All of these things I would attempt to keep in memory, turn to and caress when necessary.
No, what I missed above all was his voice on the two-way radio, a voice inflected with the playful rhythms of the large-hearted trickster he was in person. I suppose I missed it because it was the major way I experienced him during the summers we spent on our respective mountains, his almost due west of mine, a subtle but reassuring hump on the horizon, azimuth 265° and 16’ according to the ring around my Osborne Fire Finder. His peak was the first landmark on which I focused to calibrate the sighting device at the beginning of each new season. My instrument wasn’t true until I placed myself in perfect relation to him. In his absence I felt my bearings go a little squinky.
A peculiar thing happens once you’ve been a lookout for many seasons. Radio protocol demands that you forego your given name, identify yourself by the name of your peak, and answer to that name when called, so for several months each year you are not Sara Irving or Rázik Majean, Teresa Beall or Mark Hedge, Jean Stelzer or John Kavchar—you are the name of a mountain. The longer you keep the job, the more your identity becomes entwined with that mountain.
By living and working where we do, we become intimate with the moods of a wild and moody place, its flora and fauna, its susceptibility to extreme weather. We discover which of the north-face snowbanks melts last, where water collects in the rainy season, which trees lure ladybugs by the thousands until their bark turns a writhing orange like some strange, rippling skin. We learn the songs of birds and the names of flowers, the spooky thrill of monsoon-season mornings waking up inside the clouds. We discover where to find food in the time of ripeness—wild raspberries, prickly gooseberries—and where other creatures find theirs. We walk in the footsteps of bears.
We can’t help becoming amateur phenologists, noting when the aphids hatch, when the irises bloom, when the Clark’s nutcrackers and broadtailed hummingbirds arrive. Scattered across the sky-island ridges in communal vigilance, a club of splendid misfits delightfully at odds with the drift of the culture, we come to feel ourselves a part of something noble, singular, gorgeous, and doomed. Eventually the voices of our fellow lookouts become aural talismans, sources of comfort and connection amid a sometimes enigmatic solitude.
Our terse radio commo ratifies an evolving reality. The work has made of the mountains a gift, and we honor this gift by assuming and intoning their names. John had been Signal Peak, and for every summer of the new millennium Signal Peak had been John, just as Sara and Ráz had merged with their mountain, and Hedge his, and Jean hers. I had accepted reassignment from my own mountain out of respect for John, but no matter how many times I said those two little words, I could not make them comfortable in my mouth, calling in service each morning, calling in my smoke and weather reports. I was not Signal Peak and never would be. Only John could eyeball the sky and, with whimsical precision, call in a morning report of seventeen-and-a-quarter percent cloud cover. Only John would think to name a harmless end-of-season smoke the Jell-O Fire. To have tried such a trick would have marked me as the crassest pretender.
That’s not to say I didn’t admire things about the place. It was a mountain, after all, 9,000 feet above sea level, and it’s hard to be disappointed by a mountain, especially in this part of the world, especially one with a fire tower on top. The view to the northwest ran over wild and crumpled country—encompassing the deep canyon of the Gila River and the aptly named Diablo Range—to a horizon marked by the highest mountains in the region, the Mogollons, just shy of 11,000 feet. To the south the vistas spread a hundred miles most days, deep into the bootheel of New Mexico, where the ramparts of the Animas Mountains and the Big Hatchets could be seen through an aqueous scrim of desert heat. They weren’t the sort of peaks that would have caught the eye of Ansel Adams, but they did have an aura of isolated majesty about them, rising from the tilted plain like phantasmagorical pyramids. Their presence on the horizon almost forgave the defining feature of the middle distance in that direction: the gleaming rooftop of the Walmart superstore in Silver City.
Almost.
A visitor had once called the tower a “honey-colored box in the sky,” due to the lustrous finish on the pine cabinets John had installed. The tower was thirty feet tall, erected in 1932, with a cab updated in the 1960s, fourteen feet square, encircled by a catwalk: altogether more spacious and comfortable than the tower where I normally worked, that seven-by-seven-foot box entered via trapdoor. A hummingbird feeder hung from one of the roof beams over the catwalk, and a bird bath at the base of the tower drew winged visitors that were fun to watch through binoculars, performing their adorable avian ablutions. A picnic table sat next to the bird bath, and beyond it a campfire ring and a stack of oak and pine: all in all a well-kept summer home.
Two metal sheds, a 250-gallon propane tank, an array of solar panels, and a radio-repeater tower dominated the south edge of the peak, next to the clearing for the helicopter LZ—more clutter than I would have cared for in a perfect world. But that was to be expected on a mountain to which you could both hike and drive. On the other hand, the road out brought you to the Buckhorn Saloon in Pinos Altos in approximately forty-five minutes if you hustled, the shortest travel time from tower to tavern of any lookout in the Gila. One evening I succumbed to the quitting-time allure of rolling down the mountain toward one of my friend Aari’s impeccable dirty martinis, after which I raced back up the hill in time to catch the last of the twilight glow in the west, feeling a hint of a glow myself as I locked the gate behind me on the road.
John’s presence permeated the 200 square feet of penthouse real estate where I cooked and slept and kept watch that June. Sometimes I had to leave the tower and wander around the mountain for twenty minutes just to get away from him. I was in that schizophrenic phase of grief where one minute I felt grateful for the chance to be close to him by inhabiting his space and engaging his view, walking in his footsteps as it were, and the next minute I felt a taunt from every little object he had once touched, each haunted by some residual immanence of him. He was there in the vase of plastic flowers set on the windowsill as an ironic gesture of suburban interior decoration. He was there in the bag of Smokey Bear lapel pins kept handy as swag for visitors with kids.
Even something as simple as a can of refried beans in the pantry had an evocative power, reminding me of our routine for Continental Divide Trail thru-hikers, those creatures of astounding stamina whose route brought them first to my mountain, then John’s, on their journey from Mexico to Canada. By the time they reached me, they had traveled 130 miles through the desert—the bare beginnings of their 3,000-mile journey along the spine of the Rockies—and if they arrived after quitting time, I would share a swig of tequila with them in my tower as we looked upon the country they had traveled to get there and the route that lay ahead. Once they returned to the trail, either that same evening or the following morning, I would radio John and let him know that visitors were on their way, ETA twenty-four hours, give or take a couple, and he would do the prep work on a batch of homemade nachos in advance of their arrival the next day. We never met a thru-hiker who wasn’t tickled by the gift economy of the Gila’s southern sentinels: aperitif at my tower, appetizer at John’s. All their sort had ever heard of the place were rumors of its rough beauty and its capacity for inflicting bodily punishment on those moving overland by foot, and here they were, being treated like visiting dignitaries and offered ritual sustenance on the very first peaks they ascended on their long trip north.
By the time I arrived on Signal Peak that season, the thru-hikers had all come and gone, and the surplus beans sat orphaned in the pantry. Probably they would remain there for years until some new lookout came along and threw them out, unacquainted with their history, unaware of their purpose.
ALTHOUGH I WAS SLOW TO REMEMBER the fact, it turned out I did still have John’s voice in the form of the last phone message he left me. I saved it on the day after he hiked down the mountain with T
eresa to avoid the heat and smoke of the Signal Fire. “Myself plus one will be departing for Highway 15 via the Signal Peak trail,” he had informed the dispatcher by radio, just before setting off that afternoon. During the four weeks he had left to live, he teasingly called Teresa “Plus-one.”
That evening I called him to offer my condolences. I knew as well as anyone the divergent emotions John was feeling in the wake of his evacuation—the adrenaline high of the escape from an onrushing fire, swirled up with sadness at the thought of his cherished view forever transformed—and I wanted to remind him I had been there and welcome him to the club. When he didn’t answer my call, I left him a message. The next day he called back and left one in turn. He joked that he now had a more dramatic chased-from-the-mountain story than mine, and teased me about a personalized copy of a gift I had given him, a book in which he made a brief appearance. He had been its earliest reader in manuscript form, and his enthusiasm for it, more than anything anyone later said or wrote by way of reaction, convinced me that the effort hadn’t been in vain.
Once I rediscovered the message, I found myself dialing it up, alone at night in his tower, pressing the #4 key to repeat it on my phone’s substandard speaker, the last words of his I would ever have, echoing in the last place he stood before he rode to his death. In any other season I would not have had the technology available to me, but that year, for the first time, Dennis required me to have a cell phone on the mountain. At first I resented this order. I had owned my sorry little flip phone for barely a year and didn’t much care for it, its awkward presence in my life a reminder of my time as a couch-surfing bachelor who, suddenly lacking a fixed land line, still required a means of contact with realtors untangling marital commitments on my behalf. Eventually, though, I came to appreciate the communion it made possible. With every replay of John’s last message I thought of his generosity, his laughter, his genius in the art of living boldly—and the rude injustice of his having checked out way too soon.
I thought too of the first time I heard him over the radio, twelve years earlier, when I was a raw rookie in the field of lookoutry and only knew him as a disembodied voice. I tried to picture him as he was then, a man just turned fifty years old, standing on the same catwalk where I now stood, staring out over the forest, his mind unsettled over Miquette’s uncertain prognosis, unaware that in just a few months he would be standing there with her ashes in his hands.
“Hey Phil, what a nice message you left me yesterday. I came home and had to sit in the hot tub because, you know, I hiked down and loaded my pack with, well, your book, and that’s what caused me to wrench my back, all that extra weight I had to load in. Also, Plus-one wants me to let you know that she says hi and sends her regards… Anyway, give me a call, and thanks again for the message… I’ll repeat what you said in your inscription, and it was why I brought the book down the mountain with me, because you said I’ll always be a cherished friend, and that’s true of you too.”
A MERE SIX WEEKS after he left me that phone message, my cherished friend inhabited a gallon Ziploc, and the moment had arrived for him to join with his mountain. Teresa unsealed the plastic bag. We dipped our hands in his cremains, extracted a pinch between our fingertips, let it float off below us toward a cluster of century plants. His ashes joined there with the ashes of the Signal Fire, his final form mingling with the final major burn to bloom on his watch. Within weeks, perhaps even days, a good rain would flush some of the ash and loose soil down the drainage, a nutrient recharge for the creek bottoms and, for a bit of his remnants, one last ride through a piece of country he had known better than anyone alive.
Sitting there alongside Teresa, a thin coating of grit on my fingers, grit that had once been the substance of a living man, I was surprised to find myself reminded of the Catholic masses of my childhood, when the priest, arms uplifted, would intone over the Eucharist the words of the doomed savior at his last supper: Take this, all of you, and eat of it, for this is my body… Do this in memory of me. John had been intimate with those same rituals. We had talked about how one is never quite a former Catholic, only a recovering one, the liturgy (and its obsession with sin) having been absorbed on an almost molecular level by our spongy young minds. For us, the metaphors had been more enduring than the faith, none more so than those of Ash Wednesday, when our foreheads had been traced by the priest’s thumb, the cross-shaped smudge a reminder of mortality and mourning, a harbinger of what lay in store for us all:
For you are dust, and to dust you shall return…
Simultaneously, unprompted by word or gesture, Teresa and I both licked our fingers, wanting to take a bit of John into ourselves. I suppose some might view this as macabre, perhaps even a health hazard, but we had both inhaled the smoke of huge burns—as had John during his fifteen summers on the mountain—and the acrid bite of ash on the tongue was far from unfamiliar. The forests we had watched burn would evolve and become something else in time, spruce and fir succeeded by aspen, pine replaced by locust and oak, but what they had been was now, like John, a memento etched in flame.
As the heat of the day increased, a few proto-cumulus began to form. Teresa and I tossed another pinch of John into the air, watched the motes twist and float on the breeze. We shared a bitter laugh at the irony of her having finally found, after decades of boyfriends and flings, a man she cared to stand by for the long run—only to have him maroon her at the altar in the most theatrical fashion possible.
“He did have a flair for the dramatic, didn’t he?” she said. “It’s really odd, but we took Sundance to the vet about a week before the accident. He’d been dropping his head every time he took a step with one of his legs, and we knew something was wrong, he was in some kind of pain. I told John it was probably the navicula in that hoof. I’d seen it before. Sure enough, after the exam the vet told us Sundance had navicular disease pretty bad. There wasn’t much to be done about it. It was probably time to put him out to pasture.”
She paused, shook her head as if trying to forget something or remember something, it was hard to say which.
“We were leaving the vet, and John was loading Sundance in the trailer. And he put his hand on the horse’s muzzle and said, ‘Well, looks like it’s time for one last ride, my friend.’ And wouldn’t you know it, that’s exactly what they did. John brought him here for that next hitch, and they both went for one last ride.”
We both looked away, unable to maintain eye contact unclouded by tears.
“There’s still so much I want to ask him, so much I want to know. I was looking forward to our airplane-joy-ride jaunt around the West. Only John could think of something so extravagant, golfing every day in a different state. It was the goofiest idea I’d ever heard for a honeymoon. How could I say no?”
She lifted the Ziploc bag and looked at it with a rueful smile that appeared, under the circumstances, an act of gallantry.
“Now it’s just gonna have to be a road trip with these. I think I can probably find the secret valley in California where he used to camp with Miquette—or at least have a nice time trying. He took some of her ashes there. I feel like I should do the same for him. They ought to be together. And maybe you can take some to your mountain when you go back. Jean should have some too, up on her mountain. I’ve got some other places in mind that I know he liked. But sorry, buddy”—she glanced down at her hands—“none of them involve a putting green.”
I laughed. We hugged each other, and she set off down the trail, back toward the home she had too briefly shared with John, where she would spend the next three years in a longer and more complicated relationship with his things—the Pantera, the GT40, the Cessna Cardinal, the BMW motorcyle, the 40-foot “land yacht,” the list went on and on—than she had with the man himself.
MY RELATIONSHIP with John’s memory also grew more complex as time passed. I began to wonder why he remained, in some inexplicable way, elusive to me—remains elusive even in this attempt to evoke him, as I’m sure is sadly evi
dent by now, a pall of failure hanging over the entire effort. Rebecca Solnit articulated the feeling for me in a book published the year of John’s death: There is so much we don’t know, and to write truthfully about a life, your own or your mother’s, or a celebrated figure’s, an event, a crisis, another culture is to engage repeatedly with those patches of darkness, those nights of history, those places of unknowing. Sometimes John appeared in danger of being swallowed by the unknowing. I couldn’t figure out how to engage with it short of fictionalizing—and that struck me as a potential desecration of his life.
John had made the effort to know me, perhaps even made it a little too vigorously for my taste. His relentless style of questioning often left scant room for reciprocal questions, although he freely shared of himself as he spilled confessional stories on the theory that confession breeds confession. I had taken John’s confessions, he had taken mine, and they had deepened our understanding of each other’s psychic weather and built a bridge of trust and care. But of course a man is more than the sum of his sins and regrets. So often those were what we confessed, like the Catholic boys we could not escape being.
It may have been the case that two fire lookouts, solitary by nature, could only ever know so much of each other’s individuality. When we weren’t confessing, much of the talk we shared revolved around work: goofball hikers and wicked weather, visits from bears and deer, our different vantages on seasons of smoke in the sky, the sort of singular experiences that bond members of an elite club. And the flip side of the old Catholic habit of confession is a penchant for secrecy, withholding, sleights of hand, the ongoing act of carving out shadowed space in one’s life in a rebellious act of self-assertion, or perhaps self-protection, or both. In one of our conversations, we had discovered that we each first learned to lie the old-fashioned way, by being forced to confess our sins to a priest. What seven- or eight-year-old boy in his right mind would willingly cough up his real misdeeds to a paternal figure on the other side of a dark partition? It was the easiest thing in the world to make up less damning substitutes.
A Song for the River Page 11
