Fire Season

by Connors, Philip

  The entrance to the Franklin Street station was blocked with yellow police tape. I looked at the campaign posters for the mayoral primary—due to take place that day—taped to the railing above the stairs and thought that if I crossed the police line there would be no one to rely on thereafter but myself. What else was I going to do? Go back to my apartment and listen to the radio? Sit in a bar and watch TV? I lifted the tape, descended the stairs, and, in a last gesture toward civilized norms, swiped my MetroCard instead of jumping the turnstile.

  No trains were running. No clerk was in the token booth. I waited a few moments to see if a train or an MTA worker would appear, but there was only an otherworldly quiet. With no one around to stop me, I lowered myself onto the tracks and began walking through the tunnel, creeping through the dark, careful to avoid touching the third rail. Not even the squeak of a rat marred the silence. It would be the only time I ever heard nothing in New York.

  Ten blocks later, when I emerged into the light of the Chambers Street station, the platform was coated in dust, and ahead in the tunnel I heard water rushing with a sound like a waterfall. A couple of cops were in the station, hanging around the token booth, their radios occasionally squawking. I waited until they wandered off and then I climbed the stairs to the street.

  I emerged a couple of blocks north of the towers, or at least where the towers had been. The streets were covered in ash and office paper. A cop stood alone in the middle of the street, watching a burning building, which I later learned was 7 World Trade Center. I walked over and stood next to her, both of us mesmerized. After a couple of minutes she looked at me. “That building’s probably going to go,” she said. “You might want to get out of here.” She didn’t order me to leave. She seemed to assume I wouldn’t. She merely offered it as a suggestion, one among a series of options available to me, take it or leave it.

  I picked up a discarded dust mask, put it on my face, and began to make my way around the smoking rubble, through streets flooded with greenish-yellow water, or ankle-deep in fine gray powder. After crossing the West Side Highway, I entered the World Financial Center complex. The Winter Garden’s glass roof was shattered in places, and the palm trees in the courtyard were pallid with ash. All the shops were empty. I climbed the emergency fire stairs in 1 World Financial Center. I saw no one. The office had long been evacuated and was now, at least on the floor where I worked, coated in a thin gritty film blown in through shattered windows, though the computers still ran on the power of a backup generator. It was one of the most unnerving moments of my life, standing in that empty newsroom, wondering where everyone was, hoping none of my colleagues had been hurt or killed, all those computers humming with no one in front of them.

  I went to my cubicle, blew the ash off my keyboard, set a newspaper over the dust on my chair, and logged on to my computer. I sent an e-mail message to the group of colleagues on my wing of the paper, asking if anyone needed anything, since I’d made it to the office. Those equipped with laptops immediately wrote back and told me I was crazy, that I ought to get the hell out as soon as possible, there was nothing I could do for them there, a gas line might explode, the building might collapse. I logged off and walked around the office, inspecting the damage, hoping I might see another editor, but I couldn’t find a soul. I circled back to my desk. The telephone rang. It sounded a little forlorn, even spooky, amid the unusual silence of the newsroom. I picked it up. It was my mother calling from Texas, where she was on vacation with my father, watching TV with her in-laws. I could tell from her voice that she was frightened witless. I said I was fine, we were just now evacuating the building, all was well, I would call her later in the afternoon. I hung up and checked my voice mail. There were eight frantic messages from friends wondering if I was okay. I got up and went to the men’s room. I felt strangely reverent as I stood before the urinal, aware I’d be the last man to piss there that day, that week, perhaps even that month or longer. (Almost a year, as it turned out.) The irony, when I thought about it later, was vertiginous: I had less devotion to the idea of the paper than anyone else I knew there, yet I’d risked my safety to get to the office—and for nothing. I was useless. Little did I know that if I’d wanted to be of help, I should have hopped a ferry to New Jersey, where a small group of editors was putting together a paper that would win a Pulitzer Prize for spot news coverage. The Wall Street Journal of September 12, 2001, carried a banner headline in letters nearly as big as the masthead: “TERRORISTS DESTROY WORLD TRADE CENTER, HIT PENTAGON IN RAID WITH HIJACKED JETS.”

  I suppose I could tell you how the smoke smelled when I went back outside, like every kind of noxious chemical burning you’ve ever known mixed into a cloud so thick you could almost chew it. I suppose I could tell you how, if you looked up at the bright blue sky a certain way, you could see waves of tiny glass crystals floating and sparkling like iridescent sea anemones. I could describe the firefighters standing around in the smoke and dust, holding their heads in their hands, some of them openly weeping, aware that hundreds of their colleagues were dead. But many people have written about what they saw that day, and I have nothing new to add. I was just one of the couple dozen spectators at the edge of the rubble, vainly hoping for a call to join a rescue operation, snapping pictures with a digital camera I’d snatched from the office, as if to preserve, in some form outside of myself, the ghastly images searing themselves on my brain—images eight seasons of wildfire have yet to put to rest.

  This, I’m afraid, is another version of the fires that will plague us in the future.

  In the first week of August I wake each morning to a world bathed in smoke, the contours of the land softened by the haze. More than half a dozen fires still burn to my north and west, all of them exhibiting only mild activity. Overnight the drift settles in the low places as a layer of cool air flows downslope from the mountains, drawing the smoke down with it. Daytime heating produces gentle breezes and thermal currents that allow the smoke to lift once more. The Meason Fire holds steady at 7,055 acres, burning only in the interior. The Diamond Fire continues at a modest pace, edging beyond 20,000 acres—a crew of seven monitors its growth, mapping the one small length of active perimeter and collecting field data. The Wily moseys along, burning a few dozen acres a day, now 270 acres in all. The Turkey (430 acres), Trigger (390 acres), Cougar (150 acres), and Hightower (140 acres) each do their thing, growing slightly every day, firefighters camped nearby to monitor fire behavior. Other, smaller burns find wetter conditions or sparser fuels and black-line themselves at a few dozen acres, no one having viewed them up close, the grueling hikes required to reach them judged not worth the bother. (The smokejumpers are long gone, shipped off to California and the northern Rockies as fire season has marched inexorably north.) A crew rides horseback into the Rainy Fire, initially thought to be a promising candidate for fire use. The crew is so deep in a canyon they have no radio contact with anyone but me, so I relay their supply orders and fire updates to the dispatcher. After four days of scouting the country, assessing fuels and working trails as potential outer boundaries, the crew gives up when the fire fizzles at the foot of some bluffs, having burned less than two acres. They ride nine miles back to their truck at the trailhead and immediately get a call to help on a new smoke that threatens some radar towers over near the Arizona line. The last big suppression fire of the season on the Gila, the Radar Fire will burn 367 acres before firefighters corral it.

  On August 6 wicked storms light up the sky all over the forest, and when the rains clear, I call in what will turn out to be my last smoke of the season—a little puffer near the crest of the Black Range on the upper end of Lost Canyon. Surrounded by aspen, the Lost Fire burns a single snag down to its roots overnight and is never seen again.

  With the fire danger diminished, I get a full four days off for one of the few times all summer, and when I return on August 12, I’m told this will be my last ten-day hitch.

  The season has come full circle. I revert to my April
routine, climbing the tower a few times a day for a quick look around. The rest of the time I nap, bake cookies, take long walks with the dog. We visit the pond, which is filling up again after going dry in June. We look in on the hidden sheepherder’s shack where a frying pan still hangs on a nail inside the door, though no one’s lived here in sixty years and the roof has caved in. We seek out wild raspberry patches where the last of the year’s fruit is turning ripe; I pluck a handful to accompany my evening treat of chocolate, leaving the rest to the bears. On days of heavy rain, hail drumming on the metal roof, I cloister myself in the cabin, drink hot tea, read in my sleeping bag with a fire going in the woodstove. Tattered flags of fog drift past the mountain when the rain breaks. Sometimes I pause in my reading, copy a line in the commonplace book I keep:

  Multitude, solitude: identical terms, and interchangeable by the active and fertile poet.

  —Baudelaire

  The idea of the contented hermit who lives close to nature, cultivates his garden and his bees, is trusted by animals and loves all of creation, is some kind of archetype. We think we could be like that ourselves if somehow things were different.

  —Isabel Colegate

  A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.

  —Henry David Thoreau

  Walking is the great adventure, the first meditation, a practice of heartiness and soul primary to humankind. Walking is the exact balance of spirit and humility. Out walking, one notices where there is food.

  —Gary Snyder

  I wake one morning to find myself alone above the clouds—pure blue skies overhead but below me what looks like a vast ice sheet stretching in all directions, the whole world white and sparkling in the sun, blindingly radiant, the peak rising up like an island in a glacier. Then the storms come once more, the fog moves in, and in the evening the lights of all the distant towns are lost to me. Cut off from all evidence of human settlement, alone in the starless dark, I light the propane lamp and sit down to write last letters to friends. I tell of the armored stink beetles taking shelter from the rains in the outhouse, and of how the mule deer now sport healthy russet coats, much different from their ragged, pale, early-spring selves. I tell of calm mornings sitting on the porch shirtless with coffee while the hummingbirds hover. I tell of the movements of ravens, and the thrill of spotting an elusive red-faced warbler. I tell of how I’ve come to know and live Wordsworth’s “calm existence that is mine / When I am worthy of myself.” I choose in the final days to sleep on the cot in the tower overnight, so as not to miss the coming of the dawn. No one calls me on the radio anymore. No hikers appear. My time is my own and so are the moods of the mountain.

  My walks now tend to focus on the near-at-hand. I trace the ridge to the west where it drops like stair steps off the peak. I hunt for the precise place on the east slope where the ground moisture becomes sufficient for the aspen to thrive. I circumnavigate the edge of the open meadow on top, which has a shape like a boomerang, the tower in its center near the apex. I visit favorite trees both living and dead, the biggest of the Douglas firs older than the founding of the republic, the fallen ponderosa stripped of bark and bleached almost white in the sun. The spring, reduced to a trickle in mid-June, runs in a steady stream again. Spider threads glint like delicate trip wires in the light of sunrise.

  One evening I’m cooking dinner over the stove’s blue flame when I look up and see, through the west-facing windows, two bull elk with their muzzles to the ground in the meadow. They are massive, majestic, the muscles in their hindquarters rippling as they shift their weight. One of them lifts his regal head and seems to look at me, his antlers stark against the gray sky; he shakes his jowls and returns to his grazing. I slip out the door and sneak around the corner of the cabin. When they hear me coming they look up, crouch slightly, then bolt, their hooves thundering down the mountainside. My blood races. Their musk hangs heavy in the air.

  I take Alice on one final hike to the north. We drop off the peak and follow a series of ridges and knolls through aspen and fir, locust and Gambel oak, tracing the Ghost Divide where the McKnight Fire made its easternmost runs. Lavender fleabane are blooming everywhere, Mexican silene too. On a windswept ridge I pause and sit, looking out over the Rio Grande Valley to the east, the deep Black Range canyons north and west—the latter clearly country for horse people or the hardy afoot, country to be humbled in. Among some stones on a ledge of the ridge I’ve tucked discoveries from my evening walks over the years: elk antlers, turkey feathers, snake skins, dried mushrooms, pieces of charred pine shaped like a woodpecker’s head, a mule deer’s pelvic bone, a bees’ nest I found on the ground beneath a tree shattered by lightning. I don’t remember when I started thinking of this place as a shrine to those I’ve loved and lost, but that is what it has become, a spot where I gather detritus from the living world, reminders of the transitory paths we trace on earth, memento mori. I do not visit often. I do not linger long. I add a mule deer antler, shed a few hot tears on the rock, then retrace my steps to the top of the peak.

  Sunset brings colors to make a man tremble, colors without names—names would only defile such colors. I sit in the tower mute as a stone. The light in its going, in its disappearing act beyond the Mogollons, does preposterous things to the clouds in the sky. An almost imperceptible breeze blows smoke my way off the few remaining fires, harmless little smokes burning at most an acre a day. For a moment to get beyond language, beyond words—no worries, no yearnings, nothing but the colors of the sky received on the retina and channeled to the brain by the optic nerve. The sweet smell of burning pine duff permeates the air. I sit in the tower mute as a stone.

  The very last of the light rouses me from my stool, pulls me to the window like a miller moth to the moon, so close my breath fogs the panes. I turn and there again are the names of lookouts past, memorialized in pencil in all four corners of the tower. Names hinting at stories, names begging questions, things I’ll never know: How did you entertain yourself on fogged-in mornings, Eddie Cosper? Were you sweet with each other in the moonlight, Kent and Deanie Carlton? Did you play cards in the off hours, Gary and Jerrie Ruebush? How many bears did you see, Carol van Kirk? Was that you who buried your empty beer cans in the meadow, Tuffy Nunn? What were the names of your fires, Gail Stockman? Did the wind drive you half mad, Bill Head? Were you ever in the tower for the sunrise, Jim and Deborah Swetnam? Did you hang a feeder for the hummingbirds, Fred Weir? What secrets of the mountain were known only to each of you?

  The questions—unanswered and unanswerable. I stare at the endless dark north and west, the big wild, more than a thousand square miles unlit by a man-made light, and I let the questions go and think instead of a line from the poet Richard Hugo: If I could find the place I could find the poem. I have found the place. This is my poem.

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks to: my editor, Matt Weiland, who teased a book out of a slender diary of one fire season and whose editorial guidance was invaluable; the good folks at Ecco, who supported this book right from the start; my agent, Jim Rutman, whose patience and persistence proved legendary; M. J. Vuinovich, the original friend in a high place; Toby Cash Richards, for taking a chance on a greenhorn in the beginning; Dave Foreman, for sharing his voluminous files and vast knowledge on the history of the Gila National Forest; Thomas W. Swetnam, professor of dendrochronology and director of the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research at the University of Arizona, for deepening my understanding of the Gila’s fire history; Dennis Fahl, Jean Stelzer, Jim Apodaca, Willie Kelly, and Anthony James, for teaching me about fire on the Black Range; Jim Swetnam, for sharing stories of his years on Apache Peak; Stephen Fox, for correcting my grammar and helping me understand Aldo Leopold; Chris Adams, for sharing his knowledge of the Warm Springs Apache; Stephen Crook, librarian at the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature at the New York Public Library, for facilitating my access to the Jack Kerouac Papers; Les Dufour, Sh
ane Shannon, Kameron Sam, Ricardo de la Torre, and Jack Doyle, for packing in my supplies all these years; Sara Irving, Razik Majean, Mark Hedge, John Kavchar, Jean Stelzer, and Rob Park, for teaching me how to be a lookout by example on the radio; Sue Abel, Ellen Roper, and Brenda Hubbard, for helping me get paid without my ever showing up at the office; Alexandra Todd and Karen Latuchie, for reading and commenting on portions of the manuscript; Larry McDaniel, for enlivening my explorations of the Gila; and above all Martha, for friendship, adventure, forbearance, and love.

  Sources

  Abbey, Edward. Black Sun (New York: Dutton, 1971). Abbey’s “fire lookout novel,” an autobiographical story of a cranky wilderness hermit and the woman he loves and loses.

  ———. The Journey Home (New York: Dutton, 1977). In “Fire Lookout: Numa Ridge,” a diary of the season Abbey spent watching for smoke in Glacier National Park, he notes that “the technical aspects of a lookout’s job can be mastered by any literate anthropoid with an IQ of not less than seventy in about two hours.”

  ———. Abbey’s Road (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1979). The short essay “Fire Lookout” looks back on Abbey’s four years in a lookout on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon.

  Abolt, Rena Ann P. “Fire Histories of Upper Elevation Forests in the Gila Wilderness, New Mexico, Via Fire Scar and Stand Age Structure Analyses” (Master’s thesis, University of Arizona, 1997). Abolt’s study lays out the effects of fire suppression in the high-elevation forests of the Gila Wilderness and makes the case for allowing some high-intensity fires to burn once more in spruce-fir and mixed-conifer forest types.