[Ecco; 2011]
by Scott Beauchamp
A month or so ago I was walking through the Carroll Gardens neighborhood of Brooklyn with a friend of mine. Both of us being relatively new to the city, the conversation turned toward a list of places that we’d be interested in living in after our times in New York City were up. There were the usual places (Chicago, San Francisco, L.A.) and a few more random choices (Atlanta, Denver, Detroit), but they were all large metro areas. And then my friend mentioned the middle of nowhere in New Mexico, for the reasons that anyone would want to live there: to escape the hustle and bustle of the city, to simplify your life and yourself, to get “back to basics” as they say.
I was not moved. I had gone through that early-life crises years ago when I read Iron John by Robert Bly and convinced myself that what I needed was the kind of forced austerity that would purge all the negative effects that living in the city/suburbs and studying comparative literature at a State School had caused my Being. My Soul even. And so I joined the Army. It’s an oversimplification of my motivations, for sure, but that’s the basic gist of it all. And the older I get the more childish it all seems.
So that was the frame of mind I was in going into Fire Season by Philip Connors. I was initially dismissive. In the book, Connors relates his experiences spending roughly 1/2 of nearly every year over the last several years as a fire lookout in the Gila Mountain Range in New Mexico. Part memoir, part history, part long essay, I was worried that I might end up hating Connors, if only for being an adult who still had the same feelings I had when I was much much younger. The fact that Kerouac, another writer I associate with juvenile man-boy urges, was also a fire watcher in the Cascades and is presented as a sort of literary and suburban escapist trailblazer, definitely didn’t help.
But I was wrong. Not entirely — there were still things that bothered me about this book — but Connors’ voice is so convincing and he’s such a natural and sympathetic storyteller that it was impossible not to be won over by him. That being said, I’ll get the criticism out of the way first so that I can concentrate on the stuff that doesn’t make me feel guilty. Yes- Connors is such a tender-hearted narrator that I actually feel awkward criticizing him.
Connors is obsessed with lists that don’t actually convey any information. For instance, when comparing the amounts of acres burned by various wildfires (Aspen Fire: 84,750 acres, Hayman Fire: 137,000 acres, Rodeo-Chediski Fire: 467,000 acres), it feels as if the numbers, obviously nearly incomprhensible to people more used to space being conveyed in square footage, are used to lull the reader into a weird state of trust with the author. 467,000 acres is as accessible a number to me as the light years between our solar system to the next. It means less than nothing, actually.
Then there are paragraphs like this one:
“Fire…The absence of an upcanyon haze of drift smoke indicates the fire has just popped up. The color and the shape of the smoke tell me still other things, so by the time I drop my pack and key up my radio…I’m pretty certain I’m the only on earth who can see it. I also have a good idea of where it is, how it started, how big it is, and what sort of fuels it’s burning in, a bit of guesswork I can indulge after eight season in this line of work.”
The texture of the language here seems steeped in that now almost ubiquitous fantasy of lost male competence. The obvious implication is, “Don’t you wish you were like me and able to do something REAL instead of wasting your life in the make-believe economy?” But as someone who knows how to make a camp and navigate through rough terrain and shoot and fix weapons himself, this shit is just as empty and unfulfilling as processing banal paperwork.
Though more innocuously than the secret back-to-the-earth manly fantasies, Connor’s prose occasionally very suddenly transforms into something sappy and purple. “..for here, amid these mountains, I restore myself and lose myself, knit together my ego and then surrender it, detach myself from the mass of humanity so I may learn to love them again, all while coexisting with creatures whose kind have lived here for millennia.” Calm down. You get to take weekend trips into town. The most interesting part of this story would almost have to be the least consciously poetic. How did he build his latrine?
So there’s all that. And yet, the language is mostly tender. And endearing. He just seems like such a nice, sincere guy. As someone who has had to spend long amounts of time away from his wife, I can sympathize with Connors when he misses his. Even if his isolation was chosen, he’s a real mensch.
The text is shot through with many poignant encounters with hikers and government workers and animals. One scene in particular, when he discovers a hurt fawn and possibly, through a series of well-intentioned blunders, dooms it to death, is especially moving. And the more emotional conveyances dove-tail very nicely with all the science facts that are placed page to page like Easter Eggs. For instance, did you know that a certain type of wasp, the tarantula hawk, has the most powerful sting of any insect in America and can cause three minutes of pain that resemble an intense electrical shot? How cool is that?
And that’s not all that I learned. The political history, and I’m surprising myself by saying this, of fighting fires in National Forests was completely engrossing. He takes us from the beginnings of our National Park systems, through political, scientific, and ranch wars, up to present day. And he meshes it all seamlessly with his day to day experiences. In particular, I enjoyed the comparisons he made between the language used to describe forest fires in the 1950’s and the language used to describe the Red Menace. The parallels were very interesting.
So yes, I enjoyed this book. In spite of myself, often in spite of the language, and in spite of the fact that Connors’ attempts to cleave himself in two rung false: “At other times of the year, in other places, I’m a man with a debit card, a driver’s license, a Social Security number – a quasi-functioning member of the rat race. Out here I’m a biped with tender haunches and a peculiar smell, too slow to outrun a large predator.” No, Connors, you’re not one and then the other; you’re both of those things. All the time. Whether he realizes it or not, his isolation isn’t so pure, nor his city living so alienating that he has to view himself as split between the two. That’s part of being American, containing those multitudes. That’s part of being human. And that’s what makes this book so incredibly enjoyable.
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