Life in the Lookout

My son Jakob gave me a copy of Phillip Connors book about being a fire lookout in a remote tower in the Gila Wilderness. I’d heard about the book before but had never gotten around to reading it. As a former fire lookout myself—and writer— you’d think I’d have sought it out, but better late than never. Now it can be gist for a blog.

Connors and I share many of the same lookout qualifications: familiarity with Gary Snyder and Jack Kerouac’s adventures in North Cascades lookouts; a love of solitude (dogs don’t count); time to write; and hiking and backpacking in the wilds of New Mexico. We also share a deep understanding that being a fire lookout is a contradiction in terms. The job, which no longer exists, required one to report fires seen from the lookout to the Forest Service dispatcher who would then send fire crews—hot shot crews, helicopter crews, tanker crews, spotter planes, retardant planes—to stomp out the fire. I was a lookout in the 1970s, Connors in the 2000s. During my time there was only the hint of aknowledgment that perhaps the decades of suppressing all fires in our national forests had created an unhealthy and overstocked forest that made them more susceptible to extreme, uncontrollable fire. By the time Connors got to his lookout in the Aldo Leopold Wilderness—sister to the Gila Wilderness—the FS was gauging each non-manmade fire for its “let burn” potential to improve forest conditions by managing low impact ground fires.

But that’s about where our shared interests end. He’s married, hates cows, worships Aldo Leopold, and ends up with a book of “deep reflection.” I had a love fest in the lookout, being single and in my early 20s, was being schooled in the concept of inhabited wilderness, would end up living next door to cows for most of my life, and only got an article for New Mexico Magazine out of it.

I found out about fire lookouts at my first FS job ever on the Lincoln National Forest in Cloudcroft after I dropped out of Antioch. I was a campground patrol who drove around visiting with all the Texans who came to the mountain air for heat relief and moved from camp site to site camp every two weeks—the limit at each site—in their campers and RVs. I soon began an affair with one of the fire crew, a local boy who taught me how to two-step and took me camping on horseback. When one day we visited the district fire tower I knew being a fire lookout instead of a campground patrol was the job for me.

Luckily enough, I got that job the next season in the La Mosa Peak fire lookout, sister peak to the majestic Mount Taylor, near Grants. They took me up in a helicopter with all my gear as there was too much snow on the ground for the fire trucks to reach the tower. I had to come back down to get my dogs, Chani and Judge, and the fire truck dropped me off at snow line and I hiked up for my initial two-week stay. Unlike Connors, who lived in a cabin below and climbed the tower every day for work, I lived in the tower, already high enough on the peak to provide the necessary vista. My dogs lived in the tower with me and whenever company came they’d stand as sentinels on the catwalk and bark their heads off.

My visitors included my first lover, a young geology student doing an internship at one of the uranium mines on the forest boundary. In the 1970s the uranium industry was ubiquitous around Grants: drilling rigs combing the forest for potential mining sites (I had to learn to differentiate their diesel smoke from a forest fire); the open pit Jackpile mine at Laguna Pueblo; and milling processing plants near Milan. Gino was a fun-loving guy who had no intention of being a uranium miner so we had a lot of fun at night in the tower and hiking and camping in the canyons below the peak.

After he went back to school I had a brief fling with the helicopter pilot stationed on our district, then a longer affair with Danny, one of a group of friends who ended up buying land on the other side of my FS district, out in the Zuni Mountains. Then, in my second season as lookout, I met Mark, a poet who was schooled on Jack Kerouac and Gary Snyder and thought nothing could be better than having an affair with a fire lookout. That was the end of the love affairs: we were together for 34 years until he died of pancreatic cancer. After La Mosca, we took turns working the Cedro Peak fire lookout in the Manzano Mountains, closer to the house we were building in Placitas and where I took baby Jakob to work with me.

Conners and my environmental politics diverged most profoundly when Mark and I moved to El Valle, a land grant village in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains of northern New Mexico. Here, as members of a land based community that maintained the traditions of grazing cattle, cutting firewood, and irrigating fields and gardens from rivers on public lands that their ancestors previously owned, I relied more on my neighbors than the environmental heroes like Leopold, John Muir, or Ed Abbey as guides to what was ecologically sustainable for both the land and its inhabitants. Instead of writing a paeon to the wonderful luck of being a fire lookout, which Connors does admirably, Mark and I ended up publishing a newspaper that examines the conflicts that inevitably arise from perspectives, like Connors and mine, that tend to diverge based on lived experience.

That’s not to say I didn’t share the quotidian joys that Connors and all the lucky lookouts who’ve graced these peaks experience in one form or another: golden eagles flying every night, black bears with whom I competed for raspberries, bombing nighthawks, fire crews who stopped by for a visit, the view of volcanic plugs from my outhouse, lightning storms that had me hovering on the floor with Jakob, and walking my beloved dogs. I don't particularly treasure the times the two came back to the tower with porcupine quills in their snouts (and in Judge’s case, in his mouth) but they’re all my memories, good and bad. I’m sorry Connors’ generation was the last one to be there, on top of the peaks, beneath the clouds, looking out at the world.