Fire Season (25 page)

I drop my paintbrush and hustle toward the foot of the tower, radio in hand. I churn up the steps, pop through the trap door. I spin the sight on the firefinder, nail down an azimuth—265 degrees, fifteen minutes—and make the call to Mark, the relief lookout on Cherry Mountain.

“Cherry Mountain, Apache Peak.”

“Apache Peak, Cherry Mountain.”

“Hey Mark, I’m picking up a new fire a few miles due east of you. Could be hidden by a ridge from your view, but you may see a bit of drift smoke if the light hits it right.”

“Copy that. Let me have a look.”

Three minutes later he calls back.

“Phil, I can’t seem to see anything out there. Can you tell me if it’s in a canyon or on a ridge top, maybe what aspect it’s on?”

I lift my binoculars for a magnified look. The radio squawks, Mark again, and this time his voice is shot through with a childlike glee: “Phil, I got it now!”

“Copy that. Let me know your azimuth when you have it. Mine’s two-sixty-five and fifteen.”

Sara on Snow Peak, having overheard our conversation, chimes in with her azimuth too, so we’re able to pinpoint it to the quarter section, high on a ridge above Wily Canyon, three and a half miles east of Cherry Mountain. I encourage Mark to call it in. Generally we lookouts ascribe to the rule of finders keepers—you see it first, you get to call dispatch—but this time I make an exception, since the fire’s so close to Mark and he knows the country there better than I do. Plus it’s on the Silver City District, not the Black Range District, meaning Mark will be the one to name it no matter who calls dispatch. (A quirk of protocol on the Gila: if a lookout from one district spots a smoke on another district, the thrill of naming is denied the spotter.) He calls it the Wily Fire, and during his rundown he graciously tells the dispatcher I saw it first. A little later the dispatcher calls back to say the fire won’t be fought. For the time being it will remain in monitor status, and Mark and I are to watch the smoke and report any major changes.

The smoke sputters for two days, two days of warmth and sun and not a drop of rain on the forest. In the mornings and again in the late afternoons I give dispatch a smoke-volume update as the fire punks around in the soggy duff, doing its best to stay alive. Its continuing survival is my last hope for reprieve. In the meantime I finish work on my fence, take down the clothesline, sweep and mop the cabin. I cut more wood and stash a supply for next year in the tack shed. I roll up my maps and slip them into their protective tube. I zip my Olivetti Lettera 26 into its carrying case, the sleek machine a gift from a friend who won it in a raffle in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and told me the rumor was it had once been owned by the writer Barry Hannah. I figure I can hump out all my belongings in two trips down the mountain with a full pack each time: I’ll hike out for days off this weekend and return next week for whatever’s left.

Just as I’m locking the cabin to leave for the hike to the pass, I hear Dennis calling on the radio.

“Hey, Phil, am I right today’s your hike-out day?”

“Yep, I’m just about to head down.”

“How’s that Wily Fire looking?”

“It’s hangin’ in there, hoss. Smoke volume’s pretty decent in the late afternoons. If I had to guess I’d say it’s closing in on an acre.”

“Copy that, bubba. I’ve been looking at the forecast and it looks pretty dry for the next few days at least. Monsoon’s not setting up like we’d hoped. I’m thinking we ought to keep the towers staffed but we don’t have relief for your days off. How soon can you be back?”

“Sooner’n you can say Sourdough Mountain.”

A
fter that first call from Dennis, telling me to prepare myself to leave, I’d been searching for consolations to the season ending so abruptly. Among them were visions of a romantic night out for me and Martha, to celebrate our wedding anniversary—a reunion by candlelight at Diane’s restaurant in downtown Silver City, a bottle of good wine, and later a dance or two in the space between the pool tables at the Buffalo Bar while the jukebox played our favorites. We’ve not seen each other in more than a month; she extended her stay in Massachusetts because her father’s cancer had returned, and despite some early treatments the prognosis isn’t rosy. Back in town for a quick resupply, I tell her I’m sorry—but duty calls, and the season can’t last forever. She shrugs. “What can you do? It’s the U.S. Forest Circus. So we’ll spend the day together on the peak.” She’s been down this road before, and compared with her father’s condition it’s a very minor inconvenience.

William Kittredge, one of the writers I admire most, once wrote: “Back in my more scattered days there was a time when I decided the solution to all life’s miseries would begin with marrying a nurse. Cool hands and commiseration. She would be a second-generation Swedish girl who left the family farm in North Dakota to live a new life in Denver, her hair would be long and silvery blonde, and she would smile every time she saw me and always be after me to get out of the house and go have a glass of beer with my buckaroo cronies.” Martha and I like to laugh about this, in part because of its self-mocking wit but also because she’s tolerant of far greater eccentricities than her husband’s need for an occasional beer with his buckaroo cronies.

She begins work at the local hospital this month, her first job in nursing after three years of school. She’s understandably nervous. Three nights a week, from 7:00 p.m. to 7:00 a.m., she’ll care for a half dozen sick and largely helpless people, many of them in pain, some of them on their lonely way to death. Her clinical rotations have already revealed that a goodly portion of her work will involve an intimate acquaintance with the products of the human bowel. If I were the man who’d just crapped in his robe at four in the morning, confused, embarrassed, no longer in control of my bodily functions—and aren’t we all that man in the end?—I’d want her as my nurse. She’s empathetic and efficient and not at all squeamish, the ideal blend of traits in her chosen profession.

On the morning of our anniversary I cook her breakfast—bacon and eggs, a rare treat on the mountain, packed in this time by Martha. While she takes the dog for a long hike, I roam the meadow picking wildflowers, which I arrange in a glass of water on the table in the cabin. In the early afternoon we play a few games of cribbage in the tower. She scratches my back. I rub lotion on her feet. For a while she reads a magazine while I glass the country for smokes. Then she drops through the hatch, but not before issuing a stern warning: “Stay in the tower until I tell you to come down.” She’s cooking dinner and wants it to remain a surprise.

I wonder sometimes if my loner tendencies make her life more difficult than it needs to be. We married because our minds are enriched and our senses sharpened in each other’s presence, and because our interests dovetail nicely—but my attraction to solitude precludes time together and doesn’t really dovetail with anything but its own perpetuation. For most of the year we like to read in bed next to each other, cook together, share music we’ve discovered, drink wine and dream up the ways our story might turn out. I lead her on hikes to backcountry hot springs she’d never have thought to visit on her own. She introduces me to movies I missed in a farm boy’s youth devoid of access to decent film. I continue to argue for my summers here on the basis of necessity—for my mental health and for my creative life. The days and weeks alone help me focus my all-too-often scattered thoughts, and I like to think I leave each summer a calmer, happier person. She likes to visit the mountain, likes the time we spend together here, but there’s not enough of it, not with her responsibilities back in town, and I know she’d prefer it if I gave up the job. A third of the year is a long time to be away.

The sun lowers in the sky, smoke drifts lazily over the mountains—the Meason and Diamond fires have both come gently back to life amid a run of dry weather, burning once more in the grass and duff, a few dozen acres a day—and I feel a tremendous peace come over me. My dog naps in the meadow. My wife cooks dinner in the cabin. I’ve been on the clock all day, a professional watcher of mountains. These are the moments I hope to hold close when I’m old and palsied, ransacking my memories for succor and solace.

When I hear her call, I descend the tower to find Martha in a floral-printed dress and high heels, pulling a pan of lasagna and a loaf of garlic bread from the oven. There’s a fresh salad in a bowl on the table, an open bottle of wine, and two fancy wineglasses she carried up the hill for the moment. I smile and lean near to kiss her.

“I don’t know how I got so lucky.”

“I don’t either,” she says. “Now let’s eat.”

A
fter dinner, it’s my turn to entertain.

Back in springtime I lugged my friend Jaxon’s 12-gauge shotgun up the hill. One night in town I’d casually mentioned to him my interest in hunting turkey, and he’d offered me the use of his Remington 11-87. He assured me he didn’t use it much anymore. If I bagged a bird, he wanted one breast saved for him. But the howling winds of late April and early May—spring turkey season in New Mexico—made most mornings unsuitable for calling in birds, and my enthusiasm for killing the creatures with whom I share the mountain turned out to be less avid than I’d imagined. For most of the summer the gun has rested in the corner of the cabin, unloaded and untouched.

Recently, while boxing up trash left by past lookouts to send out on mules someday, I came upon the black-and-white TV once watched here by a lookout for whom the birds and the clouds weren’t enough. During my first season it remained operational, wired to a primitive antenna and capable of drawing a signal for the local public station and a couple of the networks. I carried it out of the cabin one afternoon and smashed the screen with the axe end of a Pulaski, the classic double-bitted firefighting tool, axe on one side, mattock on the other. Now it’s time to finish the job.

“I think you might want to change into something more comfortable for this,” I tell Martha. “Especially the shoes.”

“Good,” she says. “I’m beginning to feel ridiculous.”

She steps into a pair of Carhartt work pants, laces up her hiking boots. I load the gun. We call Alice into the cabin to keep her out of our way. Together we traipse through the greening meadow, down to the corral, where the TV sits with some other junk on the seat of an outhouse abandoned half a century ago because the vault was full. The wooden structure leans to one side, battered for decades by the elements. I set the TV on a tree stump and pace off fifty steps. Time for target practice.

Guns were not a part of Martha’s New England upbringing; until this day she’s never fired one. I can see from a slight posture of fear that she’s still not sure she wants to. Nonetheless I go over its mechanics, how you load it, how you fire it, where you find the safety switch, and how you toggle it one way or the other. I demonstrate how you hold the weapon cradled above the armpit, suggest she cover her ears lest the sound of it startle her. I point the barrel, ease the safety switch off. I fire a shot that grazes the TV’s yellow plastic frame.

“I don’t know about this,” she says.

I flip the safety on, hand her the gun.

“Just hold it for a while,” I say. “Get a feel for it.”

“I didn’t think it would be this heavy.”

For her first time shooting I’d prefer to have something small and sleek, maybe a .22 pistol like the one Mandijane carried when she worked here, a gun that nestled neatly in the palm of the hand. But for years we’ve been too poor for me to justify spending money on guns—not that I was all that keen on them anyway, not after my younger brother, alone in his Albuquerque apartment on a Sunday night in June 1996, put an SKS semiautomatic rifle to his temple and fired two rounds through his brain. He was twenty-two years old. His married girlfriend had broken up with him the day before. His blood-alcohol content was slightly more than the legal limit for drivers in the state of New Mexico. These facts hinted at an explanation for his death but they did no more than hint. In beginning my search for answers, I read the police and autopsy reports and requested the crime-scene photos taken by the cops when they entered his apartment. The only thing that made any sense was the gun. Some people use a version of it to hunt deer, but I’d never known my brother to hunt deer. The SKS is a military assault rifle of Soviet provenance used by the armies of certain eastern bloc countries. It was meant for killing people and it had done its job.

More than anything it was the context of my brother’s gun that spooked me, its presence in the police photos, cradled in his cold and mottled arms, his head exploded from the force of the bullets. For a long time afterward a morbid voice inside my skull thought that to have a gun around was to court the possibility of killing myself, if only to know for an instant what he knew in his final moments, when he pressed the barrel against his temple, tempted by that one small squeeze of the trigger that offered eternal escape. For me to spend a whole summer in the presence of a gun has been a kind of test. Long periods, days or even weeks, have passed without my thinking about it, which I take as a hopeful sign—that I can live with it nearby, much less handle it without a fear that I’ll instinctively turn it on myself. To share it now with Martha, to introduce her to the pleasures of shooting target under circumstances so incongruous—blasting away at a television set to enliven the celebration of our anniversary—seems to me, in my residual Catholic-boy fondness for symbolic gestures, the final step in putting my revulsion of guns forever to rest. I know Martha senses this without my saying it. I poured all my feelings about my brother’s death into those letters we shared my first full summer here, when I wrote to her at length about his sad and lonely end, how a poisonous guilt gnawed at me for years, how I clawed my way out of it by sleuthing through his past for the sources of his sadness.