted by the flash, the crack, the boom of the rapid-fire strikes. All of a sudden the hair on my arms stands up, a flickering penumbra of yellow-white light surrounds us, and I feel a percussive blast almost before I hear the sound: the cabin’s been struck by lightning. Thank goodness the thing is grounded. For several minutes there’s a weird smell in the air, like an overheated radiator, and my heart jiggles in my chest like a fox in a burlap sack. Lightning continues to pound all around, and I count off the distance of the strikes from the peak—five seconds between flash and thunder equals one mile, and I rarely get to five. Alice, pressed against my leg for some small sense of comfort, shudders every time the thunder sounds.

  Late in the afternoon the clouds break. I climb the tower for a gander at the country. The sky is immense and cleansed by rain, the earth below it a palette of muted blues and greens and browns. With the dust washed from the air, the vistas boggle the mind, my horizon stretching as much as 200 miles away. In all my seasons I’ve never seen the view so clear, so I open my notebook and begin to name and count the visible mountain ranges—the Wahoos, the Datils, the Cuchillos, the San Mateos, the Magdalenas, the Fra Cristobal Range, the Oscuras, the Caballos, the San Andres Mountains, the Sacramentos, the Organs, the Franklins, the Doña Anas and the Rough and Ready Hills, the Sierra de las Uvas, the Good Sight Mountains, the Potrillos, the Mimbres Mountains, the Cookes Range, the Floridas and the Tres Hermanas, the Cedars, the Big and Little Hatchets, the Animas Mountains, the Pyramids, the Peloncillos and Chiricahuas and Big Burros, the Pinaleños, the Silver City Range, the Pinos Altos Range, the Diablos, the Jerkies, the Mogollons—more than thirty in all and me in the middle of them, goggle-eyed and rapturous, alone in my aerie in the vastness. Caged by glass but caressed by sky, I come as near as I’m able to a perception of the numinous. The writer Richard Manning has argued that “the most destructive force in the American West is its commanding views, because they foster the illusion that we command.” I can’t say I’ve ever felt that way here. If anything, the views on offer command me: sit and be silent.

  My moment of enchantment is broken by a burst from the radio, my boss calling.

  “Apache Peak, Division 62.”

  “Division 62, Apache Peak.”

  “Hey, Bubba, how’s it goin’ up there?”

  “Not bad, chief. Just sitting here counting mountain ranges.”

  “Copy that. Good day for it, I’m guessing. I’ve got some news for you if you’re ready to copy.”

  “Let ’er rip, Skip.”

  The news is unwelcome. Dennis doesn’t have much use for me anymore, not with the rains coming almost daily. Unless the weather pattern changes, I’ll be granted four more days on my mountain and that will be that for the season. We lookouts are getting the hook.

  As consolation, he offers an extra week of work in the office, helping to write an updated lookout manual for future rookies. The prospect does not entice me. I can’t imagine writing a document bland enough to earn a stamp of approval from a U.S. government agency. Inspired by Kerouac’s list making and Black Larry’s Rules for Black Range Travel, I’ve been working all summer on a code for lookoutry, my best advice for all who come after, though I know it’s not what Dennis has in mind for his manual:

  1. Do not miss a chance to nap.

  2. Leave the place better than you found it.

  3. Never piss into the wind.

  4. Go buck naked in the tower now and then for kicks.

  5. Learn what it means to ride the lightning.

  6. Cut a good supply of wood for the start of next year.

  7. Feed the hummingbirds.

  8. Have a hobby: reading, knitting, playing the
ukelele. Something.

  9. Sleep outside when the weather permits.

  10. Love your neighbor as yourself. (Lacking human neighbors, love the bobcats and the turkeys, the chipmunks and the tassel-eared squirrels.)

  If a week in the office turns out to be mandatory, I’ll suck it up and do my time; I was once conscripted for worse. During one of my first summers on lookout, an old grazing-allotment fence was torched in a fire on the north end of the district, and after I was pulled from the tower I was ordered to join the crew rebuilding it. Thus was I thrust into company after a season of solitude: a gang of three cowboys who packed supplies for the fence and meals for the crew, and the crew itself, an ever-shifting group of tough young firefighters living in tents both acrid from camp smoke and richly rotten from dirty work socks. The cowboys were a colorful bunch. Like vaqueros of old, they drifted from job to job, working on a series of ranches, rounding up renegade cattle in the wilderness, packing with mules for forest work crews, guiding hunting parties in the fall. They spent their downtime back at the Pine Knot Bar, otherwise known as their “headquarters,” and around the campfire their stories concerned variations on only two subjects: whisky and pussy. The liveliest of their tales arose from the confluence of the two, as if they were rivers on whose banks all good cowboys waited as life’s treasure flowed past for the taking. After I shared with them some of my own whisky supply, they decided my company was tolerable, though I couldn’t say the same for the work, which I hope and pray I’m never forced to do again.