A Dream Job.

I have been wanting very badly to go on vacation, a real vacation without the survival skills some vacations require. I tell C, we ought to be on vacation, on a lake somewhere with beers growing warm in our hands. Our city's streets seem cleared out; quieted into that preternatural Sunday hum, even when it is not Sunday. Offices have summer hours, many more will be empty by the first week of August. Unfortunately, we won't be spirited away to places of perfect solitude anytime soon so I was so pleased to read Phillip Connors’ beautiful book, Fire Season: Field Notes from a Wildnerness Lookout.

Connors’ book is an exquisite sort of diary, a hundred-plus page ode to a remote corner of the Gila National Forest in New Mexico, where the author is stationed for four months of the year. There, alone, he scans the horizon for the telltale sign of smoke. He describes the job:

“The entirety of my duties are five: report the weather each morning, answer the radio, relay message when asked, call in smokes when they show, and keep an eye on fire behavior with the safety of crews in mind...And then the holy silence…Days pass in which there is nothing but wind…the sun bores through the glass windows..the world becomes the evolution of light… I produce nothing but words; I consume nothing but food, a little propane, a little firewood. By being virtually useless in the calculations of the culture at large I become useful, at last, to myself.”

Connors chronicles his season of being a lookout by month; the observations include the wildlife he observes, the rare visitor, and his meditations on being a lookout, on being alone. The book is also a history of fire management and of forestry, the American history of creating a system to balance wildness with preservation. Connors’ reporting is sharply detailed. Though his observations are sentimental, he turns an unflinching eye towards his own awe for wildness and the consequences that follow. Only at one point in the book, when Connors recounts a camping trip with a friend, did I find myself grimacing at the self-regard and swagger of the Men on an Outing. But it was only once. And I didn’t want the book to end. I wanted to stay in the fire look out, watching the tips of trees for wisps of smoke. Connors writes that the seduction of solitude “may be mocked as foolish, childish, anti-social, misanthropic, retrograde, reactionary, fuzzy-headed, and sentimental, but it exists in the human heart and will endure…” And the end of the book closes with a line from Richard Hugo: If I could find the place I could find the poem. Connors then writes, “I have found the place. This is my poem.” I’m still thinking about those lines and this book, carrying them around with me, feeling good, as one might feel coming back from a vacation.