A Song for the River

by Philip Connors

  Teresa had explored as much of that Wilderness as anyone I knew. I never tired of hearing her stories of riding the trails with grizzled mule packers or running the river’s forks solo in a battered boat. These were uncommon pursuits, to put it mildly. Packing with mules had always been a specialized skill, and those who boated on the river did so on the Gila’s main stem, not its smaller headwater tributaries. The forks were considered too small, offered too many challenges, involved too much boat-dragging and bushwhacking of the sort that could elicit four-letter words from a river-running nun. I hadn’t heard of anyone else even attempting such a float in recent years.

  For Teresa, the allure of a run down the forks resided in the difficulty, partly, and the novelty, partly, but also in the guarantee of solitude in a place unsullied by the filth and flotsam of Homo economicus. It was harder all the time to get away from the casual sadism that inflected so much of American life, but a boat trip down one of the forks of the Gila was one sure way to do it. Hers was that rare sensibility as undomesticated as the landscape. In most of her major life decisions, she had been guided by an innate attraction to wild creatures and untamed country, making for a life lived around ranchers and firefighters and others who worked outdoors—fuel-wood cutters and horse breeders and such of their ilk. A self-described “feral child with few social graces” in her youth in suburban Arizona, she had become what was called an old Gila hand: hand being the most respectful moniker bestowed on humans in wild country, and old not an epithet but an honorific.

  As the Swede once put it admiringly, having fallen a little bit in love, “She was born without a bourgeois bone in her body.”

  Her forays out from under rooftops had not been limited to the Gila. I came to think of her life as a long, peripatetic journey through what was left of wild America, and aside from mountain lookouts, rivers were the thread that ran through it. She had once floated the Green River solo, from northern Utah to Lake Powell, 430 miles in six weeks—one of many such trips on streams all over the country, including the Pelican in northern Minnesota and the Big Bend of the Rio Grande down in Texas. She had also ridden horseback across the southern island of New Zealand and done the same from Mexico to Canada, a six-month journey on the second day of which she was dragged by a rope that connected her horse to a temperamental mule barely green-broke. Amid the commotion she suffered a fractured arm. For most people that mishap would have derailed the trip, or at least postponed it, but Teresa was not most people. As fortune would have it, she found her way to a nearby ranch owned by a semi-professional rodeo cowboy who kept a supply of casting material handy in his tack shed. He used it on the calves he practiced roping when the rope broke one of their legs. Calf-roping tended to result in a fair number of broken legs, which healed relatively quickly when properly set. His expertise made for an impeccable cast on her arm; he sent her on her way with some extra plaster, in case the cast wore out and she needed to make a replacement herself. Four weeks later she did just that.

  But that was long ago, in what sometimes seemed to her another life entirely. During one of her last seasons as a lookout, she came unglued after too much time spent in a poisoned tower. The previous occupant had died when he fell off a sheer cliff below the lookout for reasons unknown. The mystery of his death became a little less mysterious after Teresa began suffering from memory loss, asthma attacks, and extreme bouts of vertigo. A mycologist who was called in on a hunch from the University of Oregon identified the culprit: toxic black mold growing behind the tower’s wall panels. As if that weren’t an exotic enough malady, a tick bite later bequeathed her a bouquet of blood-borne pathogens. This, combined with the mold poisoning, set her on a self-directed medical odyssey that lasted several years and only really delivered relief after she made a practice of lying very still in a hyperbaric chamber. In the worst of her anguish, she had stood on a bridge over the Colorado River on a lonely summer night and imagined herself for one final moment a bird, swooping toward the canyon bottom in what she later wryly noted would have been terminal velocity. It was, in its weird way, a happy thought—flying like that, launching into the afterlife. It cheered her so much she decided it had to be one of those beautiful human ideas, of which we have so many, that are better in theory than in practice.

  At age sixty-three, having lived hand-to-mouth for decades in order to feed her jones for adventure and avoid what she viewed as the suffocating expectations of the culture, namely marriage and motherhood, she surprised herself by having a change of heart about marriage. (John surprised himself too, having recently left a seven-year relationship that didn’t result in an exchange of vows.) With her capacity for solitude and all-around hardihood, she made a felicitous match with John—her groundedness a nice balance for his occasional flights of fancy—but they had been granted only eleven months together, just long enough to know they wanted it to last. In a matter of weeks she had gone from the novelty of imagining forever with one man to confronting forever without him: from wedding engagement to memorial service. She had hosted, with grace and good humor, grieving family members from out of state and guided John’s body from autopsy to cremation. Now she was walking around with his ashes in a gallon freezer bag and looking, uncharacteristically, a little bit lost.

  It had the feel of an appropriate day for spreading some of those ashes. The breeze was no more than a whisper in the tops of the pines below us. Their needle clusters glinted like tiny pom poms as they caught the slanted sunlight. With the ribbons of ground fog beginning to dissolve, we turned our attention southward, where we could see mountains over in southeast Arizona and down along the Mexican border—Gadsden Purchase land, the final chunk of territory added to the Lower 48. It was a lonely and sun-seared country and in some ways the last American frontier, a place where ranchers, smugglers, and migrants tested their resolve against a pitiless landscape long on rock and short on water.

  We both felt the gravity of what we were about to do and so held off a while longer, not wanting to rush toward a reckoning. Instead we remained on the catwalk and watched the forest come alive with the songs of morning, sometimes speaking quietly to each other, sometimes pointing to something in the landscape, sometimes standing silently attentive as the hummingbirds buzzed around the feeder and the shadows shortened and the air began to warm.

  I left Teresa alone with the view and went inside the tower to make myself some oatmeal and a cup of coffee, extra strong, with a generous pour of cream to mask the bitterness. As I warmed my hands on the cup and felt my blood quicken with caffeine, the other lookouts began to call in service over the radio—first Jean’s voice, then Hedge’s, and on around the horn, one by one, nine of them in all, until each of us had been accounted for but me. Some days I liked to speak first and others I preferred to go last, and often the ritual round of morning voices called to mind the first few lines of Gary Snyder’s poem “The Lookouts”:

  Perched on their bare and windy peaks

  They twitter like birds across the fractured hills

  Equipped by science with the keenest tool—

  A complex two-way radio, full of tubes.

  The most alone, and highest in the land,

  We trust their scrupulous vision to a man:

  Likely in Snyder’s time and place, the lookouts had all been men, but on the Gila in the 21st century the gender split was roughly fifty-fifty, and the lookouts I admired most were women. Four of them—Teresa, Jean, Sara, and Rázik—counted a hundred fire seasons worth of experience altogether, a deep reservoir of knowledge about the work and the country that, one had to believe, would never again be duplicated.

  Jean had once lived alone on a boat off the Virgin Islands and taught in Detroit city schools. Unmoored after a breakup with a man she assumed she would marry, she came to feel her only hope for salvation resided in the freedom of the open road and the stark beauty of the American desert. She drifted southward across the country in her Isuzu pickup, sleeping in the back under a camper shell, until s
he came to rest in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, where she decided to put down roots. The name of the place appealed to her, as did the clarity of the sky and the naked geology of the mountains. Now in her forties, she had spent one-third of her summers on Earth working the loneliest of the Gila’s lookout peaks. She saw fewer visitors than the rest of us by far, sometimes only three or four during a whole fire season.

  Sara and Ráz split time equally on their mountain. The hike in was so long—twelve miles—it didn’t make sense for one of them to work the relief lookout’s schedule of four days every two weeks, only to spend two full days coming and going on the trail. Sara had first come into the country during a 3,000-mile thru-hike along the Continental Divide from Mexico to Canada, back in 1980, before there was a properly marked CDT. She had worked more summers on her mountain, thirty-three straight, than John and I combined on ours. She figured she could hang up her binoculars without regret once she reached the nice round number of fifty fire seasons. Ráz liked to say that Sara knew the lay of the land so well she could tell you precisely which tree had caught the lightning that started the fire.

  At twenty-four seasons of service herself, Ráz was no slouch when it came to understanding the country. She had a previous career in government shipyards, the only woman on crews installing communication systems in submarines. Now she was in her seventies and spry as most people half her age—a little slower on the hike to reach the tower than she was once upon a time, but still hardcore. And I do mean hardcore. In one recent fire season, she had walked to and from her lookout half the summer on a broken foot.

  I joined the morning chorus by pressing the transmit button on my Bendix-King VHF radio full of tubes and carefully enunciating, “Silver City Dispatch, Signal Peak, in service.” It felt peculiar, almost a form of sacrilege, to mimic those seven little words John had uttered on more than a thousand mornings, but Signal Peak was where I was, so that’s who I was, for the time being.

  ONCE I FINISHED calling in the weather, Teresa suggested a morning stroll. We descended the tower and walked down the trail until we came to an opening in the forest, where the ridge overlooked the rounded peaks of the Twin Sisters to the south. John had come there often with his wife, back when they first staffed the lookout, back when Miquette was still alive. In 1999 she had been hired as the primary lookout, he as her relief, and they both came to cherish the view from a natural stone bench just below the top of the ridge: ponderosa pine rolling down the slopes of the Pinos Altos Range, giving way eventually to piñon and juniper, and beyond them the cougar-colored grasslands. Miquette’s tenure lasted just four summers. In 2003, half a year after her death, John spread some of her ashes in the clearing.

  Now it was his time to join her.

  In their last months together, John played caretaker while Miquette succumbed to cancer. I didn’t know him at the time, except as one of the many voices on my two-way radio. He later told me it was the most difficult thing he had ever done—and the most meaningful. Tending to the needs of a dying lover surpassed any form of intimacy he had known, even as it tested the limits of his emotional and physical strength. According to people in a position to know, he did with patience and tenderness a thing he hated having to do at all, which is perhaps one way of defining the outer reaches of unconditional love: grace in the face of the unbearable.

  A surprise bequest from Miquette’s godmother had granted the two of them the freedom to live on the road for years, untethered to the demands of gainful employment. They had dropped anchor in different campgrounds full of vagabonds for a week or a month at a time, moving across the mountains and deserts of the West, from Arizona to Idaho, Colorado to California, a habit they kept up in the offseason after they became lookouts. It felt crucial that their final journey not end in some godforsaken institutional room. Once they learned the cancer was incurable, they made a plan for what John called “hospice in a motor home.” Ignoring her doctor’s appalled warnings to the contrary, they packed up her crutches and oxygen tanks, her gauze patches and pill bottles, and set off toward a secret camp they both loved in Death Valley. It was as romantic, in its own intimate way, as a honeymoon, John later wrote of that week, in an essay he published in a newsletter for RV enthusiasts, likely the most moving piece of writing ever to appear in its pages.

  They continued west to a campground on the Pacific coast, where the host, apprised of their situation, waived the two-week stay limit. As was their way, they kept making new friends until the very end. Fellow campers came by to see if they needed help; some brought tapioca pudding to share with Miquette, aware she couldn’t eat much else. When the end drew near, they bowed to necessity and joined her family in Santa Cruz. On New Year’s Eve, with a sigh, Miquette slipped gently away, John wrote. Outside the bedroom window, fireworks sparkled in the midnight sky.

  Afterward John felt an urge to bend his grief to some redeeming purpose, so he signed on as an air angel, flying sick patients in need of emergency medical care to distant hospitals free of charge in his own private plane. He reminded himself that although the end had come too soon for her—she had gone at the age of fifty-six—Miquette had managed to live out her dreams. As a little girl she fantasized about living one day in a treehouse and loved horses so much she wanted to be one. After she met John, they lived in the shadow of 14,000-foot peaks in Colorado, tucked amid a grove of aspens on the edge of an alpine meadow, where they worked as caretakers of a large horse herd. Later they took up seasonal residence on Signal Peak, in a sort of deluxe treehouse above the Gila. The timing and manner of her death had not undone the fact that hers had been, in so many ways, a charmed life.

  So had John’s, mostly. As with all of us, there were corners of his personal history shadowed in varying degrees of darkness, but on the day of his death, age sixty-two, he was happier than he had been in some time, excited to be planning a honeymoon that would involve flying his Cessna Cardinal around the American West with Teresa so they could golf in a different state each day on a lark—a major concession on her part, golf being far afield of her own interests.

  But what the hell, the things we do for love.

  Instead the plane sat orphaned in a hangar at the Grant County Airport, and there would be no teeing off in Arizona one day and Utah the next, not to mention no more air angel flights with him at the controls.

  SITTING ON THE STONE BENCH, Teresa and I sifted through what we remembered most vividly about John. His laughter still echoed in our memories, and often we felt like displaced conduits for it. Never one to be stingy with his emotions, he would have approved of us crying one minute and giggling the next—and sometimes both at once.

  I often thought of him as the blue-eyed gringo incarnation of a Mudhead Kachina, the drumming, dancing clown in Hopi ceremonies: partial to mischief and merriment, and the most gregarious lover of solitude I had ever known. His laughter, his most winning characteristic, tumbled forth in staccato waves, his belly shaking, his torso rocking back and forth from the hinge of his waist like a see-saw. It was a sort of bebop laugh that reminded me of a Dizzy Gillespie solo—supple and exuberant, the individual notes crowding each other as if in a hurry to be free in the world. When children visited his lookout tower, he delighted in showing them how he could make a flower of his lips by painting them with lipstick and pursing them just so, luring hummingbirds for a kiss if he stood as still as a statue on the catwalk. I found the tube of cherry-colored Wet n Wild in the drawer where he stored his weather instruments. Its gauche branding at first made me laugh and then ruined me for half an hour with all it evoked of him.

  The sight of that lipstick was nothing compared with my initial glimpse of his handwriting in the logbook, which detailed the major events of his last hours alive:

  Noonish—Past lookout Bart Mortenson family arrives. Bart was a lookout here in the 70s. He honeymooned here

  12:32—Smoke report: Azimuth 247° 30’, Township 16S, Range 14W, Section 32—small white column—call it BART FIRE />
  12:39—Smoke more dense, still white color

  12:57—Engine 672 on scene

  13:00—Mortenson family spreads Bart’s ashes north of tower. Nice singing of hymns drifting inside…

  19:00—Out of service

  In addition to ruing everything unsaid and undone, the mind can’t help but hunt for crumbs of solace in the aftermath of an unforeseen death. I found mine in the fact that, like Miquette, John had eluded the confines of a grim hospital chamber for his end. Shortly after writing the words Out of service, he saddled his horse Sundance and set off on a ride along the Continental Divide, passing by the spot where he had spread Miquette’s ashes eleven years earlier. He had promised to ring Teresa that evening but never did. She tried him multiple times, but the call always went straight to voice mail. When he didn’t report in service over the radio the next morning, Teresa met up with two of his closest friends—his relief lookout, Mark Johnson, and his supervisor, Keith Matthes. They set out ahead of a search-and-rescue team in a hunt for him, while Teresa went straight to the lookout tower.

  The hunt did not last long. Keith discovered John and the horse in the position they had fallen, less than a mile from the tower. Sundance had collapsed to the downhill side of the trail and crushed John beneath him. Neither showed signs of having struggled. Death for both appeared instantaneous. Those of us who loved John told ourselves that whatever the reason for the fall—the evidence, according to Keith and Mark, suggested a horse heart attack, although we would never know for sure—he had gone quickly, while doing something he enjoyed, in a place he loved.

  June 7, 2014, just happened to be the day he did so.

  “At least he died with his boots on,” I glibly told Teresa, when we met in the hours after his body was found.