fire season field notes from a wilderness lookout

That shift is at the heart of the book’s environmental history, which is more fully and compellingly told than the personal history. Ninety percent of the towers have already been decommissioned, partly due to the use of airplanes and satellites for monitoring and partly due to a radical shift in the attitude of the U.S. The book ends with a suggestion that his summers as a lookout might be coming to an end, perhaps because Martha will need to move elsewhere to follow her nursing career or to care for her ailing father, perhaps because the last of the lookout towers will be decommissioned. Husband and wife do visit one another during those months, Connors descending the mountain on his days off and Martha occasionally climbing up to his cabin on Apache Peak. On the personal side, he sketches his upbringing in Minnesota amid “the oppressive grid of monoculture farming” the legacy of “Midwestern Catholic guilt” his “peonage in newspapers” as a copyeditor for the Wall Street Journal the impact of his brother’s suicide and his marriage to a surpassingly tolerant woman named Martha, of whom he remarks, “If there’s a wife more indulgent of husbandly eccentricity, I do not know of her.”Īmong those personal themes, the one most fully explored is that of marriage, and how it mixes with what he calls “lookoutry,” a pursuit that keeps him away from home for most of five months each year. What he offers instead is a modest amount of personal history blended with a generous amount of environmental history. 'Fire Season: Field Notes from a Wilderness Lookout' by Philip Connors (Ecco. While he revels in million-acre views of roadless mountains and the company of elk and bear, he leaves the full-bore celebration of wildlands to Abbey. While Connors welcomes the escape from frenzied consumerism and the digital “hive mind,” he leaves the heavyweight spiritual wrestling to Snyder and Kerouac. While he tells about spotting smoke and hosting smokejumpers, he does not try to rival Maclean in dramatizing the thrill and skill and danger of fighting wildfires. With such illustrious predecessors, his challenge was to find something fresh to say about wilderness, solitude and fire. In writing about his experiences as a fire lookout, he follows in a lineage that includes Norman Maclean, Gary Snyder, Edward Abbey and Jack Kerouac, all of whom he richly acknowledges. Later on, a teamster would haul up supplies by mule, so the pack held only “immediate necessities.” When you learn that among those necessities was a typewriter, you understand that Connors climbed the mountain to look not only for fires but also for literary material. To reach the mountain peak where he would begin his eighth summer as a fire lookout in New Mexico’s Apache National Forest, Philip Connors hiked the last five miles from the end of the road carrying a 50-pound pack, the final mile through hip-deep snow.

“Fire Season: Notes From a Wilderness Lookout,” By Philip Connors (Ecco.

Fire season field notes from a wilderness lookout