Review by New York Times Review
MANY of us have probably on at least one cubicle-gray afternoon dreamed of lighting out in a rented U-Haul for some territory or other. Few who've acted on the impulse have made as excellent use of a sabbatical as Philip Connors has, and there are few territories left as wild and grand and as richly meaningful, or as spectacularly combustible, as the one Connors found almost a decade ago - New Mexico's Gila Wilderness, the first designated wilderness in the history of the world, which also happens to be, as Connors puts it in his finely, wryly, at times poetically wrought first book, "the epicenter of American wildfire." In the spring of 2002, then a copy editor at The Wall Street Journal, Connors quit the canyons of Manhattan for the mountains of the Gila. Upon arriving, he ascended 10,000 feet above sea level to the summit of Apache Peak, then another several flights of stairs to the top of a Depressionera lookout tower. There, for the next five months, in a 7-by-7-foot "steel and glass room immaculately designed to attract lightning," he spent his days as "a professional watcher of mountains," "a sensei of the sedentary," "an aristocrat of sky," which is to say as a lookout in the employ of the United States Fire Service - the U.S. Fire Circus, he now prefers to call it. He has resumed the post every summer since. His book narrates a single fire season, that of 2009, from the snows of April to the "blessed indolence" of August, one chapter devoted to each month, a structure that gives the book a kind of plot. But this is no Year of Living Loftily. Connors draws deeply from the well of field notes he patiently collected, like rain in his lookout's cistern, over the course of eight summers. His official duties are simple enough -"report the weather each morning, answer the radio, relay messages when asked, and call in new smokes when they show." The life of a lookout, Connors tells us, "is a blend of monotony, geometry and poetry, with healthy dollops of frivolity and sloth." For us, he has kindly boiled off nearly all the monotony. "Fire Season" unapologetically belongs to that venerable taxon of American letters trivializingly known as "nature writing" - a phrase that calls to mind the literary equivalent of the dreamy illustrations on view in a Sierra Club calendar or a Yellowstone gift shop. But the best so-called nature writers are also social critics, looking back from afar at what Edward Abbey called "syphilization" (a bit of barbed wordplay that is a hallmark of the tradition). They stalk observations about the flora and fauna, but they also stalk new answers to the excellent questions -Who are we? Where are we? - that Thoreau shouted from atop Mount Katahdin. After enjoying a renaissance in the '60s and '70s - the heyday of Abbey, Dillard, Hoagland, Lopez, Matthiessen, McPhee and the rest - nature writing seemed to approach the brink of extinction, or at least endangerment. The paths through the woods seemed well trodden, and so did the turns of phrase. How many pilgrimages could we make to Tinker Creek before the place became a picnic area? Since Bill McKibben published "The End of Nature" in 1989, those writers wishing to live deliberately were as likely to seek the marrow of life on the farm or in a vacant city lot as in the woods. Or they followed the lead of Rachel Carson and abandoned the essay for the environmental exposé. While Connors occasionally wears the cap of environmental reporter, his book is at heart as old-school as his manual Olivetti. "Time spent being a lookout isn't spent at all," he observes. "Every day in a lookout is a day not subtracted from the sum of one's life." If that line sounds familiar, then you've probably read "Walden," in which Thoreau says much the same of the time he did not spend hoeing beans. Connors is fully aware of the allusion, as he winkingly makes clear. "Having rendered the mood of an entire day in a derivative 25 word aphorism," he writes, "I pour myself a glass of bourbon on ice." What saves the book from feeling derivative is Connors's wry sense of helatedness but also and above all his voice. Although he can take flight on sentences borne aloft by thermals of lyrical observation, he almost always returns to earth on downdrafts of irony. Witness this fancy bit of stylistic stunt flying, performed after a round of mountaintop Frisbee golf: "The toss of a Frisbee is a bit like the writing of a sentence. . . . Each can go astray, spin out of control. At times what is called for is a long, unspooling line, a toss that slices and circles and hovers in the wind, feinting one way before turning back in another, just as a sentence can move in spirals around a central idea, curving ever closer to the center, the heart, the rock. Other times you need a direct approach. Straight and crisp. A shot from short range." The old-timey thumbnail labels that Connors places at the head of each chapter suggest just how varied the objects of his attention are: "Unsettled by solitude, troubled by wind," "The symbiosis of grass & fire," "The wisdom of Marlon Perkins." The natural history he collects provides vivid reminders that a great deal of killing and dying happens in Eden. So does the human history. The Apache once made of the Gila a hunting ground, and when a troop of Buffalo Soldiers in the United States Cavalry started hunting them, they made it a refuge and then an ambush. Connors is also an amiable guide to the literature of "lookoutry." The list of American writers who did time as lookouts is long and illustrious, and Connors plays host to a number of them, telling us, for instance, that Kerouac, intending to become a fire-watching Buddhist monk, instead spent six months in a lookout pining for tobacco, the sights of Venice and booze. What along with his voice weaves together Connors's variations is the "story of fire," told through the forester turned prophetic ecologist Aldo Leopold. It was Leopold who in 1924 hatched the notion, heretical at the time, of setting the Gila aside not for timber companies and ranchers but as wilderness whose value couldn't be measured in dollars and yields. Even then, to Leopold and timber companies alike, wildfire seemed an adversary to be attacked wherever and whenever it arose. Only decades later did ecologists come to recognize that wildfire is a creative as well as destructive force. Summing up the Forest Service's current thinking, Connors notes that if Smokey Bear were to give honest advice today, he'd say: "Remember - Only YOU Can Prevent Your Cigarette or Campfire From Starting a Wildfire We Are Forced by Longstanding Protocol to Suppress With Every Available Resource So as Not to Encourage Promiscuous Pyromaniacs; on the Other Hand Some Fires Started by Lightning Ought to Be Allowed to Run Their Course. . . . " The least successful passages are those in which Connors draws not from his field notes but from memory. In a nostalgic riff on the pleasures of walking the grungy streets of 1990s New York, the details -cross-dressing prostitutes, Spanish lyrics wafting from tenements, nights in jazz clubs and smoky bars - have the feel of stock footage from a bohemian fantasy. And his attempt to tie the fires he witnessed on Sept. 11 to those of the Gila strikes a rare false note. Far more moving is his account of the much smaller drama that plays out on Apache Peak one afternoon after he makes the well-intentioned but accidentally murderous choice to rescue a newborn fawn. Connors has succeeded in weaving many stories into one. There's even a love story. But it's what he calls "the drama of the self" that most distinguishes "Fire Season" - the drama inherent in a solitary existence amid "a landscape prone to burn," but also the drama of a writer alone before his typewriter finding a voice and new literary life in arid terrain where I, for one, had suspected there was little new life to be found. Donovan Hohn is the author of "MobyDuck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea and of the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists, and Fools, including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [April 10, 2011]
Review by Booklist Review
To burn or not to burn? That's the question Connors tackles in his poetic, thoroughly researched, thrilling account of his job as a fire lookout, roosting high in the heart of New Mexico's Gila Wilderness, one of America's wildest and most flammable landscapes. From April to August every year for nearly a decade, Connors has lived in a seven-square-foot, glass-encased tower, from which he can see as far as 180 miles away, scanning mountains and deserts for smoke. In an area averaging more than 30,000 lightning strikes a year, where even careful tourists can accidentally instigate the burning of tens of thousands of acres, this is no small task. For decades, ranchers, loggers, politicians, and conservationists have battled over the moral and economic implications of subduing the fires or allowing them to burn. Wise and impassioned, Connors' unique perspective on the debate reflects his literary watchtower forebears Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder, Norman Maclean, and Edward Abbey and illuminates the joys of solitude and the complicated nature of life in a volatile, untamable environment.--Fullmer, Jonathan Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
For almost a decade, former Wall Street Journal reporter Connors has spent half a year keeping vigil over 20,000 square miles of desert, forest, and mountain chains from atop a tower 10,000 feet above sea level. One of a handful of seasoned, seasonal fire-watchers in New Mexico's Gila National Forest, Connors introduces us to his wilderness in this ruminative, lyrical, occasionally suspenseful account that bristles with the narrative energy and descriptive precision of Annie Dillard and dovetails between elegiac introspection and a history of his curious and lonely occupation. Poet Gary Snyder, environmental advocate Edward Abbey, and beat novelist Jack Kerouac once stood watch over the woods, but today, 90% of American lookout towers have been decommissioned, with only a few hundred remaining. The world at large intrudes in Connors's account of contented isolation only in a discussion of evolving forest fire-fighting policies, in which advocates of ruthlessly suppressing fires are pitted against a new generation of Forest Service professionals who choose, when it's safe, to let forest fires burn themselves out. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Former Wall Street Journal copy editor Connors recounts the five months he spends annually as a U.S. Forest Service wilderness lookout. Though far from his usual beat, the author relishes his activities, which range from nocturnal fly-fishing to cleaning animal droppings from his cabin. The tale is exciting enough, and Sean Runnette's narration makes for more enjoyment. (LJ 8/11) (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Former Wall Street Journal editor Connors ruminates on his eighth summer in the Gila Wilderness of New Mexico.A small, glass-walled perch on stilts on the middle of nowherea fit milieu for misfits, from the curmudgeon to the bliss-seeker, as Edward Abbey and Jack Kerouac so amply demonstratedbut Connors brings a fresh eye to the fire-lookout job. He combines explanations of his interest in the vocation with a professional's thoughtful considerations on the role of fire in the greater environmental good. He is there (with his dog, an important character) for a multitude of well-considered reasons: to witness, undiluted, an eclipse, lightning, sandstorm and fire (watching "pine trees explode in a blue ball of smoke"). He is also there to master the act of solitude: "Once you struggle through that swamp of monotony where time bogs down in excruciating ticks from your wristwatch, it becomes possible to break through to a state of equilibrium, to reach a kind of waiting and watching that verges on what I can only call the holy." For him, there is no better job on Earth. With balance and experienced insight, he provides sharp discussions of burn policy and our rich, evolving understanding of fire ecology. Meanwhile, if suspicious plumes aren't calling, the author revels in nighthawks, ladybugs, long walks and the squid-ink dark of a moonless night.Print journalist and fire lookout: When it comes to paying jobs, Connors has a death wish, but he has made the very best of it.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
