A Song for the River

by Philip Connors

  We took his food to the back patio, where we ate from bowls while standing, a courtesy he did me because he knew I couldn’t sit.

  He told me he had been thinking a lot about a problem of the lookout’s life: how maybe once a decade a fire pops up on your turf just when you’ve gone to the outhouse or left the tower to stretch your legs or do a little project work on the ground, radio in hand, as always. Sometimes, just in that moment, another lookout sees the smoke and calls over the radio, seeking a cross of azimuths. John wanted to devise some sort of code we could use to cover for ourselves if we weren’t in the tower. The code he proposed was for the one caught unawares to reply, “You know, I was just looking over there, thinking I might have seen something. Let me get the binoculars and have another peek”—then boogie up the tower to get the coordinates.

  This was clever, no doubt about it, just the sort of cheekiness that made John so dear. It was also a means of hiding ignorance beneath the cloak of premonition to everyone else listening on that radio frequency, essentially all of our colleagues. But I was pretty sure I would have no need for any secret code, not that summer: the five miles on foot to my mountain were way beyond my powers just then, and I felt the possibility of my twelfth summer there slipping away. John refused to offer false encouragement. He simply persisted with his bid to bring me into his friendly conspiracy, which was, in its way, a form of encouragement.

  “The only question is which of us will be caught with our pants down first and need to use the code,” he said. “Whoever it is, that guy buys dinner for the other.”

  When I looked back on the time of my illness, I saw that I never again felt quite as bad as I did the moment before John showed up at my door with dinner and a postprandial smoke. Perhaps it was merely coincidence. I’m not ascribing him magical healing powers. The remedy for my ailment remained months away, the food he had prepared was mediocre, the cigarette tasted awful. Each of us was merely a social smoker, on “special occasions,” and as John pointed out, what could possibly be more special, hard on the heels of a marital implosion, than a belated fortieth-birthday present of a prostate like a spiny blowfish? Delivered in a voice both sly and sensitive, this situational assessment was exactly the sort that could make a man forget to feel terrible about himself for a moment, by holding up a mirror to the absurdity and even the bleak comedy of his condition. Maybe that was the thing I needed right then: an ability to finally laugh at myself, at just how pathetically my life had gone off the rails.

  MY RECOVERY, AS MENTIONED, took some time in arriving—and took a profound leap of faith of the sort perhaps only a desperate man could make. That leap of faith involved availing myself of the tender ministrations of a woman I nicknamed, with all due affection, Lady Magic Finger, the details of whose healing modalities John found engrossing when I eventually mustered the courage to share them with him just weeks before his death.

  He was delighted to learn the backstory. It began when an overseas radio network called me in 2011 to request an interview with a living fire lookout in situ. Fire season on the Gila had just ended, but I arranged to drive up John’s mountain and have a conversation by phone, while standing on the catwalk of his tower. The network wanted high-quality audio of my end of the conversation, so it hired a radio reporter on a freelance gig to record me with a mic while I talked on her cell. Mónica was the reporter they found for the job.

  Although she had lived most of her life a three-hour drive away, she had never been to the Gila. The view from Signal Peak amazed her, this piece of wild country, so close to home, that had the look of nothing she had ever seen. Afterward, eager to learn more about the place, she began poking around, searching for stories to report. It didn’t take long for the country to oblige, beginning with the biggest fire in state history, nine months after we met. I became a background source for that story, and a link to others who knew more than me. In this way our friendship was born, and platonic friendship it remained for two years.

  When my marriage collapsed, though, I sensed a change in the emotional weather between us.

  The mutual respect demonstrated by our friendship convinced her that perhaps we were destined for more. Despite every impulse to the contrary—newly single and decidedly skittish about romantic enganglements, not to mention the signals being sent from Prosty the Blowfish—I agreed to her overture to take me out for my birthday the autumn after the Silver Fire, dinner and drinks in downtown Ciudad Juárez, ten minutes from her home in El Paso. I had always enjoyed her company and admired her mind. I figured our outing would at least offer me the chance to explain, face to face, how unworthy of her attention I was, how broken a man.

  It was no lie, no pantomime of modesty. After sitting for three hours in my truck to get there, I found that sitting through dinner tipped me into pain beyond description amid polite company. I had a fire inside of me that would not go out, and whatever it was she thought she saw when she looked at me, I assured her she was mistaken. She could do better.

  She asked if there was any way she could help. I told her I didn’t think so. All that was left for me to try was an ancient remedy I had come across in my research, a practice called milking the prostate—or, more prosaically, prostate massage—which was the subject of more than a few good jokes but had gone out of favor with the advent of potent antibiotics that, as my case proved, still sometimes failed. I couldn’t imagine anyone I knew performing such a procedure. The very thought of it gave new meaning to that old familiar phrase from my Catholic youth, “the mortification of the flesh.”

  To my surprise she immediately offered to give it a try.

  “What is there to lose?” she asked.

  “My dignity, for one thing.”

  “Don’t be silly,” she said. “The thing to try to lose is the pain. Lose that, and your dignity will take care of itself.”

  I had experienced my share of first dates over the years, some of which had ended awkwardly, but this was something else.

  Having begun our romance with such a radical act of trust, we could hardly do otherwise than proceed in that fashion thereafter.

  When I told this story to John, the only friend to whom I could imagine admitting something so intimate, so bizarre, we shared a ribald round of laughter at the fact that my ability to take any enjoyment from life—to sit for a meal or a movie, to drive, to make love—hinged on my submitting to a program of what he called “therapeutic ass play,” conducted with the aid of water-based lubricant and powder-free, beaded-cuff, non-latex rubber gloves. The whole ordeal had the shape of a parable about the quasi-religious faith with which we ingest the fruits of corporate chemistry to treat problems better solved by human touch. I had gobbled pills when what I needed was a laying on of hands. The pills had done nothing to help, had in fact done me nothing but harm. Only a firm and well-placed finger saved me, and John did not surprise me when he spun this as a blessing in disguise.

  “Every guy on the planet should have the experience of being penetrated by a woman,” he said. “Especially us poor bastards who grew up Catholic, fearing nothing more than rear entry from a foreign object. I think it would make us all better men. So congrats on becoming a better man. You didn’t even have to try very hard. Just drop your drawers and presto bingo.”

  Afterward, each time I heard behind me the satisfying snap on Mónica’s wrist from those beaded-cuff, powder-free, non-latex rubber gloves, I thought to myself: I am about to be a better man.

  It was true in more ways than one.

  But like the fire that would change my mountain forever, that was all still in the unseen country of the future on that evening when John assured me I would soon be back on the lookout—and in this too he was right. One month after his surprise visit with the chicken paprika, still weak and wobbly from too long spent in bed, barely able to sit long enough to drive myself the hour to the trailhead, and somewhat of a suppurating wound emotionally speaking—not yet on the path to becoming a better man—I nonetheless stood o
n my elevated patch of querencia, later than planned but not too late, alone in the place where I felt most myself in the world. As I stared down the fact of my fragility that spring, I ached not only with a pain in my privates but with a desire to re-embrace the wild beauty of the mountain, to touch its ancient energies, see deeper into its mysteries—no doubt as a means of transcending that pain. Appropriate, perhaps, that around that time I would add to my commonplace book a passage from Chuck Bowden: I try to read nature books but I do not know what they are talking about. There is no booze, women seem to be shunned, the men also do not appear on the pages. There is this quality of a life without a heartbeat, loins without juice, breasts without nipples, britches without a bulge.

  Also, it went without saying, no inflamed sex glands, please. My malady not only didn’t belong in a nature book, it hardly appeared in serious literature at all, aside from afflicting Steinbeck’s dog in Travels with Charley. In my rather desperate search for anything of enduring value ever written on the subject of my condition, I found precisely one book, by the novelist, critic, and fellow sufferer Tim Parks, in which I underlined a single passage, a quote from a pamphlet handed him by a young urologist: It has to be born in mind that the chances of a complete recovery from prostatitis are minimal, almost nonexistent in fact. Prostatitis sufferers tend to be restless, worrisome, dissatisfied individuals who drag their miseries around from one doctor to the next in search of a cure they never find. The urologist must be careful not to let himself be demoralized by these people and their intractable pathologies. To which Parks appended: The urologist must be careful! Poor fellow.

  While expressing sympathy for the doctor over the patient, the pamphlet alluded to a phenomenon common to sufferers of chronic prostatitis—an emotional state called “catastrophizing.” I knew it well. The pain becomes so debilitating, and goes on for so long, that the mind can no longer see a way out. The future appears a total ruin. One begins to feel as if only a miracle can stave off catastrophe, and miracles, as we know, are in short supply.

  Nonetheless, I had come to the mountain that summer secretly hoping for a profound intervention from an unseen source. I would get exactly what I wished for, just not in the form I had imagined.

  Now, when I look back on my notebook entry from the night before the big fire, I conjure the final twilight of a vanished world, a high mountain forest poised on the pivot of before and after, an owl in the gloaming like an omen. And I hear an echo of Joan Didion:

  Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.

  BEING CONSCRIPTED for public relations work and light clerical duty in a government office was John’s and my shared nightmare, and the summer of the Silver Fire the nightmare came true for me. With the lookout closed in the wake of my evacuation, my boss Dennis couldn’t think of a way to make use of me in the woods, so he handed me over to colleagues who turned me into an all-purpose gofer of the sort that answers telephones and inventories office supplies. Five days of that put me thirty-nine hours beyond my tolerance for flourescent lighting in any given week, and by the end of it I was close to being a candidate for long sleeves and padded walls. As fortune would have it, my stint as an office monkey lined up with Jean’s days off her tower. She stopped by the office one afternoon in order to turn in her time sheet, just as I was making photocopies of campground-closure notices. She took one look at me and said, “You do not seem happy.”

  A fellow Midwesterner like me and John, Jean was keenly attuned to the mental weather of people she cared about. She was also a skilled diplomat with a nose for logistics, always willing to coax and cajole the chain of command in order to make things happen. All of her most subtle talents in that realm were required to negotiate a deal that sprang me from my workday prison.

  It just so happened that around that time another mountain on the forest lost its primary lookout due to medical emergency. A firefighter stepped in to cover the open shifts, but that was merely a stopgap. Jean devised an elegant plan whereby her relief lookout, Jim Cox, agreed to cover for our sick colleague. I would cover for Jim, and Jean would give up a couple of her regularly scheduled work days to grant us both alternating eight-day runs. It was the same schedule as the one worked by Sara and Ráz, with an overlap day every Wednesday as one of them hiked into the mountain, the other out. This thoughtful and selfless move on Jean’s part kept me employed at what I do best—looking out the window—and, as an added benefit, made for a decent vantage on the Silver Fire.

  Jean’s mountain offered not only a different view but a different experience than I was accustomed to. The lookout there lived in the tower, a twelve-by-twelve-foot room. Cooking, eating, sleeping, and standing watch all took place in the same 144 square feet of real estate. Over the years I had come to appreciate the fact that my tower was no more than a spartan office, seven-by-seven, and that my domestic duties and my work duties played out in separate realms. Despite the roomier tower, the merging of living space and office space made me feel slightly claustrophobic. I compensated by bathing more frequently than I would have on my peak. On days of clear skies—most days that June—I used showering as an excuse to get out of the tower for a while in the afternoon. Water was plentiful in the cistern, and Jean’s three-gallon shower bag heated quickly with the sun burning overhead. I hung it from the roof of the supply cabin below the tower, confident I would not be interrupted by a random visitor. During the twenty-four discontinuous days I spent there, I saw one hiker.

  With smoke billowing in the distance by day and the top of the Black Range glowing orange and crimson by night, I wandered in my mind over the particulars of that high mountain forest as I had known them, places I had come to love more than any others on Earth. Most days I spent an hour or two working on a crude map of things that may not have existed any longer. There was no way to be sure. I revisited in memory the ruins of an old line cabin on a hidden bench just below the crest trail. I recalled an aspen tree with a dendroglyph from 1922 carved in its bark, and I remembered a series of old Douglas firs with ceramic insulators wired high on their trunks, relics of the telephone line that once ran from the lookout to the guard station in the foothills. All of them human artifacts, I realized: just the sorts of things a wildfire in a Wilderness would devour, maybe even should devour, as a reminder of our human transience.

  On one hot and windy day in late June, the fire chewed through 10,000 acres and blew up into a smoke plume that rose to the top of the troposphere. It was capped by a pyrocumulus cloud from which could be heard the rumble of thunder, the fire having created its own weather. The main column of heat resembled a shimmering sword of smoke piercing the cloud above it—easily one of the most astounding sights I had ever witnessed, as hot air exploded upward and cool air rushed into the burn from all sides, feeding the fire with fresh oxygen. According to John, charred oak leaves fluttered to the ground like wounded birds below the tower on Signal Peak, more than twenty miles away as the crow flew.

  Absorbed as I was in my smoke-plume gawking, I sometimes forgot I was living inside another fire scar, the Bull Fire of seven years earlier. It had roamed the land for weeks in 2006 and singed nearly 80,000 acres—a mostly calm, low-intensity burn, allowed to do its thing. Jean had lived with smokejumpers on the mountain for a week and a half as they cleared brush and created a fire break to protect her tower, waiting all the while for the flames to arrive. Their bivouack site, which they christened “Camp Patience”—complete with thronelike seats carved from a big ponderosa trunk and arranged around a stone fire circle—remained intact out toward the mountain’s helispot. Evidence of the burn itself was still visible in every direction, although the blackened bark on the dead and living trees was muted by the vibrant leaves of healthy young oak and the waxy green needles of ponderosa saplings.

  When the rains set in that July, I made a circuit of the mountain ever
y evening, as I would have on my own peak, angling first along the north-facing ridge below the tower, dining on gooseberries from the bushes sprouting there. Plucked with care—ideally by the withered brown bud at the bottom of the fruit—and split open between my front teeth, they spilled their sweet flesh and didn’t hurt the tongue despite their armor of spines. Their existence was a direct result of the Bull Fire. I had it to thank for my nightly dessert.

  Meanwhile, I kept up my habit of writing down the days:

  It’s Independence Day and I’m socked in by rain. The temperature dropped so suddenly I lit a fire in the wood stove to stay warm. Yesterday I witnessed the best lightning storm I’ve seen in years. It rolled in after dark and strobed the sky with capillaries of light, cloud-to-cloud strikes with weird fringes and jagged arcs, and ground hits that along with the wind made the tower rock and roll. Earlier in the day I spotted a smoke in Chicken Coop Canyon, a single snag struck by lightning: a crew flew in on a helicopter and quashed it. Even the Silver Fire has been reduced by rain to not much more than a minor smudge of smoke in Black Canyon. No more plumes or open flames. It’s in the books. The season has turned.

  It’s cozy in the tower with the wood stove cooking. Lightning stabs to the north; heavy rain falls to the west and southwest. Two pink smears of cloud hang above Eagle Peak. The forest has a cool, blue-black look to it, and the Gambel’s oak thickets shiver in the breeze. Low rumbles echo in the canyons and shake the ridge tops. I sit in the tower sipping tea. Nothing to do but plenty to see.

  It’s still a little odd to be here. I’m too accustomed to a certain view, certain trails, a certain setup for cooking and using water—everything here is different. I respect Jean’s space and am trying to leave everything as untouched by my presence as possible. (My frequent bathing, I tell myself, is as much for her as for me: I remember what she once said about her hypersensitive nose, and I recall stinky Barry, the relief lookout whose body odor lingered in the tower for hours after our shift transitions.) I’m as much a creature of habit as she is. She runs a damn tight ship—she has to, living and working in a twelve-by-twelve room—and I only want to leave the place ever so slightly better than I found it when she shared it with me. Just as she’s done all these years here. Just as I’ve done on my peak.