A Song for the River

by Philip Connors

  Even though it sits on public land, open to all who can walk or ride a horse, I sometimes think of my mountain as my own personal kingdom. Unaccountable arrogance, no doubt—I’m merely 1/300-millionth part-owner like any American—but it is true that I’m the one who gets to live there a hundred days a year, and it’s not as if I run off visitors by brandishing a gun. The mountain doesn’t belong to me. I belong to the mountain. I’m nagged by a sense of nostalgia for the way it was and I’m anxious to see what’s changed, what burned and what was spared. What does the place look like now? Not knowing is a kind of torture. To have been airlifted out, as good a story as that makes for winter bull sessions at the Buffalo Bar, still stings a little bit—to have been denied an ongoing, front-row seat for the big one. Then again, it’s not as if I didn’t have fair warning. Quite the contrary. Two years ago I saw the Wallow Fire, 538,000 acres, largest in Arizona history, just across the state line from the Gila (in fact a little finger crossed the border near Luna), its smoke blotting out my western horizon, its origin sixty miles from my tower on a straight line. Then last year gave us the Whitetwater-Baldy Fire, largest in New Mexico history, 297,000 acres and only half as far from my mountain as the Wallow. I remember the taste of it, the smell. There was no good reason to think my neighborhood wouldn’t be next.

  I wonder why I’m so nostalgic and sentimental for places. Maybe it has something to do with growing up on a farm we lost to the bankers. So many times over the years I’ve returned there in search of something from my past I cannot name, and every time I discover that the place is more real in my imagination than it is when I stand upon it. The buildings are gone, the grove of trees is gone: all of it burned to the ground in a training exercise by the local VFD. In order for it not to vanish entirely, I’ve had to keep it alive in my memory. Maybe that established a pattern for all the places I’ve loved since. Perhaps it even accounts for my attraction to burn scars—the fact that my original home on Earth was erased in flames. Conversations, even the names of people, often just drift away from me unless I write them down while they’re still fresh, but I can remember the rooms where I lived fifteen years ago in Missoula, Montana, as if I stepped away from them yesterday. None of the places I’ve loved have been spared transformation. Houses, apartments, neighborhoods, landscapes—every single place I’ve ever lived has changed in significant ways, and often I feel the change as a kind of desecration.

  Maybe that’s simply a result of growing older and imagining a time and place of lost innocence. Or maybe it’s just the price of living in a society as restless and dynamic and omnivorous as ours, a society that has little use for that which does not generate profit, and everywhere discards and dishonors the past. Southern Minnesota has mostly been cleansed of its small farmers and wildlife. Missoula is deep into the process of being Californicated. The island of Manhattan has become an urban theme park, one giant upscale mall for the rich and shameless.

  I should know by now that nothing lasts and nothing stays the same. My life has been one long lesson in that fact. I want, I suppose, one place I can hold to as immutable, one thing I can count on as fixed. But of course I already have that: the guarantee that I won’t be here forever. The knowledge that transformation awaits me too, the transition to nonbeing. I am as ephemeral as the details of any place. More so, given that once I’m gone, the places will remain. So I scribble to mark my passage through those places I have loved most.

  WHEN ITS GROWTH CEASED, four weeks after it began, the Silver Fire had moved across 138,705 acres, or 214 square miles. It lived on through the rains for an additional week or two in scattered stump holes, burning in the roots of trees it had already consumed aboveground, sending up smoke signals from the underside of the Earth.

  Dennis granted me permission to return to my mountain in the final week of July. “Don’t get too depressed up there,” he said. “Remember, a big fire is just the birthday for the next forest. It will be green again before long.”

  It was a peculiar hike in, that first time back. Much of the walk was lacking in living vegetation. It made me feel a little vulnerable to move through the landscape, visible as I was from a distance. Then I remembered the burn area was still under a closure order: the country was entirely mine, for a little while anyway. No one would see me but the birds. Still, it felt spooky to be so exposed in a place where the forest had once provided the shade of an intermittent canopy. Now there was no proper canopy, just a bare etching of black branches against a pale blue sky. On a trail I had hiked so often I could make my way along it in the dark, I felt as if I were having the inverse of a déjà vu experience—traveling through a familiar place made newly strange.

  The view to the south, where the fire first got up and ran, encompassed a stunning tableau of destruction, a 10,000-acre patch of forest transformed into charcoal: a century of accumulated biomass reduced to blackened stalks overnight. It had the naked look of country whose soil structure might unravel with one hard rain. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I thought, as my fireproof Nomex pants accumulated streaks and smudges from burnt branches and fallen logs. I was slowly taking on the camouflage offered by the country—becoming, step by step, one with the char.

  Three-quarters of the way to the top, big stands of intact forest appeared where the fire didn’t climb into the crowns of the trees, thanks to a mid-June rain that moderated fire behavior for a weekend. That pause helped preserve my immediate environs far better than I had dared hope, in part by allowing a window of opportunity for a burnout operation. With the smoke and flames tamped down by higher humidity, a helicopter was able to maneuver in close enough to drop ping-pong balls juiced with potassium permanganate and glycol in a big circle around the lookout. When the balls hit the ground they ignited the surface fine fuels but spared the trees above, robbing the Silver Fire of continuous fuel—fire fought with fire. Standing in the middle of the open meadow on the mountain, rejoicing in the sight of the cabin and tower standing unscathed, I could hardly tell there had been a burn in the neighborhood at all. The peak still wore its cap of pine and fir, and the meadow grasses were luxuriant from the rains.

  As I made my initial survey of the facilities, something caught my eye in the grass, something bright green and gently quivering. I bent close and studied it: a mountain tree frog. I had heard its telltale croak on occasion, late in previous seasons, usually around the pond on the flank of the mountain, but I had never seen one up on top. I sat down near it, as unthreateningly as possible, and tried to remain as still as it did for the next half hour, my compatriot on an island of green, each of us breathing but otherwise motionless.

  It thrilled me as much as any wildlife encounter I had ever experienced, probably because it contrasted so starkly with my pessimistic assumptions of what I would find on my return. Despite a decade of visiting the aftermath of big burns, seeing how quickly the regrowth came, I had arrived expecting only the funereal this time, probably because the changes hit extra close to home. My attachment to the landscape surrounding that mountain had arisen from an ongoing intimacy with all its moods and weathers and creatures. It had been cemented by a fondness for certain special places I had come to think of as sacred, places whose beauty had offered me a lifeline through more than one kind of loss: in the beginning, the death of a brother; more recently, the end of a marriage. With the forest reshaped, I had feared another in a suite of losses whose accumulated weight I struggled to bear.

  Many of us who lived in and cared about the American West felt that sense of mounting loss, felt it in our physical beings—our reason for living here rooted in the physical, after all, both the land’s and our own. We liked the look and feel and smell of the mountains and we liked to test ourselves in them, hiking, skiing, rock climbing, horseback riding, fly fishing, elk hunting—you name it, there was something for everyone, and big chunks of public land on which to do it. But landscapes we loved were being transformed on a scale that was hard to absorb; entire mo
untain ranges were burning up. For a hundred years we mostly kept the scorch at bay. We became expert at deploying shock troops in the war on fire, bringing the hurt to an elemental force we convinced ourselves was unnatural. As a result we cultivated a public belief in the idea that our forests were meant to remain forever dense and green, timeless and static. Just as we awoke to the rude fact of our mistake, the fires became bigger and more intense than any we had ever seen, even in places like the Gila, with a decades-long history of aggressive burning, though not quite aggressive enough. Scorched earth was now the ground we inhabited if we lived in or near the forests of the American West. We often wondered how long it would take for them to “recover” from being burned. Too infrequently did we recall that a charred forest was itself in recovery from having been kept artificially green, by a war fought in our name, and paid for by our tax dollars—a war it seemed would never end, although the battles were often rearguard actions now.

  In “Lifetimes With Fire,” Gary Snyder wrote: In 1952 and ’53 I worked on fire lookouts in the Skagit District of the Mount Baker forest, northern Washington Cascades. Crater Mountain first and then Sourdough. Those were the first jobs I’d held that I felt had some virtue. Guarding against forest fires, finally I had found Right Occupation. I congratulated myself as I stood up there above the clouds memorizing various peaks and watersheds, for finding a job that didn’t contribute to the Cold War and the wasteful modern economy. The joke’s on me as I learn fifty years later how much the fire suppression ideology was wrong-headed and how much it has contributed to our current problems.

  I knew that feeling of self-congratulation. I had once bailed on a career in corporate journalism because I came to detest its narrow range of acceptable opinion and its attitude of deference to officially constituted power. With a few vivid exceptions, it mostly served to normalize sociopathic greed and endless war. I wanted no part in buttressing either. Instead I ran away to a lookout tower in the world’s first Wilderness and even managed by sheer happenstance to land in a place with an enlightened attitude about fire. I bathed in my sense of good fortune and felt a little smug every time I thought of my friends toiling away at their computers back east, feeding the bottomless maws of the content machines. But the joke was on me as I learned our enlightenment had come too late to prevent huge, abnormally destructive burns in the age of rapid planetary heating. I had arrived seeking freedom and found more than my fair share, the nearest thing on Earth to my own private utopia. True wild in the 21st century was a rare vintage indeed, but I had tasted it. The price was my attendance at what came to feel like a wake for the Holocene.

  The miracle of concealed combustion—of the sort found in jet engines and coal-fired power plants, the sort upon which our entire way of life was built—once did us the favor of drawing a discreet curtain between our appetites and the immense heat that made their satisfaction possible, from morning commute to bedtime calibration of the thermostat. The effects of our ongoing resurrection of the Carboniferous, everywhere visible—vanishing glaciers, megafires—no longer granted us any such courtesy. Having exhumed oil and coal from the bowels of the Earth and torched them in world-altering quantities, we now inhabited the space between their origin underground and their destination in the atmosphere: the surface of a planet on fire. From the taiga along the Arctic Circle to the brushlands of Australia, the world was burning up. It wasn’t merely my vocation that made me think this a fact best appreciated from a high place, the higher the better. NASA satellites, for instance, showed smoke from the Whitewater-Baldy Fire visible from space in May of 2012. The plume blew several hundred miles across the borders of six states, as far north as Iowa.

  In the southern Black Range, the old, green forest lived only in remnants and memories, and some of the memories were mine. It was a sobering thought, the idea that my mind, if I lived another forty years, might become one of the last repositories on Earth of how certain stands of old growth looked and felt and smelled in a place once called “the wildest Wilderness in the West.” At first I wondered whether the fire would deform my connection with the country—whether it would inflict a wound that would forever disfigure my passion for it. Instead I found I loved it more than ever, indeed felt an obligation to continue my annual mountain-sitting retreat for as long as I felt physically able, years into the future I dared hope, in order to see what the place would become, what capability for resilience it possessed, if only we could leave it the hell alone and let it burn.

  Ecologists would find plenty to keep them busy in the years to come, cataloging transformations, tallying losses and gains, but any sentient human with an interest in actual science could intuit that more would be lost than gained. As the planet went on heating, the spruce-fir and mixed-conifer forests of the Southwest would continue torching off, destined to pass into legend and lore. Perhaps the amphibians that called them home would one day vanish too: a mountain tree frog at 10,000 feet in the Black Range had nowhere higher—and therefore nowhere cooler—to move to escape warming temperatures. This plot of ground was its final refuge, unless it found a way to hitch a ride on clouds.

  It would fall to the poets among us to work up a lament for the unmaking and remaking of our forests, a lament that at the very least accommodated, perhaps even found ways to celebrate, the taste of ash and the color black.

  THE NAVEL OF THE WORLD

  SUMMER 2014

  ANOTHER SUMMER, another burned mountain: it was getting to be a habit. For reasons having to do with both my fear of death and the allure of it—the big dark, the long sleep—I needed to spend some time in the place where John had breathed his last breath. Staring at the Signal Fire scar day after day from John’s tower, a fire that never should have happened but which now dominated the view, not to mention the emotional life of the town I called home, with its connection to five deaths in fifteen days—Dr. Hochla, Ella, Michael, Ella Jaz, and John—I came to feel I’d be shirking a duty to bear witness if I didn’t venture into the burn. One evening, after going out of service on the radio, I decided it was time for a walk through the ashes.

  It didn’t take long to discover the scene. The smell tipped me off from fifty yards away. The body of Sundance still lay where he fell, and his bay-colored hide stood out in a landscape that was otherwise monochrome. The bare earth and fire-scarred trees created a black canvas that was now streaked and daubed with white vulture droppings, like a halfway finished Pollock painting. Search-and-rescue volunteers had retrieved John’s body, but rules and regs did not call for the removal of a half-ton of horse flesh from national forest land, and the birds had made of the carcass a feast. In the afternoons I sometimes watched them circling the ridge southeast of the tower, as many as two dozen at a time riding thermals over the crest of the divide, spinning in languid gyres, dark against the light blue sky. Lazy-looking but never not vigilant, they reminded me of lookouts with wings.

  The trail followed the contour of a steep slope just inside the edge of the burn. Sundance had fallen hard to the downhill side, his neck bent around a charred tree trunk, his shoes still glittering amid the ash. In the two weeks since his fall, his hide had shrunk until it draped over his bones like a tattered blanket. Beneath that blanket, inside the rib cage, something scratched and scrabbled, something alive. I stood and listened for awhile, touched in some very old way—even sort of honored to eavesdrop on the process of flesh reentering the food chain by the traditional method. The sound said all you needed to know about the pickin’s being slim: a dry scraping, a sound signifying the carcass had been worked over pretty well already. I tossed a small rock at it, then another, irrationally fearing the appearance of a tiny bear cub, which would imply the presence of Mama nearby.

  Instead a vulture’s head poked from the body cavity. The bird ducked out into the light, glanced over its shoulder at me, beat its heavy wings, and took flight through the bare branches of the ghost forest: meal interrupted.

  The turkey vulture, a study in paradox: from a
distance so graceful, gliding on invisible currents, air riffling its fingerlike wing tips; at close range another story, misfortune its sustenance, death what’s for dinner. Your ass is somebody else’s meal, Gary Snyder wrote, in an essay called “The Etiquette of Freedom,” and more than once over the years, while thinking of those words, I had imagined my corpse—after an accidental fall from my fire tower—picked clean by Cathartes aura, ensuring my remnants would soar one last time over mountains before drifting back to earth as scavenger’s excrement. What can I say? The days are long in a lookout tower. A man has to think about something. But not until that moment, as I stood over a fleshless cadaver once called Sundance, had I known by name a creature who had passed through a vulture’s digestive system. The old boy had rejoined the chain of life at a new link, and as a devotee of the glorious messiness of the human and the animal, I found myself pleased by the thought.

  It occurred to me to wonder whether John might have chosen the same fate, had he been given the option of how to dispose of his corpse ahead of time. It would have been just like him to want to skip the expense of cremation.

  IN THE FIRST DAYS AND WEEKS of John’s absence, the things I missed most were not his hugs, which were truly unrestrained for a dude from the Upper Midwest, nor his stories, which ran along forever in accumulating details and comic digressions as he teased you toward the climax or the punch line, nor even his invitations to go for a joy ride in his GT40, the car designed by Ford specifically to beat Ferrari at Le Mans in the late 1960s. He would push it to 130 miles per hour on lonely blacktop straightaways, the engine roaring so loudly behind our heads we had to wear earplugs and communicate with hand gestures as the scenery scrolled past in a blur.