Except for a small misgiving that haunts the echo chamber that is my heart, I am very happy these weeks out at the fire lookout. What a relief to be done with the windy tense drama of June. What a pleasure to voyage through the shadows and rain festivals of July. Now I record an inch of rain one day, a quarter of an inch the next. The night lights up vast...
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Some time ago I stopped by Smokey Bear’s office in the Department of Agriculture in Washington, D.C., and I said, “Hey Smokey! Aren’t you tired of holding down a desk? Why don’t you come out to Arizona and work in the woods again.” He didn’t commit, and the winter passed, and about the time Fisher Point started smoking this spring I got a text message that...
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I collect trees. That grove of oaks out A-1 Mountain Road, the grandmother juniper beside a trail north of town, the biggest aspen of them all on the west slope of the Peaks and the trees that lean over the St. George River in Maine to drop golden leaves each fall. And the mulberry I climbed when I was a child in Phoenix. And the one I call My Tree, a...
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We both like tea in the morning and wine in the evening. We both talk into handheld radios in the summer: she on the volunteer ambulance squad in a little town in northwest Connecticut, I on a fire lookout near Flagstaff. We’re both likely to delight and probably call each other if we hear a canyon wren in an unexpected place. But, unlike those pairs of...
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Feeling overwhelmed by distances recently, I parked my truck on Mars Hill where I could see the plateau as a game board instead of a web of gas-sucking, spine-sagging miles. A train snaked through downtown. Mormon Mountain hibernated with blue-shouldered grace. A half-hour of perspective from above nudged my glum mood a bit. It could be I was TOO...
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