“Actually,” I say, “I’ve been a fire lookout for 22 seasons because I like how I can sneeze as loud as I want and no one laughs at me.” The hiker on the catwalk isn’t sure what to make of this. Am I teasing? I peer through binoculars at the dust kicked up on the 776 Road and remain inscrutable. “Actually, what I most love about solo,” I tell the next pair...
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After I wrote my first letter of the summer, I asked a hiker who stopped by the fire tower to put the envelope into his pack and walk it the five miles off the mountain and mail it for me. I hoped he wouldn’t forget and find it a month from now stained by orange peels and smelling of sunblock-stained handkerchief. In the past six summers, I think most of...
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“I often conduct an orchestra in my sleep; my orchestras are so huge that the back desks of the violas vanish into the horizon. And everything is so wonderful,” wrote Finnish composer Jean Sibelius to a colleague in 1943. I had to call my violin-playing sister in Connecticut to ask her about the “back desks of the violas.” “Oh,” she said from her desk at...
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In winter I miss them. Without the windows and doors open I don’t come across them as often, those others who live where I live, the lively silent ones. I like finding ants, spiders, moths and other tiny beings on my windowsill, under the sink, outside the door and on the kitchen counter. I peer at them closely. I gather them onto paper or shoo them into a...
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My legs tire of being tentative with steps. My eyes glaze with looking so closely at the danger lurking in sidewalk ice or trail snow. Eventually one winter morning between the whirls of Christmas/New Year’s holiday events and SuperBowl/Valentine’s Day partying, I wake up starved for planet delicacy. I need rocks, not snow. Time to go south for an...
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