Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Fire Season Field Notes from a Wilderness Lookout by Philip Connors Fire Season. A decade ago Philip Connors left work as an editor at the Wall Street Journal and talked his way into a job as one of the last fire lookouts in America. Fire Season is Connors's remarkable reflection on work, our place in the wild, and the charms of solitude. A decade ago Philip Connors left work as an editor at the Wall Street Journal and talked his way into a job far from the streets of lower Manhattan: working as one of the last fire lookouts in America. Spending nearly half the year in a 7' x 7' tower, 10,000 feet above sea level in remote New Mexico, his tasks were simple: keep watch over one of the most fire-prone forests in the country and sound the alarm at the first sign of smoke. Fire Season is Connors's remarkable reflection on work, our place in the wild, and the charms of solitude. The landscape over which he keeps watch is rugged and roadless - it was the first region in the world to be officially placed off limits to industrial machines - and it typically gets hit by lightning more than 30,000 times per year. Connors recounts his days and nights in this forbidding land, untethered from the comforts of modern life: the eerie pleasure of being alone in his glass-walled perch with only his dog Alice for company; occasional visits from smokejumpers and long- distance hikers; the strange dance of communion and wariness with bears, elk, and other wild creatures; trips to visit the hidden graves of buffalo soldiers slain during the Apache wars of the nineteenth century; and always the majesty and might of lightning storms and untamed fire. Written with narrative verve and startling beauty, and filled with reflections on his literary forebears who also served as lookouts - among them Edward Abbey, Jack Kerouac, Norman Maclean, and Gary Snyder - Fire Season is a book to stand the test of time. A Talent for Sloth. The landscape where I work, in far southwest New Mexico, is one of the most fire-prone areas in America. I look out over a stretch of country with nearly a million acres of roadless wilderness, where an annual upsurge of moisture from the Gulf of Mexico combines with the summertime heat of the Chihuahuan Desert to create tens of thousands of lightning strikes. In an arid land with brief but intense storm activity, wildfire is no aberration. My lookout tower is situated five miles from the nearest road, on a ten-thousand-foot peak in the Gila National Forest. I live here for several months each year, without electricity or running water. Although tens of thousands of acres are touched by fire here every year, I can go weeks without seeing a twist of smoke. During these lulls I simply watch and wait, my eyes becoming ever more intimate with an ecological transition zone encompassing dry grasslands, piñon-juniper foothills, ponderosa parkland, and spruce-fir . Fire Season: Field Notes from a Wilderness Lookout by Philip Connors. In a year when so many of us have struggled with feeling isolated in our homes or apartments, living alone in a 14-by-14-foot cabin perched thousands of feet above the wilderness might not sound enticing. For more than a century, though, across the United States, a few intrepid Americans have sought out those remote towers as not just a job, but a lifestyle. And unlike so many jobs that were long considered “man’s work,” women broke the glass ceiling of fire lookout positions almost as soon as the job was established. Before American women were granted the right to vote or allowed to have bank accounts in their name, they were trekking into forests alone, manning lookout stations, and helping to save millions of acres of wilderness from wildfires across the country. “Women have earned their place in the history of forest fire lookouts,” says Dixie Boyle, a longtime lookout and author going into her 34th season. She staffs a tower in the Cibola National Forest in New Mexico’s Manzano Mountains. Men like author Jack Kerouac brought attention to the job when he wrote about the 63 days he spent as a fire lookout in the summer of 1956 in books like The Dharma Bums and Desolation Angels , but it’s women like Hallie Morse Daggett, Helen Dowe and Boyle herself who deserve our attention. “Those early women paved the way for the rest of us,” says Boyle. Dixie Boyle and her dog, Maggie, at Capilla Peak Lookout in New Mexico's Manzano Mountains State Park (Marilyn Conway) Depending on what part of the country you’re in, fire season generally goes from March or April through September or October. The training for lookouts was, and is, brief. They’re shown how to use the equipment (like the sighting device known as the Osborne Fire Finder), told what duties they’re expected to accomplish to maintain the tower, and sent on their way. After that, it’s up to individual lookouts to haul their equipment to the tower, resupply, and spot and report as many fires as they can throughout the season. It’s not a great job for anyone who needs another soul to motivate them each day. Lookouts are truly on their own. In the decades following the Great Fire of 1910 (aka “the Big Blowup” or “Devil’s Broom fire”), which scorched 3 million acres across Montana, Idaho and parts of Washington, the U.S. Forest Service and state and local agencies created a system of thousands of lookout stations across the country, many of them towers with small cabins (or “cabs”) that were perched on cliffs and peaks, with 360-degree views of the wilderness so lookouts could detect and report smoke before the fires got out of hand. By the 1930s, nearly 5,000 active lookout towers stood across the U.S., but today that number is drastically smaller. “In 2019, one of our members did a survey and came up with a figure of 450 to 500 [towers],” says Gary Weber of the Forest Fire Lookout Association. “A few years ago, the count of standing towers was somewhere over 2,700, so it's safe to say that there are over 2,000 inactive towers, some of which could be put back into some sort of service, but many are long abandoned.” Hallie Morse Daggett became the first female to serve as a Forest Service fire lookout. (Forest History Society, Durham, NC) Because so many agencies (Forest Service, National Park Service, Bureau of Land Management and multiple states) are involved with the lookout process, it’s tough to pin down the exact number of fire lookouts, let alone break down the ratio of women to men who are staffing the towers. “I would hazard a guess that it's probably close to 50/50,” says Weber. In 1902, before the system of lookout towers was established, a woman named Mable Gray, who was a cook at a timber cruising camp in northern Idaho, was asked by her boss to climb a ladder, sit 15 feet up in a fir tree, and look for smoke. If she saw anything suspicious, she’d hop on her horse and alert the crews. Just three years after the Forest Service created the job, Hallie Morse Daggett became the first female to serve as a Forest Service fire lookout, at Eddy Gulch in northern California’s Klamath National Forest. Before that, women in the Forest Service were pretty much relegated to clerical work. Daggett attended boarding school in San Francisco, far from the wilderness, but she’d grown up fearing the wildfires she saw as a child. She loved exploring nature in the Siskiyou Mountains, and so in 1913, even though no woman had ever held the position, she applied to be a lookout. Daggett was among the top three candidates for the job, the two others, of course, being men. After seeing Daggett’s application, Ranger M.H. McCarthy wrote a letter to his boss explaining why he thought Daggett would be the best person for the job: The novelty of the proposition which has been unloaded upon me, and which I am now endeavoring to pass up to you, may perhaps take your breath away, and I hope your heart is strong enough to stand the shock. It is this: One of the most untiring and enthusiastic applicants which I have for the position is Miss Hallie Morse Daggett, a wide-awake woman of 30 years, who knows and has traversed every trail on the Salmon River watershed, and is thoroughly familiar with every foot of the District. She is an ardent advocate of the Forest Service, and seeks the position in evident good faith, and gives her solemn assurance that she will stay with her post faithfully until she is recalled. She is absolutely devoid of the timidity which is ordinarily associated with her sex as she is not afraid of anything that walks, creeps, or flies. She is a perfect lady in every respect, and her qualifications for the position are vouched for by all who know of her aspirations. Daggett got the job, and her first season she allegedly spotted 40 fires. Only five acres total burned. She made the arduous trek to Eddy Gulch for 15 seasons (lookouts had to haul in supplies by foot or pack mule), blazing a trail for “lady lookouts , ” as early news articles dubbed them, and breaking into this role long before women would become smokejumpers, let alone CEOs or vice presidents.