Fire Season
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Ball, Eve. In the Days of Victorio: Recollections of a Warm Springs Apache (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1970). Ball was a dogged collector of Apache oral histories, and this “as told to” narrative by James Kaywaykla is the fullest and most gripping account of what it was like to be an Apache child during the Victorio War.
Callicott, J. Baird, and Michael P. Nelson, eds. The Great New Wilderness Debate (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998). In this raucous anthology, environmental historians and philosophers beat defenders of the wilderness idea about the head with truncheons of deconstructionist academic-speak, while wilderness defenders reiterate the case for a basic level of respect toward the nonhuman world. It was followed a decade later by a companion volume, The Wilderness Debate Rages On: Continuing the Great New Wilderness Debate (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2008).
Chamberlain, Kathleen P. Victorio: Apache Warrior and Chief (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2007). I drew on this sympathetic (and sometimes speculative) biography of Victorio for my thumbnail recap of the Victorio War.
Colegate, Isabel. A Pelican in the Wilderness: Hermits, Solitaries, and Recluses (London: HarperCollins, 2002). This is surely one of the most charming books ever written on solitude; Colegate writes in a lucid and discursive style about hermits ancient and modern, religious and secular.
deBuys, William. “Los Alamos Fire Offers a Lesson in Humility.” High Country News 188 (July 3, 2000). An early essay on the disaster that was the Cerro Grande Prescribed Fire.
Egan, Timothy. The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire That Saved America (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009). Egan’s book recounts with narrative panache the events leading up to, and including, the Big Blowup of 1910. I found here the quote from the Idaho Press about clear-cutting the northern Rockies as a defensive measure against wildfire.
Erdoes, Richard, and Alfonso Ortiz. American Indian Myths and Legends (New York: Pantheon, 1984). A valuable source for my discussion of Native American fire myths.
Flader, Susan. Thinking Like a Mountain: Aldo Leopold and the Evolution of an Ecological Attitude Toward Deer, Wolves, and Forests (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1974). As it says right there in the title.
Foreman, Dave. Confessions of an Eco-Warrior (New York: Harmony, 1991). The cofounder of Earth First! recounts his career in conservation and the major ideas that drove it—a must-read for eco-freaks, wilderness lovers, devotees of deep ecology, and redneck patriots of the fecund world. Foreman once told me that his greatest achievement as the Southwest field representative for the Wilderness Society in the 1970s was fighting to keep the boundary between the Gila and Aldo Leopold Wilderness areas at one mile; the Forest Service had argued for a ten-mile buffer between them, five miles on either side of the North Star Road.
Fox, Stephen. John Muir and His Legacy: The American Conservation Movement (New York: Little, Brown, 1981). One of the first books to make use of Muir’s personal papers, it beautifully recounts the early history of American conservation and Muir’s central role in it.
Gott, Kendall D. In Search of an Elusive Enemy: The Victorio Campaign, 1879–1880 (Fort Leavenworth, Kansas: Combat Institute Studies Press, 2004). This monograph argues that the Victorio campaign is analogous to the so-called “war on terror,” but since Victorio was never actually defeated by American troops—he was killed by Mexican militias—the comparison is perhaps unintentionally apt as a study in U.S. military failure.
Hugo, Richard. The Real West Marginal Way (New York: Norton, 1986). Hugo’s essay “Some Kind of Perfection” contains the line of his I quote, “If I could find the place I could find the poem,” and the fuller context is something I’ve considered many times as an impermanent caretaker of a permanent (by human time scales) landform: “Sometimes it seemed the place was more important than the event since the event happened and was done while the place remained.”
Hurst, Randle M. The Smokejumpers (Caldwell, ID: Caxton Printers, 1966). An entertaining memoir of jumping fires on the Gila in the mid-1950s.
Kerouac, Jack. The Dharma Bums (New York: Viking, 1958). Kerouac and Gary Snyder (known here as “Japhy Ryder”) wander the West Coast as early pilgrims in a rucksack revolution. Good times.
———. Lonesome Traveler (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1960). As it says right there in the title.
———. Desolation Angels (New York: Coward-McCann, 1965). This novel represents the truest account of his lookout days outside the pages of his journal, from which he borrowed heavily.
———. Book of Blues (New York: Penguin, 1995). Contains the dozen “Desolation Blues” poems.
Kittredge, William. Owning It All (St. Paul, MN: Graywolf, 1987). I took the quote about his dreaming of marrying a nurse from his terrific and timeless essay “Redneck Secrets.”
Leopold, Aldo. A Sand County Almanac (New York: Oxford University Press, 1949). Still the one great American book for students of the natural world and a human land ethic.
———. Aldo Leopold’s Wilderness, eds. David E. Brown and Neil B. Carmony (Harrisburg, PA: Stackpole, 1990). Brown and Carmony gather a fascinating collection of Leopold’s early writings on the Southwest, which chart his evolution from gung-ho Pinchovian to first-rate natural historian. It appeared later in paperback, from the University of New Mexico Press, under the title Aldo Leopold’s Southwest.
———. The River of the Mother of God (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991). See in particular Leopold’s fascinating and groundbreaking essay, “Some Fundamentals of Conservation in the Southwest,” in which he first discusses “conservation as a moral issue” at length.
Maclean, Norman. A River Runs Through It (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976). Although the title novella sparkles as an incomparable gem of American literature, the other long autobiographical story in the book, “USFS 1919: The Ranger, the Cook, and a Hole in the Sky,” is also first-rate and contains some lovely meditations on being a fire lookout in the early Forest Service.
———. Young Men and Fire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). This meticulous reconstruction of the Mann Gulch blowup remains the only literary masterpiece ever written on the subject of American wildfire.
Manning, Richard. Rewilding the West: Restoration in a Prairie Landscape (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009). I took his quote about the West’s commanding views from this intriguing study of an effort to rewild a Montana grassland ecosystem.
Meine, Curt. Aldo Leopold: His Life and Work (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988). An exhaustive biography, Meine’s book was an invaluable source of information on Leopold’s Forest Service career and the evolution of his thinking about ecology, conservation, and land health. I relied on it heavily for all things Leopold.
Muir, John. Nature Writings (New York: Library of America, 1997). Collects the best of his work between two hard covers.
Nash, Roderick Frazier. Wilderness and the American Mind (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1967). Revelatory when it appeared four decades ago, it remains the starting point in any syllabus of books about wilderness and American culture.
Oelschlaeger, Max. The Idea of Wilderness (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991). Among much else, Oelschlaeger’s book explores the evolution in Aldo Leopold’s thinking, from a strictly “imperial ecology” to a more “arcadian ecology,” as he formulated his land ethic.
Pinchot, Gifford. Breaking New Ground (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1947). The memoir of the man who put his permanent stamp on the Forest Service, it contains the wonderful story about Muir and the tarantula.
Pyne, Stephen J. Fire in America: A Cultural History of Wildland and Rural Fire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982). Pyne is the granddaddy of fire historians, and this was his first entry in the field. His section on fire in the Southwest was particularly useful, and from the books of his listed below I gleaned most of what I understand about the history and cultural context of wildland fi
re in America.
———. Fire: A Brief History (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001).
———. Year of the Fires: The Story of the Great Fires of 1910 (New York: Viking, 2001).
———. Smokechasing (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2003).
———. Tending Fire: Coping with America’s Wildfires (Washington, DC: Island, 2004).
Russell, Sharman Apt. Kill the Cowboy: A Battle of Mythology in the New West (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1993). A scrupulously fair-minded account of public-lands ranching in the modern West from all points of view, Russell’s book offers the ranchers’ dubious defense of their livelihood so I don’t have to.
Scheese, Don. Mountains of Memory: A Fire Lookout’s Life in the River of No Return Wilderness (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2001). This is the finest addition to the literature of lookouts in decades, recounting Scheese’s years as a fire watcher in the mountains of Idaho.
Snyder, Gary. The Practice of the Wild (Washington, DC: Shoemaker & Hoard, 1990). The passage of Snyder’s about walking, which I copied into my commonplace book, comes from his essay “The Etiquette of Freedom.” This and all of Snyder’s works are beautiful meditations on wildness, ecology, humility, and the search for meaningful play and meaningful work.
———. Mountains and Rivers Without End (New York: Counterpoint, 1996). Snyder’s poem “Things to Do Around a Lookout” can be found in its entirety here.
———. The Gary Snyder Reader (Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 1999). I found the the lines I quoted from Snyder’s “Lookout Journal” in this grand collection of four decades of Snyder’s writings.
———. Back on the Fire (Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 2007). See in particular the essays “Thinking Toward the Thousand-Year Forest Plan” and “Lifetimes With Fire.”
Suiter, John. Poets on the Peaks (Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 2002). The photography alone makes this book worth the cover price, but it also tells the fascinating story of Kerouac, Snyder, and Philip Whalen working as lookouts and discovering Buddhism in the 1950s.
Swetnam, Thomas William. “Fire History of the Gila Wilderness, New Mexico” (Master’s thesis, University of Arizona, 1983). Researched and written during the early years of prescribed natural fire, Swetnam’s thesis used dendrochronology to show that, pre-1900, surface fires occurred as often as twice a decade in the ponderosa pine forests of the Gila Wilderness.
Thrapp, Dan L. Victorio and the Mimbres Apaches (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1974). A fine account of the Victorio War, it focuses largely on the military maneuvering.
Truett, Joe C. Grass: In Search of Human Habitat (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010). Truett, writing from the perspective of a man who makes his home just beyond the border of the Gila National Forest, makes the intersection of grass and human culture more fascinating than would seem possible.
Williams, Gerald W. The USDA Forest Service: The First Century (Washington, DC: USDA Forest Service, 2000). A useful overview of major events and periods in Forest Service history.
Worster, Donald. A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). A full-fledged biography of the original proselytizer for American wilderness preservation.
Wuerthner, George, ed. The Wildfire Reader: A Century of Failed Forest Policy (Washington, DC: Island, 2006). Among other treasures, this anthology contains a marvelous essay by Tom Ribe, “Fire in the Southwest: A Historical Context,” which spurred my own interest in Southwestern fire history.
About the Author
PHILIP CONNORS has worked as a baker, a bartender, a house painter, a janitor, and an editor at the Wall Street Journal. His essays have appeared in n+1, Harper’s, the Paris Review, and the Best American Non-required Reading anthology. He lives in New Mexico with his wife and their dog.
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Credits
Jacket design by Allison Saltzman
Jacket photograph © by Deon Reynolds/Monsoon/Photolibrary/Corbis
Copyright
Author’s note: Some names of places and people have been changed in an effort to protect their innocence.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint copyrighted material:
Oxford University Press for excerpts from A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There by Aldo Leopold, copyright © 1968 by Oxford University Press. Reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press.
The University of Chicago Press for excerpts from Young Men and Fire by Norman Maclean, copyright © 1992 by the University of Chicago. Reprinted by permission of the University of Chicago Press.
SLL/Sterling Lord Literistic for excerpts from an unpublished fire lookout diary by Jack Kerouac, copyright © 1956 by Jack Kerouac. Reprinted by permission of SLL/Sterling Lord Literistic, Inc.
Small portions of this book appeared in different form in n+1, The Nation, The Paris Review, The Indiana Review, and the anthology State by State, the editors of which are gratefully acknowledged.
FIRE SEASON. Copyright © 2011 by Philip Connors. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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