Detail from an illustrated letter from the fire lookout.
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 the letters have gotten through that I’ve trusted to chatty youths hiking in church groups, foreign travelers amazed at the view and local hikers doing their annual trek. One letter even rode down the mountain in a doggy pack! Woof!
It still impresses me when a hand-kissed page travels from hand to distant hand. Maybe that’s why I save postmarks I’ve received from the South Pole and valentines posted from Loveland, Colo. I like the dated one of a kindness of them. I’ve thought about creating a round stamp, an imprint to add to envelopes I send from the lookout: MAILED BY FOOT. It would be a special cachet like the one on the postcards we use to hike from river trips to Phantom Ranch for mailing. They’d get stamped Mailed By Mule from the Bottom of the Grand Canyon.
While I enjoy the “ting” on my iPhone that signals there is an email, those words don’t stick to my life like a letter or card does. Email messages all look alike on the glowing screen: credit card balances and links to cute animal photos look trapped in a column of same sans serif droning. The boring click and click again feels like emptying a dishwasher. By contrast I smile when I shake out a carefully opened envelope; there I find sentences that please my eye, words uniquely shaped, as lively as a flock of grosbeaks pausing on the wooden bird feeder that hangs from an apple tree branch. Signatures as sturdy as petroglyphs.
Tucked into the journal from my first season as a fire lookout are two postcards from Edward Abbey bearing his particular chicken scratch. I was working Horsethief Lookout on the Prescott National Forest and would sometimes hear a fire boss relaying messages to Ed who was on Aztec Peak Lookout. One night it was news about an invitation for Ed to speak in Hawaii. This amused me, so I sent a letter to Aztec Peak teasing him about having better places to be than in a glass cube up several flights of steps. He wrote back to invite “Horsethief” to a reading in Prescott. I was glad I invested in that stamp!
I keep handwriting longer than I keep emails, like the watercolor postcard sketch of the top of the Mormon Temple in Salt Lake City that arrived to me last summer. It still looks lovely taped to the door, gently fading from the big light that travels through the lookout each day. Temple meets temple I thought when I fixed it there.
A fine way to inspire letter writing is to Google “artist illustrated letters.” Look at Frederick Remington’s sketches of horses in margins, or Gauguin’s watercolors from Tahiti. I once got to see the Beatrix Potter letters that first told the tale of Peter Rabbit, and I marveled to think that’s how a story might begin. Impressed by how sketches amplify words, I often draw to start a letter. A postcard comes of Van Gogh’s bedroom, so I tape it to the fire finder and then draw them both, adding in the San Francisco Peaks outside the windows. I reel in clouds and place them around an address. Maybe it’s a day to have honey in my tea, so that’s the detail I send to a friend with a drawing plucked from the kitchen counter.
For several fire seasons, I and other fire lookouts and rangers kept a round robin letter going: we each wrote up the details of our days at assorted parks and peaks and mailed it along to the next gal. It was a fun accumulation of piercing insights and shared gripes about seasonal work. I thought of those letters again when I rented this season’s PO Box for the summer at the downtown post office. I so love finding real handwriting layered into the credit card offers and bills. So it occurred to me it might be fun to invite you into Box 1716.
Tea time at the tower: envelope art and inspiration for envelope art. Photos by the author
Write me, dear reader. I might not be that busy at the fire lookout, especially if this season continues to be so wet around the ears, so there might be even more time to read. I dare you: tell or draw the news of your one and only day. Send it along. When I come down on a day off to have shrimp and polenta, or dance at the Orpheum, or cruise through the wonderful selection of cards at Zani, I’ll collect my mail at the post office and tote it up the dirt road to read. It’ll be fun to have your quirks and sentences with my second cup of tea and the views of the North Rim, Navajo Mountain and the Little Colorado. I’ll share your insights with the ravens and Violet-green Swallows. Maybe I’ll coax the Canyon Wren I hear down slope into view by reading paragraphs aloud.
I’m not too worried about being overwhelmed with missives. I’m pretty sure no one writes letters anymore except me. (And Matt, and Ann. And Michele and Kate.) Do you remember where the address goes? Jean Rukkila PO Box 1716 Flagstaff, AZ 86002. Got it? Can you find a 49-cent stamp? Maybe I’ll write back. Around 250 hikers come up the mountain every summer and they are eager to have the weight of my mail in their packs!
