Stepping to each direction, pausing with both hands on the catwalk railing, softening my eyes, I pour all of me into one leg, then the other. My day on duty at the fire lookout begins with looking in the four directions before calling the dispatcher, “Flagstaff, Turkey Butte.”
“Turkey Butte.”
“I’m in service, winds NW at six, precip .35 inches.”
He reads it back. Elden, O’Leary and East Pocket lookouts report their rain which I jot down, interested in the on-going story of moisture in the woods over summer. Then I put on my good sunglasses, my cap with a brim, and take binoculars in hand and repeat the circuit outside to more closely study north, east, south and west near and far.
That’s how this job at 7374 feet starts each morning at 8 a.m. On this 82nd day upstairs, I’m a little distracted by five fluttering birds thirty yards away. I’m realizing they are not swallows, as I wrote yesterday, but swifts. Twenty-five seasons on fire lookouts, and I still confuse swallows and swifts. However, I don’t confuse their human-made labels with their names in my heart: hello there Dear Darters and Fine Flutterbys. A balsa wood glider on the desk next to my pen lifts one wing as if it says, “I want to play with them.”
I don’t like to answer questions about fire lookout life because people seem most curious about details that don’t interest me. What are the number of steps up, does lightning scare you, do you work through the night, is it lonely, how many fires have you turned in, do you see bears, and how can I get this job? No one ever asks, what kind of soul do you need to be a lookout. Much less the wiser question, how does being a fire lookout shape your soul?
Answer to the first: you must be a soul patient with fear.
If noises in the night scare you, you are human. If you do not let yourself over imagine potential goblins, good for you, you might have the right stuff for the job. Likewise, you better have made your peace with spiders, snakes, bats, bobcats and lions. It is not a big happy Disney animal family out here in the woods. Creatures howl, stalk, scratch and bite for a living. Also the weather can threaten. Think 40 mph winds up three flights on an open staircase. Think lightning bolts striking a metal structure on a peak top. And what do you know about being alone for days? If being alone out 20 miles of dirt road feels daunting, that is natural because your safety is up to you. But if you don’t trust the self in self-reliance, you aren’t going to have a long summer, you’ll quit two weeks into the season.
Recently, reading late by candlelight with the door open for cooling, a bat zoomed into the cabin, circled over my head three times and ended up in the closet, clinging to the wall. Such an odd bag of bones: it looked like an origami crane dunked in water. Interesting but its tiny sharp feet made my skin crawl. Covering it with a bowl and sliding stiff plastic underneath to catch it, scared me. With a deep breath I lurched across the floor and flung bowl, plastic, bat and my peace of mind out into the night. Door shut and locked, I sat on the end of the bed and shivered.
The soul seeking this job should be easy with delight. Inhaling the tang of pine trees at the edge of a summer rainstorm can fill you with a vast trust if you let it. Yes, sunset views from peak tops can be vivid Hallmark rectangles of blazing oranges and streaming shafts of yellow. After years of living with endless varieties of light I have turned into a woman who savors the dawn. Pine trees appear to be blushing when the long reach of early light delicately penetrates the forest. It is spell binding to stand inside first light hush. Maybe the person who can be entranced by stillness is who will become the lookout that returns year after year. He who savors the allure of a curve of road waking up. She who notes the sound of one pinecone falling. We who are not just protecting the resource for a paycheck but are embraced by it, we live hours of heart balanced with purpose, days knitted into nourishing sleep, easy with our choices and our souls. Inspired to come back year after year after year, we are nourished again and again by enchantments large and small.
Even when we get scared. Last night I stepped to the cabin stoop to gauge the distance of the storm pulsing at the windows. A loud buzzing alarmed me; it sounded like a cricket on drugs with a much-amplified microphone. I gasped. There in my flashlight beam I saw a lump of Arizona black rattler the size of a cow patty. It was fearful, that insistent warning; it was also beautiful the dark curves of its movement back into the night after I beat a hiking stick against the door frame and uttered, “Shoo, you!”
“Dispatcher, fire flash…dispatcher, smoke update…dispatcher, weather report…” The syllables we lookouts calmly speak lace the hours with adrenalin. The job is, after all, to do the early detection of wildfire so they can be found quickly and kept small. “Dispatcher, I have a small blue smoke at 311 degrees, 13.5 miles.” Dispatch calculates location and resources available. Patrols respond to find the roads and foot route to flames. Engines break records to be first on the scene. The hotshot crew is eager. A helicopter could be launched with a bucket. A slurry bomber stands ready. Today it is a lone engine who finds the incident and reports a tenth acre on fire, a lightning struck tree, “a flaming cigar 30 feet tall. Can handle.”
I was part of keeping that fire small. And I don’t work alone. From my high place out a dirt road, I can see eight other fire towers on three different national forests. Hello, Barb eight miles away. Greetings Fred and Sterling to the north. I hear you, Malorie on the other side of the mountain. Moqui, Baker Butte, Hutch, Apache Maid are the other lookouts with maps, logbooks and binoculars like mine. Horsethief, Towers Mountain, Bill Williams, Grandview: towers I once worked, peaks where my eyes were busy, my voice calm. I’ve returned again and again. Why? Because I have a soul sensitive enough to enjoy the companionship of rocks, and a nature stoic enough to be able to capture and release a bat caught in the closet. Between many dawn-painted morning strolls and theatrical midnights, a career happens. I’m proud of it and pleased to have been shaped by it.
I have learned unexpected surprises can feel daunting but needn’t freeze your life, and Iunderstand how important it is to look carefully when I open the door to say goodnight to the night.
“Dear delicate heart,” I murmur with bare feet on the chilly cement stoop of the cabin quarters, my neck craned to face the kisses of constellations. “My darling Big Dipper, you are so generous to offer me a ladle full of stars to take back to bed.”
How can I not love the dreaming that follows.
