I tip back in a stout red wood chair to read mail at the lookout. When I leap up excited to write a reply to a good letter—BAM!—the feet crash with a metallic bang on the catwalk before I go inside to make the typewriter chatter with sentences. Beginning with Flo who sent a calligraphic meditation on the letter R until a couple of weeks ago when a woman living along the Rio de Flag observed, “the yucca in my yard sent up 5 stalks instead of the usual 2,” dozens of you readers responded to my May invitation to send me letters with the news of your one and only day. “At first I feared that they wouldn’t have envelopes at Walmart, across from us at the Motel 6 here, but then I found them,” wrote a retired attorney from southern Arizona. She and her husband read my column while on a week’s road trip to Flagstaff, and eager to engage in snail mail with a fire lookout, she wrote me three pages on a yellow legal pad to describe the books bought and their hike on Bill Williams Mountain. She even included a simple drawing of her dog asleep by the side of their bed. And she wrote, “We were surprised to see stamp machines in the Flagstaff post office. They took them out in Tucson.”
I wrote back to her, “Kind of like phone booths, stamp machines, eh? Now you see them, now you don’t!” And I described a raven going by with something orange in its mouth. “What could it be? Maybe that bird went all the way down to the campground at the foot of the mountain? Grabbed an orange peel?” And I mused and doodled and then sent the letter off with a couple of hikers who had climbed to the tower with their collie dog.
On my next day off I found in my PO Box an envelope from Amarillo, Texas, with a hand cancellation “First Day of Issue” on that lovely Forever stamp, PLANT for more BEAUTIFUL STREETS.A 74-year-old widow said she picked up Flag Live while “eating the most delicious hamburger at Mamma’s Café,” and then described her travels to see all 50 states. “Flagstaff, Arizona was the last one on my bucket list.” I wrote to Texas to say I haven’t been to all 50 states yet, but “meanwhile I savor the bird voices and wind sound, the passing clouds and rainfall. Rainbows, too. Sometimes I’m looking down through the arc of a rainbow! Haven’t spotted any pots of gold, however. Darn.”
If I could capture a pot of gold, I’d head out like that Texas gal with a Senior Pass, and I’d explore national parks from coast to coast to coast. But meanwhile receiving mail to savor at the lookout was a pot of gold. One letter came from a desk clerk at a motel who has 12 rescued cats and another arrived from a therapeutic musician who plays “for people with special needs and elderly in nursing homes and at the hospital.” One fat envelope had seven pages inside. I write long letters myself when finding my way through a thicket of experiences; what fun to get one! It came from an ex-student who spotted the address for me in the newspaper. What a pleasure to unfold multiple paragraphs of his sense-making again.
I liked the stamps: the Queen in a blue hat for her birthday brings a letter from Australia and there is Akhenaten on a stamp hand cancelled in Egypt, sent by a Chandler woman who waited until she was on a dive boat in the Red Sea to mail her card that shows mountain peaks and a quote by John Muir, “Going to the woods is going home.”
You readers sent enough postcards one could tape them in place to completely cover up a small television set. Except I don’t keep a television set at the tower, so I thumbtacked cards to the white ceiling where I could travel through them as I lay on the cot bed. I peered at a rectangle of “Hola!” from Los Cabos showing palm trees and white beaches. Others showed the arch of the bridge in Sydney Harbor and the inviting Gold Coast of Australia. Another featured a treasure from the Medici Collection in a museum in Florence, Italy. It was a bejeweled monkey with a staff and pack; I set it hiking across my ceiling past lava meeting the sea in Hawaii, and serene cats with bowties and sunglasses, Provincetown street color, Kansas sunflowers, the Pluto discovery photographs, and a pink humid sunset over Everglades National Park. A postcard of New York City arrived, and when I looked at the Statue of Liberty, I remembered climbing the stairs to her head when I was a girl. “My first fire lookout?” I murmured, thinking maybe my lifetime of climbing stairs toward a big view began inside that strong woman in a harbor.
On a card of the Boundary Waters from St. Paul, Minn., a woman wrote, “Paddled to Clark Island and set camp in a downpour,” which made me drool to camp again. And then there came a postcard from the Rocky Mountain Book and Paper Fair in Denver and I thought, “Must do road trip, with camping.”
While I waited for hikers to come by who might take my mail, I drew on envelopes with pen and watercolor: clouds, cans of lunch, shapes of peaks. And you readers sent color to me: a raven dressed in a pink tutu! A rich collage of forest freshness made from orange, green and blue squares. And a drawing with purple marker that depicted me on my tower with my hair standing out like porcupine quills, which is about what sitting through a lightning storm feels like! (Thanks Sharon, Denise and Merah!)
A woman in Sedona who used to live in Flagstaff and liked to read “Letters from Home” with her lunch at the old New Frontiers wrote she still makes a habit of finding the paper when she returns to town for the altitude and a haircut. “There is a permission granted in your words,” she writes. “They are relaxed and lyrical.” I wrote back to her, “7 years ago Tony Norris approached me at the library with his vision of a column shared by local writers. I’m a lucky gal to keep such company. Glad you enjoy it.” And that’s the truth.
