Fire Season: Field Notes from a Wilderness Lookout (review)

In Fire Season, Phillip Connors chronicles a single summer as a fire lookout in the Gila Wilderness of New Mexico. The book is a riveting read, even as Connors never relies on raging wildfire—“the oldest story on earth, … the marriage of fuel and spark”—to keep the reader turning pages (12). While he does spot more than a dozen fires, not a single blaze becomes a significant mover of plot. This lack of dramatic action provides the space necessary for subtle development of tensions between Connors, as the everyman, and the open western landscape. When these tensions rise, they do so through Connors’s layering of the history of the Gila and the effect of fires and fire policy on the present landscape. From his tower, Connors has a view of the “birthplace of the wilderness idea and the birthplace of the nuclear age”—in the form of the Gila (first marked off on a map by Aldo Leopold in 1924) and of the Trinity Site, respectively (39). This is “a landscape overlaid by history with equal parts hope and dread,” Connors notes, “and plenty of irony to keep the mind at play through the long afternoons of no smoke” (39).

Connors tells history with an eye for its subtlety. For example, his interest in the Mann Gulch fire of 1949, chronicled in Norman Maclean’s Young Men and Fire (1993), centers on the firefighting foreman’s lighting of “an escape fire”—he burnt the ground ahead of the approaching flames and hoped by lying in the burned ashes he might save his team of young men from the out-of-control flames. “As the big fire whirl passed over his men … he tried in vain to persuade them to join him” in the escape fire ashes. Frightened by the overwhelming flames, his young men failed to listen, attempted to flee, and died as a result (117).

Connors’s arguments on public lands, grazing, and early Total Suppression wildfire policies never come off as dogmatic or rigid. He warns of his relative inexperience as a lookout; he is the rookie among lookouts in the Gila Wilderness with “only” nine seasons on the job. But he cops to his share of interesting experiences at 10,000 feet. His tower juts sixty-five feet into the sky, situated directly along the route of the continental divide and therefore a common stopping point for the rare hiker trekking from Mexico to Canada. When he writes of intersecting these hikers, his prose is vivid. It’s as if his seasonal lull of social contact preps him to write of rare run-ins with humanity with perfection. Among his curious visitors is a laptop-toting nomad nicknamed the Electric Cowboy, who tells Connors he’s from Montana but that if Connors is ever in the state, he shouldn’t bother looking him up. “I probably won’t be home. But maybe we’ll meet again in the woods some day” (84).

Fire Season amounts to a highly enjoyable read and a brief but gripping introduction to the history of fire policy and land issues in the West. Scholars of the region looking for a new critical approach to western land and fire issues may find it lacking in depth. But this is the best sort of widely approachable literary nonfiction, laced with historical tales, well researched and convincing. It’s a rare book—entertaining and broadly informative.