Sometimes hikers climb
to the top of my mountain. Sometimes I unlock the trap door in the
floor and invite then to crowd into my seven-foot-square, glass-walled
tower room. They look around on Flagstaff, a toy town from there,
and beyond it the Painted Desert 65 miles away, at the Matatzals 80
miles to the south and the cliffs of Oak Creek Canyon and the mountains
west of Prescott, at the long line of old volcanos across the north-they
look around and they say, "Wow, this is really neat, I'd go crazy
in a place like this."-They mean first the size of the view and
then-the size of the room.
They don't entirely trust my sanity. "What are you trying to
do, be a hermit?" Retreat from a world of speed and noise and
pressure? From people who complain and throw temper tantrums?-Hermit
doesn't sound so strange to me.-In the morning I stand in the open
doorway of my cabin and look around, look down on ranch buildings
two miles away, brushing my teeth. There's no need to hurry through
tasks. I am responsible to no one but myself-and the dispatcher-no
meetings, no shopping, no driving to work-I am free to stand brushing
my teeth, listening to birds, and looking at the sunrise.
Well, OK--it's not a job that would suit everybody. They ask, "Don't
you get lonesome?"-On the Coconino radio I'm in touch with 300
people, hear their voices, know their names, but I don't have to deal
with gossip or office politics.-All day the radio plays music I like
and news I don't like, often as not. In books I'm in touch with the
most interesting minds in the country. Lonesome? I've been there 18
years and lonesome doesn't occur to me.-Don't assume too much-it's
a myth, no more, that lookouts are eager for visits from strangers,
panting for any kind of company.
It's hard to make a fool of yourself when you're by yourself. With
no one else around, I can be what I want to be, ease into the peace
and beauty so lacking in other places. Our Milky Way Galaxy probably
contains 200 billion suns-and I can see all of them from my mountaintop
at night.
"Don't you get scared?" Lookouts aren't afraid of heights.
Obviously. Most of us have come face to face with bear, with upset
mother elk and deer-they were more afraid of us than we were of them.
There's a lion on my mountain; I've found a dead fawn covered with
branches. Coyotes sing in the evenings. A dozen vultures ride the
updrafts above me. Wind shakes the tower.
Lightning strikes it. Rain makes the stairs slippery. You are more
likely to be hurt driving a car on city streets. Probably I won't
be mobbed by all three dozen of my hummingbirds. Several times a day
they visit the tower, whirring in to examine book covers, my shirt,
a flowered cap that keeps sun out of my eyes. If I imitate a statue,
they rest on my shoulder.
One day last summer I was sitting at an open window, reading, when
a tiny bird buzzed in. I moved my eyes but not my head. it perched
on my book and looked at me. Wings blurred they moved so fast and
it approached my face until I could feel moving air, closer and closer
until I couldn't focus. Tentatively-gently-it put its bill into my
left nostril- about the size of a darning needle. Clean and smooth
against the membrane. When I laughed, the bird zipped out the window.
I'll bet I'm the only woman you know who has had her nose mistaken
for a flower.
Last year a television reporter came up to my tower with his cameraman
and sat around for awhile asking questions. Seeking marketable sensation,
he asked several times whether anything about the job frightens me.
I told him no-each time he asked.
That wasn't entirely true-I'm afraid of people, but I didn't want
to advertise that. A man threatened me with a knife in my tower a
few years ago. Another talked for two hours about why his divorce
was all her fault, which was almost as bad. A couple of weeks ago
Jim reported that a man in camo clothing was up in a nearby tree,
pointing a rifle at his tower.
But the worst fear all of us lookouts have is that ground units will
think we're stupid when we get our distance wrong-again. It would
be awful to repeat the record of the lookout who reported the dome
at Lowell Observatory as smoke so often that finally the dispatcher's
response was-a long silence.
We're afraid of going to sleep after lunch and missing a fire. Once
I went to sleep standing up-and fell into the fire finder. Pilots
headed for Pulliam airport frequently line up with my tower and pass
close by. I hope their depth perception is functioning.
I don't go hiking after duty hours during hunting season. I've watched
teen-age boys hop off their ATVs and begin to break into my cabin.
"What did you have in mind?" People are the real danger,
far as I'm concerned.
Shirley agrees. She has elk and bear and lightning strikes and wind
at 90 miles an hour and wind chill at 40 below. She's more upset by
the people who come every summer to pick the ferns that grow in the
forest around her. Like the rest of us, she feels protective of her
territory. You should hear her language when people open her gate
after hours and drive up.
We have one fear in common with employees everywhere-the new boss-simmering
with ideas-ho changes things around. A decade or so ago we were told
that new employees would be classified as contractors who would be
expected to bid for their jobs. The result was forestry students who
bid a dollar an hour-undercutting Ed Abbey, and a Navajo patrolman
who didn't have a driver's license and couldn't speak English.
"Why did you take this job?" Good question. I had taught
high school English for ten years. When I began to have my semiannual
nervous breakdown in September, I wanted privacy, quiet, trees, a
long view, company rather than contact-freedom, time.
Everybody has a different reason. James says, "Ah'm jes an 'ol
cowboy needed a job." Eric hurt his knee skiing and took a summer
off from fire fighting. Ed hurt his foot. Ray liked fire but was too
old to fight it. Scott says-to tell the truth-he had no idea what
he was getting into; he didn't own a car when he reported for duty.
Jim says, "Solitude when controlled-and voluntary-is good for
the soul. It makes you appreciate people more, not less."
We work together by radio, communicate in notes carried by patrol
people, but we see each other, if we're lucky, once a season. Shirley,
who has been a lookout for 16 years, says she took the job that first
summer because she anticipated big fires. Now she can't think of any
place she'd rather be. Sandy's reason-"I come here to feel alive."
Visitors to my tower can see books, pen and paper, knitting, a practice
keyboard, an exercise bicycle, and they say, "What do you do
up here?" (laugh) I scan the land for fire, for one thing, but
I can't rotate slowly all day. Sometimes weeks go by without smoke
anywhere, and the radio is so quiet that I check to be sure it's on
the right frequency. You have to have something to do or you'd be
talking on the radio all the time, making a pest of yourself.
The Coconino used to have a man who drove around in the forest after
hours-smelling of alcohol-introducing himself as a ranger and inviting
campers up to see him. Lookouts who last long enough to learn the
landscape are people who people who have things they like to do by
themselves.
Towers are different sizes of small, and activity inside is restricted.
Beth wrestled an electric keyboard in, put a generator on the catwalk,
and practiced for hours. Ray painted watercolor landscapes. Paul worked
on chess problems. Scott plays his guitar; Shirley quilts. Ray is
classifying ground strikes-he says there are at least four different
kinds. Bob built a zither. Jim says, "Everybody thinks he wants
to be a fire lookout, but there's no such thing as a "normal"
one. We are all-a little nuts."
Nights in my little cabin, alone on its mountain top, area joy. The
moon shines white on treetops and makes long shadows on the ground.
In a storm, trees roar and thrash. Wind whistles through cracks. And
I'm cozy with a book under blankets. I'm working on a theory that
if phone calls and business decisions, lawsuits and legislation were
conducted from a cabin on a stormy night, this would be a happier
country.
Those of us who are long-timers use the isolation- the freedom. Ray
says it's fun and exciting. Jim says that after 34 years as a seasonal
employee, he is a fire lookout because it's an easy, honest, necessary
job-and because he's lazy. Shirley's reasons for coming back are sunsets
and sunrises, birds and elk and bears.
I've known men who tied flies and women who carried babies up the
stairs on their backs. Once we had a lookout who hung blankets over
the windows and watched wrestling on a battery television all day-but
he didn't last long. Shirley Pierce said, "It's been my life,"
in the hospital just before she died. Takes all kinds, they say, and
it's a good thing because all kinds is what we have.
Usually, although it's not planned that way, we are fairly evenly
divided between men and women. A few of us are mid-twenties. Some
of us are 60, 70 or more. Chris is 81; she's been a lookout for 37
years. She won't quit, and they can't fire her-like J. Edgar Hoover.
Mavis outranks us all-she's been a lookout for 40 years. At least
we think so-no one else on the forest was working there when she started-all
of us are part of a long historic line, going back almost 90 years,
serving as early detection to keep forests, ranches, subdivisions,
whole towns from burning.
We live in the sky. It forms three-fourths of what we can see. A lookout
lives with weather, not land, not fire. The sky moves and changes;
the land doesn't unless there's something like shadows of clouds passing
over. Wind blows from varying directions, a different speed every
minute. Temperatures rise or plummet. Clouds are not linear thinkers:
In ever-changing textures they move and combine, separate, re-form,
turn dark, flare with lightning.
Visitors, when they're through with their incredulous, critical questions,
usually have two more: "How much do you get paid?" And "How
did you get this job?"