A Song for the River

by Philip Connors

  “Not quite,” she said. “Classic John: the bastard was wearing his tennis shoes. If he’d had his boots on, who knows, he might’ve got out of the stirrups in time.”

  When she later visited the scene, she found cause to develop her own theory about the fall. It involved Sundance’s habit of rearing on his hind legs, a habit she had warned John was dangerous and ought to be nipped in the bud. She noticed two freshly sawed logs next to the trail a little ways ahead of the place where Sundance collapsed. The logs had been dropped by firefighters less than a month earlier, and the entire hillside was still black from the fire they had battled. She figured Sundance came around the bend and saw the ends of those cut logs looking like big googly eyeballs or two white moons. “I’m guessing he got spooked and reared,” she said. “And because of the fire, the footing there wasn’t great. Keith told me he noticed that Sundance’s neck was bent between two saplings. I think he fell awkwardly and broke it, and that was that.”

  THOSE OF US with long experience sitting watch over the Gila sometimes joked that we weren’t so much fire lookouts anymore as we were pyromaniacal monks or morbid priests—officiants at an ongoing funeral for the forest we had found when we first assumed our posts. All of us had been attracted to the job for its promises of solitude and adventure, the romance of wild mountains and a taste of the sublime. It delivered everything we hoped for and more, including a privileged view of wildfire on a landscape scale. The season never lasted long enough—six months maximum, more like three or four in a typical year—but it beat hustling for a living down in the neon plastic valleys.

  Nationwide our numbers dwindled by the year, our sort of work a casualty of “development” and the never-ending schemes of the techno-titillated, who looked forward to the day when the last of us would be put out to pasture by satellites, drones, and high-definition infrared cameras linked with pattern-recognition software. Sometimes it seemed an oversight on the part of the culture that the job still existed at all.

  Even in the eyes of some of our friends, we lookouts were considered a little bit goofy—but we were blessedly so, having found a job where being a little bit goofy was a prerequisite. In the sunset days of a doomed vocation, we had lucked into a lineage of mountain mystics and lone rangers. We were paid in US dollars to read the meaning in clouds and discern the difference between a smoke and a water dog, and those of us who kept with it across the decades became walking repositories of bird-migration and weather patterns, fire history and trail conditions. We performed annual maintenance on our facilities and for days and sometimes weeks on end luxuriated in silence and solitude. Some of us even learned to kiss hummingbirds.

  Then a thunderstorm moved over and the fires busted out, two or three or a dozen in an afternoon, and we earned our keep triangulating the coordinates of smokes, alerting crews to sudden changes in wind and fire behavior, and guiding smokejumpers toward good trails on which to hike out after demob. It was hard to imagine a group of jumpers in on a detail from Alaska or Montana, dropped from the sky into a remote place they had never seen before, getting that sort of intelligence from a high-def camera—you’re gonna wanna angle toward the ridgetop northwest of you above the scree field for about two-thirds of a mile, then look for a cairn at the base of a big Doug fir, and follow the trail south from there until it dumps you onto an old faint two-track road—but the gadget fetishists who dreamed of our obsolescence never bothered to imagine that we offered more than merely a pair of eyeballs, that the palimpsest of knowledge we accrued about the country year by year might have some practical value beyond that of an adorable curio.

  Keeping watch over the Gila meant having the good fortune to witness a forest that was allowed to burn more aggressively than any other in the Lower 48, for the sake of the health of the land. We had witnessed the triumphs of progressive fire management, even played a small role in them, participants in a new pyromancy that no longer viewed wildfire as a disruption of the natural order, a menace, a scourge. After most of a century of total suppression, the fire managers of the Gila National Forest had adopted a strategy that helped preserve one of the healthiest ponderosa pine ecosystems in the American West. The idea was this: let a few fires burn, when and where conditions were favorable, generally in the middle elevations of the Wilderness, away from the settled edges of the forest.

  The private land outside the forest boundary was essentially a sacrifice zone to cattle grazing, denuded so thoroughly it was a study in the process of desertification. The forest’s fringes had been transformed as well, also overgrazed for more than a century, crisscrossed by roads and off-road-vehicle trails, pockmarked by mines, and overgrown with unburned timber and brush. In some areas wood-cutting—for cooking, heating homes, making lumber, and smelting copper ore—had altered the forest structure, and throughout the region top predators, notably grizzly bears and Mexican gray wolves, had been the object of a relentless effort at zoöcide. Against all odds the wolves were making a tentative comeback, but the grizzlies were likely gone forever.

  The heart of the upper Gila River watershed nonetheless remained a land without roads, one of the wildest places left in North America, licked by flame since at least the end of the Pleistocene, and all the more beautiful and resilient for it. Standing in the middle of McKenna Park, the place in the state of New Mexico farthest from pavement, you’d have to be lobotomized or a filthy aesthete not to sense something sublime about the country: the scent of wild earth unbroken by human tools, a pine-oak savannah that called up a primeval feeling in the blood. The whole interwoven pattern of life there flourished amid frequent low-intensity burns. It had been, and remained, a fire-adapted ecosystem. The ponderosas had the ingenious habit of dropping their lowest limbs to prevent fire climbing into their crowns, giving the forest a distinctive, open look. Nearly every living tree was blackened at its base—evidence of wildfire as catalyst to evolution.

  For close to four decades, the mantra on the Gila had been that fire was good, fire was necessary, but the size and character of the burns had changed. All across the world forests were succumbing to drought, disease, and beetle infestation, not to mention logging and slash-and-burn agriculture on an industrial scale. Even in the world’s first Wilderness, theoretically protected from destructive human activities, the effects of global warming were evident in a new kind of megafire. This reinforced a dispiriting fact. No place on Earth could be sealed off from the effects of human activity.

  One of the penalties of an ecological education is to live alone in a world of wounds, Aldo Leopold wrote seven decades ago. An ecological education was easier to come by in the 21st century than in Leopold’s time. The penalty now was not to live alone with the burden of bitter knowledge—there was plenty enough company—but to feel helpless to stanch the losses foreordained by our fouling of the atmosphere with methane and carbon dioxide: losses of habitat and species, losses of forests and ice and coral reefs. As lookouts over Leopold’s original American Wilderness, we had been offered a front-row seat for some of the most photogenic expressions of the Anthropocene, namely smoke and flame. It was a bittersweet privilege, watching from above as the place we loved combusted on a scale not previously seen.

  One of the peculiarities of a lookout’s sinecure on the Gila is to live alone inside a wound after first watching the wound be inflicted. The Whitewater-Baldy Fire set a state record when it burned 465 square miles and forced Sara and Rázik off their mountain for most of the summer of 2012. They returned to a forest in cinders. Ráz likened the loss to a kind of psychic amputation. She kept feeling the presence of the old forest all around her, but when she reached out to touch it, she found it gone.

  One year later the Silver Fire repeated the scenario for me—conflagration, evacuation—and one year after that the Signal Fire came for John’s mountain, just weeks before his death. Together the fires roamed across more than 440,000 of the forest’s 3.3 million acres. There wasn’t much to do but marvel at the heat and smoke and what they
wrought, which included the incineration of the normally moist woods of the high country: Douglas and corkbark fir, blue and Engelmann spruce. It felt naïve to hope for their return in a warming world. The climatic stability that allowed them to thrive no longer prevailed; the future of a once majestic forest, at least on the high peaks, looked to be heavy on brush.

  On John’s last day as a lookout, the open-ended memorial enlarged for one moment to include not just old-growth forest, but one of our predecessors, one of our tribe. It unnerved me to study John’s handwriting in the logbook and absorb the fact that he had saddled his horse and ridden to his death within hours of witnessing, out his tower window, those rituals honoring the memory of Bart Mortenson. The resonance of all the little details made for a paradoxical feeling, a retroactive sense of foreboding: the loved ones of a fellow lookout bearing the man’s ashes to the mountain; John’s mention of that now poignant word, honeymoon; his honoring the memory of a man by bestowing that man’s name on a fire—mere hours before the fire in his own eyes went out.

  ALONG WITH HIS SHOCK of silver hair that appeared never to have made acquaintance with a comb, those efferevescent blue eyes were the first thing you noticed about John. Lustrous as polished turquoise, they gave his face the look of a man who never said no to the world, although that hadn’t always been the case. “It took me some time to animate my face,” he had written, in a notebook discovered by Teresa after his death.

  When I learned he was a Minnesotan, I tried once and only once to engage him on the subject of our land of origin, but he recoiled from my mention of it so abruptly, with a look of such dread in those normally avid eyes, that I felt as if I had poked my finger in a wound. Only later would I learn that he had been there when his best friend accidentally killed himself during the winter of their senior year of high school. The friend had been fooling around with a gun in the woods while John walked a little ways ahead. He admitted he could still see the scene as if it had happened yesterday, although forty years had passed. He remembered just as vividly his parents’ reaction to the tragedy: his father picking him up at the police station afterward, not even looking at him as they drove home in silence, and his mother turning away in disgust when he walked through the door, as if he were implicated in a murder.

  It was not the sort of story one dropped as an icebreaker at parties. He trusted me with it, I suspect, because I first shared with him the fact that my brother killed himself with a bullet from a semiautomatic assault rifle. Sometimes you just have a feeling about people, and from the beginning of our acquaintance I judged him the kind of man who was capable of absorbing such knowledge with sensitivity and grace. From the very beginning, in fact: I shared my brother’s story with him the first time I saw him face to face, at an end-of-season gathering of lookouts in the summer of 2003.

  I suppose you could say I dropped it as an icebreaker at a party. Our colleague Hedge had invited a few of us to his place at Elephant Butte for beer around the backyard fire pit. For some in attendance, including me and John, it would be our first chance to connect faces with familiar voices on the radio. That just so happened to be the day John spread a first handful of Miquette’s ashes in the clearing near his tower. He knew he was going to spend time with other lookouts that evening. Although he hadn’t met us all in person yet, the thought of our company gave him the courage to do a thing he had been putting off for months. Within an hour of our having shaken hands that night at Hedge’s, we were sharing tears over the losses of people we had loved. We began our friendship in mutual candor; it would have felt phony to proceed any other way thereafter.

  Shared some time later, his story of having been a witness to his friend’s death by gunshot revealed that we were blood brothers of a sort. The more we spoke of it, the more we came to understand that each of us, in the wake of a bullet’s destruction, had checked into the guilt suite at the Hotel Sorrow and re-upped for a few hundred weeks, he at the age of seventeen, I at twenty-three. We had both been gnawed on by the what-if game for years and years, the sense that we could have—should have—done something to prevent a tragedy.

  Nothing anyone ever told me did more to ease my loneliness, that peculiar solitude of the person who has put himself on trial, acted as judge and jury, found himself guilty of a crime of neglect, and imposed a sentence that denies the possibility of a parole into happiness. I couldn’t claim John as my closest friend, nor my oldest friend, but I did find in him a man I could tell anything and be met with a voice of understanding and compassion. He never flinched or turned away, always embraced whatever I offered of myself.

  That sort of human doesn’t come around often.

  I reviewed my life and it was also a river, Herman Hesse wrote, in the voice of Siddhartha, a line that stayed with me through the years. Whenever I recalled it, I felt an impulse to revise it for my own purposes and replace the word river with the word fire: I reviewed my life and it was also a fire. In fact my life was more like a series of fires, each of which moved through similar phases, from a thunderous moment of ignition—the lightning strike of a brother’s suicide, the incendiary dissolution of a marriage—to the full flaring heat of grief, followed by a long, slow cooling, a landscape of ashen remains, and out of the ashes purgation and rebirth. It occurred to me more than once to share my plagiarized sentiment with John, including him in it—I reviewed our lives and they were also fires—but I never had, and now I never would. This thought was merely one of many that reinforced the knowledge that I had erred in assuming tomorrow remained an ongoing possibility for that combination of elements, forged in friendship, known as us. For me, tomorrow might still come. For him, and for us, there would be no such thing.

  After our initial disclosures around the fire pit at Hedge’s place, we gleefully abandoned the stilted gestures of emotional reticence that were our birthright as sons of the upper Midwest: manly handshakes, murmured small talk about the weather. With John it was all hugs, naked honesty, and lots of probing questions—real mountain man stuff, no doubt about it. How’s your soul? I asked him once, and the question so delighted him that ever after he would ask it of me within minutes of any encounter—and he didn’t let go until he got a truthful answer. His dogged curiosity could sometimes feel borderline aggressive, tenacious as a prosecutor’s, even downright rude. It was as if the Catholic ritual of confession with which we had both grown up—although neither of us still practiced it formally—had morphed, with him, into a hunger for the confessions of others. He had a hard time taking no comment for an answer. Most of the time he couldn’t believe you meant it. He held to the conviction that if only he pressed hard enough, you’d yield and feel better for the sharing. At the same time he had a capacity for empathy that surpassed any male of the species I had known. Our revelations of our unguarded selves sometimes brought to mind something I had read in Rilke, from his Letters to a Young Poet:

  Do not believe that he who seeks to comfort you lives untroubled amid the simple and quiet words that sometimes do you good. His life has much difficulty and sadness and remains far behind yours. Were it otherwise, he never would have been able to find those words.

  SHORTLY AFTER the fatal gunshot, John left the Minneapolis exurbs and began a life of restless movement that took him across the country and around the world, including a year-long trip through Mexico and South America, and a stint of expatriate living in Spain. His work life made for the most exotic résumé I had ever encountered: bartender, gentleman rancher, private investigator, claims adjuster for Lloyds of London, PR man and pit-crew member for an IndyCar racing team. He liked to tinker with things and once patented an invention for an elegant window blind. At the time of his death, he was president and part owner of an airplane repair business. But the job he loved to reminisce about involved his misadventures as a deputy marshal in Telluride, Colorado, where he and his boss—committed to gentler forms of justice than the code books called for—adopted the motto: better busted by us than the real guys.

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nbsp; Over time he surrounded himself with all the trappings of old-school machismo, the whole suite of midlife-crisis totems—airplane, Jeep, motorcycle, Pantera sportscar, GT40 race car—even as he cultivated his inner Midwestern penny-pincher, an archetype partial to torn blue jeans and thrift-store sweatshirts, and liable to haggle over the cost of just about anything. He liked to fly high and drive fast. He also liked sitting in one place for months, staring out the window, watching light on mountains. He lived in a house of 400 square feet with a loft bedroom but also owned a forty-foot mobile home he liked to call his “land yacht.” Just when you thought you had him figured out, he showed you another facet that complicated the picture. Hermit, adventurer, homebody, horseman, life of the party and possessor of offshore investment accounts: he could not be pinned down.

  More than haggling for better deals, the man loved needling bureaucratic authority, especially when he thought it unjust or blinkered. Even as a lowly agency employee (pay grade GS-4), with no health insurance, no retirement benefits, and a merely seasonal appointment (“forestry technician”), he wrote long, deeply researched letters of complaint to the chief of the Forest Service about the waste of running reconnaissance flights over a piece of country already covered by the eyes of ten lookouts. Dear Chief Tidwell, one such missive began, I am a fellow Forest Service employee. I work as a fire lookout… rest assured my office is nicer than yours. After this cheeky opening he spent nine pages eviscerating the agency’s rationale for using expensive, accident-prone aircraft to detect fires and guide slurry planes in a place such as the Gila Wilderness, supposedly protected from violation by all things motorized and mechanized. His objections encompassed both the practical (wasteful spending of tax dollars, leaded-gas emissions over the forest, a history of fatal crashes of agency aircraft) and the philosophical, the latter grounded in the knowledge that the landscape we loved and claimed as part-owners, along with the rest of the American public, had been seized from the Apache in a genocidal war. Firefighting—with helicopters, slurry bombers, and paratrooper smokejumpers—was simply a way of perpetuating the endless war on the land by other means.