New West Book Review

Freak on Peak Speaks: Philip Connors’ ‘Fire Season’

By Jenny Shank, 4-18-11

Philip Connors has spent eight seasons in a high, isolated outpost as a wilderness lookout in the Gila Wilderness of New Mexico, the “epicenter of American wildfire,” spotting fires for the U.S. Forest Service. How did he become one of the “freaks on the peaks,” and why does he love this job? Connors has plenty to say about these and other subjects in the entertaining and informative Fire Season: Field Notes From A Wilderness Lookout (Ecco, 256 pages, $24.99).

Connors mixes natural, personal, and literary history in this remarkable narrative, along with a touch of Ed Abbey-style ranting against America’s fat, out-of-shape people and the government’s bumbling ways when it comes to wilderness management, allowing cows to graze on public land, and agricultural subsidies. Although Connors spends most of his time in the wilderness alone, Fire Season keeps plenty of company, fitting comfortably and capably into the American nature writing tradition headed up by Thoreau, who went to the woods “to live deliberately,” and carried on by Norman Maclean’s Young Men and Fire, which Connors calls “the one and only masterpiece ever written on the subject of American wildfire.”

Fire Season also holds its own among the literature produced by prior wilderness lookouts, while imparting its own style of irreverence and reflections on the contemporary illness of “the group hug of a digital culture enthralled with social networking.” Connors writes of the pastimes of his fellow literary wilderness lookouts:

“Gary Snyder practiced calligraphy and meditation. Edward Abbey pitched horseshoes with his pa on the rim of the Grand Canyon. Jack Kerouac studied the Diamond Sutra, wrote an epic letter to his mother. If I were a more dutiful son I’d do the same. Instead I shoot Frisbee golf.”

Fire Season is composed of series of essays that move between anecdote, observation, historical information, and reflection. It doesn’t follow a strict chronology, although the book is structured so that the first chapter describes what it’s like to hike to the lookout post and set up for the season in April, and the last recounts the melancholy leave-taking in August.

Connors grew up on a farm in southwest Minnesota that was eventually “destroyed by the logic of industrial agriculture.” After looking forward to farming as a boy, he came to see farming as “a kind of pointless feudal labor that condemned its practitioners to penury or government handouts.” He pursued a career in journalism, which landed him in New York.

He thought “fire lookouts had gone the way of itinerant cowboys, small-time gold prospectors, and other icons of an older, wilder West,” but then a friend, a fellow graduate of the journalism program at the University of Montana, told him she was heading off to become a lookout in New Mexico, while Connors worked an unfulfilling job as a copy editor for the Wall Street Journal in Manhattan.

After visiting her that summer, Connors signed on for his own hitch as a lookout, and has been working the job ever since, tending bar in the off-season. “By being virtually useless in the calculations of the culture at large,” Connors writes, “I become useful, at last, to myself.”

Connors’ prose is a treat, full of punchy, descriptive sentences such as this one: “This time of year the available spectacles of lightning, hail, rain, and rainbow just continually and freakishly astound.” Although he’s often cranky or sarcastic in this book, like the many writers who have come this way before, the contemplation of nature turns Connors reverent: “Time shapes itself around me in that silence, shape-shifts from mistress to shade, caressing and haunting by turn. Days pass in which there is nothing but wind, bending the pines to postures of worship of an unseen god in the east.  The sun bores through the glass windows of the tower, solar heating at its essence. The world becomes the evolution of light.”

There is a complication to Connors’ ideal existence, however: love. Connors is a rare example of a married lookout. His wife Martha comes across as a singularly generous and lovely person, tolerant of his absences, although Connors knows she won’t put up with them forever. Connors writes, “We married because our minds are enriched and our senses sharpened in each other’s presence, and because our interests dovetail nicely—but my attraction to solitude precludes time together and doesn’t really dovetail with anything but its own perpetuation.”

The clock is ticking on Connors’ mountain idyll, which makes him savor it all the more. Judging from the rigorous author tour schedule for this highly touted book, Connors is taking time off from lookout duty this season. Hopefully he will settle into an occupation that will allow him to continue to observe and ruminate on the wilderness and to share his insights with readers.

Stops on Philip Connors’ book tour include visits to Bookworks in Albuquerque (April 26), Garcia Street Books in Santa Fe (April 29), Moby Dickens in Taos (April 30), Boulder Book Store (May 2, $8 tickets include a discount coupon and will benefit the Fourmile Canyon Fire Department), Tattered Cover (LoDo, May 3), Bookworm of Edwards in Edwards, Colo. (May 4) and Maria’s Bookshop of Durango, Colo. (May 5, 6:30 p.m.)

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