How much of the book came into being up there in your seven-by-seven-foot glass box in the sky? From it you can see the first wisps of smoke below, but you can also -when things are calm-write. Your lookout tower stands on a mountain that rises more than ten thousand feet. Without being didactic or blinkered, or even obvious about what he’s doing, he offers an impassioned defense of a life and place he loves. He’s plainspoken but not condescending or tinnily folksy. Connors examines the wilderness and his experience of it by turns from a remove, dispassionately, and up close, with great feeling, and evokes a whole world in charming but disciplined prose.
His new book, Fire Season, which started as a diary in The Paris Review, is at once a fascinating personal narrative, a history of “a vocation in its twilight,” and a poetic tribute to solitude and the natural world. He’s spent a third of each year for nearly a decade watching for smoke in the Gila National Forest.
To be a fire lookout, Norman Maclean once wrote, isn’t a matter of body or mind, but of soul.
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