“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 of hikers an hour later, “is how I can go to work on a bad hair day and not even notice it is a bad hair day until noon.” They can’t tell it is a bad hair day because I’m wearing the white Coconino National Forest cap that covers up the stringy unkempt three-days-since-a-shower hairdo I woke up with.
I ask the next hiker for help. “Let’s fold this,” I say to the sweating young man who has spent 10 minutes marveling at the view in four directions. He is waiting to see if his three pals will make it up the switchbacks. Before he thinks of more questions to ask me about a life alone on a mountaintop, I reach for the red, white and blue. “It’s done more easily with two,” I say. We make neat work of it, the 9-foot-6-inch flag between us folded into perfect thirds, and crisply triangled to a finish where the blue tucks in just right.
Usually I put my big flag up only three times per summer: Memorial Weekend, Flag Day and July Fourth. Along with a check for $255 to help with burial costs, the government gave my mother the flag to commend the military service of her husband, my father. I especially like displaying it on the Fourth, which was his birthday. But this year I pulled it out early, impulsively, on the fourth Friday in June to let its bold colors flap in the gentle winds of change.
A refreshing coolness strokes my neck and legs. I steady myself against the corner of the lookout to look through the binoculars at the Camillo Fire burning near Mormon Lake. It is a fire from a lightning strike that has been permitted to do good work in the woods, burning with low severity for weeks, consuming fine fuels, churning through dead wood, appropriately recycling nutrients. That’s a change in my lookout career: the acceptance of the wisdom of not putting every fire out.
People sometimes arrive at smart changes when they put their brains together, I think, and recall other shifts of “truth” that inform my 60-plus years. It was a distant moon when I was a girl until I watched a man standing there on a glowing TV screen. Stunning. Somehow all those guys in the white shirts and ties at consoles joined together and figured out how to do something impossible.
Girls must wear dresses to high school, the principal said when I was a freshman. Decorum must be preserved. But the rules changed when I was a sophomore. (Maybe it was the last time I wore a dress?) Our Fellowship Club discovered covenants in deeds that prevented Jewish people from buying in the neighborhood. Then our reporting in the high school newspaper helped to change that once accepted practice. Bathrooms and bars were choked with cigarette smoke well into my 30s. But no longer. Violence stopped in Ireland … a Berlin Wall came down … the USSR—that vast enemy that caused us to pull the curtains and get under our desks—disbanded. I see the recent June National Geographic has marijuana on the cover to tell a story I could never have imagined when I was on fire crew in the ’70s. What other “impossible” changes will arrive?
While I savor my hours alone, I admire what unions of citizens can accomplish.
I’m well aware that the 33-year-old Thomas Jefferson was not a solo poet. He didn’t launch his words in a paper airplane from the top of a mountain. Months of collaboration knitted to a lifetime of thinking supported the writing of a declaration signed by 56 men. When I spy the dandelion fireworks in the distant dark each July Fourth, I always think of that: each burst a brain cell exploding with brilliant color. Every generation brain cells must again be launched into the public realm with passion—it is what it takes to keep alive “unalienable Rights.”
When a happy email from my longest married friend arrived, I couldn’t believe it. Nine judges thought hard and studied a long time and wrote up their opinions and announced now he could marry he, she could legally bind herself to she, in every state. Soon funeral flags will be folded and handed to a new shape of spouse. Eventually $255 checks will not be delayed.
At lunch on June 26, I savored the glowing Facebook posts on the small screen of my iPhone and then I put my father’s flag up feeling fiercely proud of my country. Chaotic and labored as the process feels, change can happen. The union thoughtfully decided to expand the legality of unions. Hey Mom, hey Dad. Maybe your child, the only one of four who never married, will tie the knot one day after all. A funny thought to have up a dirt road alone. I’m an independent gal—ask anyone. “Don’t Fence Me In” is my theme song. But it brought tears to my eyes again and again: feeling the exuberant YES to inclusiveness echoing through the land, savoring images of multicolored flags with the words “LOVE WINS” and imagining a previously unimaginable possibility.
