This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2011, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
Philip Connors traded his New York City job at the Wall Street Journal for eight years' seasonal work in southeastern New Mexico. Instead of a Manhattan newsroom, in his new working life he stood 10,000 feet above sea level in a small box perched above a tower.
He wanted solitude, obviously. But he also sought the curious effects of nature on the human conscience, which resulted in Fire Season: Field Notes From a Wilderness Lookout.
It's the 38-year-old Minnesota native's first book but not likely his last, given numerous glowing reviews. Annie Proulx, Barry Lopez and Walter Kirn have chimed their praise for Connors' unique voice. Connors' "adventures in radical solitude," as Kirn labeled it, are "profoundly absorbing, restorative reading."
Depending on his wife Martha's continuing accommodating nature, Connor said he'll work as many more seasons as fire lookout for the U.S. Forest Service as possible. "I confess it feels pretty natural to me, to spend those summers alone on my mountain," he said, speaking by phone from his backyard in Silver City, N.M.
You describe your isolation at the lookout post in an almost Zenlike manner. But what you really seem to communicate is a belief that human emotions and thoughts need the spontaneous freedom to drift and spark, almost like forest fires themselves.
You can't help but be changed spending 1,000 days alone or thereabouts over the course of eight years. There's a story near the book's end about a fawn I came upon that I thought was abandoned. I tried to handle the situation myself, which was the wrong thing to do. If I wanted to preserve the impression of myself as some sort of wilderness sage, I would have left that story alone. But since I talk about various ways we mismanage the land through rabid fire suppression, and overgrazing land prone to erosion, I thought it would be disingenuous not to implicate myself. That's one part of the book I can barely stand to look at now, but hopefully it serves as a cautionary tale to those who read it.
Could a security guard working in the inner city write a book similar to yours? How might it be different?
If you worked nights somewhere alone, you might end up drifting through some of the places I drifted through. With that amount of time to sit and think, I kind of surf through memory a lot of the time. The book contains whole digressions when I spin back into the past: my time in New York City, or school in Montana. You can cultivate your memories when you have time to sit and think. One thing the book hazards is a meditation on work. Anyone who thinks hard about work, and what they do for a living, could probably write a similar book.
So instead of being truly alone, you trained your memory to keep you company. You weeded and cultivated it like a garden.
I'm always amused when people say I must have a boring job. It offers expansiveness and freedom with time.
With technological advances replacing people, how many lookouts are left?
It's in the range of a few hundred still staffed each year, usually in the West and Alaska. There used to be up to 7,000, many of them in the East. There's even a tower still standing in a Harlem park in New York City. They used to have lookouts for structural fires in the 1800s. I'd love to climb aboard it, but it's fenced off.
Why do you lament the demise of fire lookouts in the American Southwest?
Just the fact of being stationed in one location of the wilderness for long stretches of time means we see patterns, and see more deeply, into geologic time. It's an intimacy with the natural world most of us are estranged from nowadays. Some of the writers who've spoken most deeply to me have been fire lookouts, such as Gary Snyder and Edward Abbey. These are people who looked closely at the natural world and have seen things most of us haven't had the chance to see.
And you don't ever want your solitude interrupted?
Anyone who reads that book will get that message. It's not a cry for visitors. In fact, I've changed the names of many markers to confuse the curious who might want to locate my post.
Look out
Philip Connors reads from Fire Season
When • April 9, 6 p.m.
Where • Sam Weller's Books, 254 S. Main St., Salt Lake City
Info• Free. Call 801-328-2586 or visit http://www.samwellers.com for more information.