Fire Season (24 page)

O
n 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,
ooh
ing and
aah
ing 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.

J
ohn 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.

The job was not only the worst kind of grunt work, it was counterproductive: cutting down old barbed wire, rolling it up, pounding new fence posts, stringing and stretching new wire—all in rocky, steep, undulating mountain terrain—so a rancher could resume running cattle on the public domain at below-market lease rates, his efforts subsidized by my mindless labor. It’s one thing to rail against government farm subsidies; it’s quite another to suffer the humiliation of
being
the subsidy. Cattle grazing and fire suppression have been the banes of this country. Why the Forest Service would correct one component of a warped cycle, by letting a fire burn where it wanted to, while perpetuating another, by refitting the land for grazing, is a contradiction that bedevils public-lands management in this part of the world. The argument in favor of grazing boils down to sustaining a 120-year tradition. Whether such a tradition is worth sustaining despite the mounting costs—fiscal and ecological—is a whole separate question the agency prefers to duck.

I’m not unsympathetic to the notion of preserving rural traditions. I grew up in the bosom of traditions that somehow felt eternal, on a farm where I became intimate with domesticated animals from the moment I could walk; I knew how to castrate a pig before I knew how to read. We lived a mile down the road from the homestead my great-great-grandfather staked out in 1887, in the Des Moines River country of southern Minnesota. My great-grandfather lived there all his life. He saw both the first motorcar and the last train to come barreling over the hill out of the east. My grandmother and her siblings retrieved corncobs from the pigpens to burn in the stove and warm the house during the Depression. My father and his cousins held late-summer hog roasts and potluck socials. We were regulars at 4-H club meetings. Church attendance was nonnegotiable, as was respect for all manner of Jell-O salad cuisine.

In truth, that way of life, which felt timeless to my child’s mind, was barely more than a century old, and its establishment required just as much butchery as the subjugation of the Apache, except in our part of the world it was the Sioux who had to be done away with. For years my father’s cousins struggled to drain and farm a swampy spot on the prairie called Slaughter Slough, the name of which gives a flavor of how the so-called Sioux Uprising played out. The farmers who, unlike my father, survived the lean years of the 1980s have been propped up by government subsidies for their commodity crops, sometimes to the tune of millions of dollars. In the rural county where I grew up, the federal government paid a quarter of a billion dollars in farm subsidies from 1995 to 2009. The cheap corn grown there is shipped west and south to the Great Plains, or to Texas or California, where it’s used to fatten hogs and cattle on industrial feedlots whose tremendous odor and death-camp architecture testify to the ecological depravity of the entire enterprise. All the corn syrup guzzled down the gullets of America’s overweight children, all the ethanol being distilled in heartland refineries, all of it underwritten by as wasteful a government spending program as now exists this side of the defense industry: these things do little to reassure me that precious rural folkways are being preserved in the place I once called home. An analogous situation holds true for public-lands ranching, an anachronism sustained by government predator-control programs, giveaway rates on public lease allotments, stock ponds gouged by bulldozers to catch rainwater, barbed wire strung through the mountains on the taxpayers’ dime—all of it calculated to favor one domesticated animal we can eat over the diverse array of life we do not.

W
ith my departure imminent, I draw up measurements for my new picket fence. The project serves not only to keep me here a few extra days, it distracts me from feeling sorry for myself. I’m not ready to leave, but then I never am when the word comes up it’s time to go. I always want one more fire, one more week, one more tour, one more month. Each year I’ve settled instead for the prospect of one more season, which forces me to improvise a winter scramble after a paycheck at a job I can abandon without remorse come spring.

I try not to think ahead just yet. Morning dawns clear and warm, a few puffy clouds in the sky, one of those Black Range summer days of unsurpassed splendor—dappling shadow, lazy light, bees buzzing drunk with nectar. Good weather for the work that awaits me. I balance the pickets on the sawhorse and brush them with a weatherproof sealant. I cut some lengths of two-by-six with a handsaw for the perpendicular braces, stain them too. This takes most of a day. Every hour or so I break for a glass of water in the shade of a white pine tree. Around four o’clock I look up from my work and glance off toward the Pinos Altos Range in the west. There, on a west-facing slope twenty miles away, a brand-new smoke slithers into the air, a single snag by the looks of it, visible for who knows how long. A sleeper smoke from the previous day’s storms, nothing to be worried about given how wet the forest is—but I’d hate to be scooped by another lookout.