Field notes from a Fire Tower, September 2001

A few pages from The Fire Tower Chronicles, my first season in as a lookout.

St Mary’s peak view of the Heavenly Twins

September 7

I tune into the FM radio. And suddenly America is turning its attention to Afghanistan.  It has been in the news the last couple days.  Small stories, but there.  Why Afghanistan?

And last nights dream: There were legends about the legendary Sullivan, the Master of Chocolate.  He told me childhood tales, wild, gigantic Swiss tales of his chocolate caves and caverns all throughout the land of the Swiss people and when children were good and lost their teeth Sullivan, the Master of Chocolate would appear in the night and leave them nuggets of goodness that he pulled from deep inside the high mountains where he lived.  I’ve never seen him myself, but I love that he exists.  A chocolate man who loves living high in the Swiss Alps, bringing delicious treats to nice children, then retreating once again to his alpine paradise with green pastures, friendly cows, and mountain goats, wandering along singing Frank Sinatra songs all the while.  And occasionally his own song, “I am Sullivan, the Master of Chocolate...”  And off and away he danced and sang.

September 9.

The story I am writing (outside of this journal) has come easily until today, and I’ve been stumped since last night, but it is all about to change.  I’m about to take the mountain air in my lungs in big heavy breaths.  I think this is going to help by reinstalling oxygen deep in the crevasses of my lungs.  This will carry the oxygen to my blood and supply my brain with fresh food.   It is time to finish this damn story.  Ah yes, determination crossed with ADHD... and it was such a lovely sunset this evening.

Strong winds tonight.  Lovely sunset that lit the northern mountains in a blanket of rose-tinted orange, all the way north, the Missions, the Swans, and beyond.  I don’t know where today went... but it went fast.  Don’t know where summer went, but it went fast.  Poor ol’dogs... I haven’t seen much of them lately, esp. Uma.  Caleb has been here most of the time and I am as concerned about his state of mental health when we have to come down from here as I am for mine.  But things always work out.  They just do.

Sept 11.

There is something in the air, something quiet and solemn, which is not unusual, but there is something else, something wrong, but it is only indicated by an absence.  Two things.  My radio has been silent all morning.  I am well past check in time and still I have not heard any of the normal radio communications.  There is radio chatter and I hear all the usual voices, but they have not checked in with the fire towers, and that is unprecedented.  But at the same time, we wait for their initiation unless something is wrong, so I don’t call them, nor do the other lookouts.  We just wait.  The second thing is the sky.  The sky is unusually calm.  I have seen no air traffic all morning.  That is unusual.

The air smells wonderful today.  Wind blowing upslope filtered by miles of evergreens, washing up to the mountain peaks, then down again the other side.  Finally, hours after we typically would, we do call in the weather, but everything is brief and quiet.  It sounds like someone at the main office got fired and there is drama around it so the radio waves are being neglected.  Tones are coming across weird.

It is September, and enough days have passed since Labor Day that the regular visitor numbers I became accustomed to expecting have tapered off to nearly non, and it is has been a full week since I have seen anyone at all, and even the last folks I saw stayed far below the lookout, not venturing into the full torrent of winds that maintain this altitude.   9,351 feet in the atmosphere, sitting above tree line in a minimum sustained 15 mph wind, my trusty lion-of-a-dog Caleb (a French Malamute to be specific) [Sidenote: many years later I figured out he was an actual breed, a Eurasier] is at my feet as we survey the catwalk.  To the east, the Bitterroot Valley with a river cut into the center, and a road, then splayed out to either side the speckled mass that is homes and cut out fields.  It had always seemed like a large valley until I took this job, and now, three months late I see the Bitterroot Valley for what it is, a nearly insignificant yet beautiful valley surrounded amongst age old mountains, enormous and vast.  In this place humans are a brief history in time and the mountains are what truly define the landscape.  The speckled masses will some day fade into dirt and wash away.

I get a call on my handheld from J.  Caleb jumps as the radio squelches, tilts his head looking at me.  J. asks to switch to channel 3, a work station used by crews when they do not want the greater public to listen in.  When I call back he asks me if I have been listening to the radio today.  The radio, sure, but it has been quiet.  No, the FM radio.  Public radio.  I have not.  His voice is fragile, almost week.  He tells me that the Twin Towers in New York have been hit by airplanes.  Both of them.  The thought is abstract, relevant perhaps to the greater world I know, but that I am currently completely disconnected from.  The only Twin Towers that come to mind are the Heavenly Twins, the two enormous peaks lined up perfectly to my west, towering monoliths that reach into the blue sky.  They are the very two towers that keep the sky in all its enormity at bay.  The thought of a jet crashing into them is strange.  What doom.  But so insignificant.  But the towers he is talking about are not made from granite, are not tested in glacial time.

We don’t talk long.  He tells me to tune in the FM radio if I can.  At this elevation I have my choice of radio stations from three different towns, all hidden behind miles and miles of forest.

The radio waves carry the same fragile waves I could hear in J.’s voice.  After they say that the Twin Towers have collapsed I still can not picture it.  High rise buildings do not fall, so what happened, the top fell off?  I don’t understand.  I can picture in my head the Twin Towers falling no better than I can imagine the Heavenly Twins falling, but that is not what they describe.  Total, complete structural failure.  That is what they describe, but I still can not imagine it.  That is not the world I currently occupy.

Eventually I find myself so disconnected from what they are talking about that I have to turn off the FM and let the mountains go on doing what they do, uninterrupted by confusing radio wave signals.  There is a swarm of flying ants today, hovering on the only side of the lookout without wind, but they are having a difficult go of it.  As are the small blue butterflies that have been here in some form or another all summer.  They are smart, keeping low on the warm rocks, out of the wind, doing their best to stay alive.  And ladybugs.  Millions of lady bugs crawling under the same rocks in preparation of winter, which is already teasing the wind with it’s temperature.

Caleb does not know a thing about the people in New York.  Somedays he only speaks French.  His mood is just chipper as ever and he lays in stalk of a chipmunk that he has had his eye on all summer, preparing to engage.  My brain feels mushy as I think about how surreal it must be to see the twin symbols of capitalism and western domestication falling to the ground in a rumble of smoke and fire, and the horror for the people that I assume were in the towers, and the horror of those that were around it.  I can only imagine from the voices of the commentators the sight of people falling from the towers, being chased down paved lanes by plumes of toxic smoke and ash, the air filled with asbestos, very likely mind from just a ways north of here in Libby, and this toxic cloud engulfing the people of New York in a cloud of gray.

New York City is home to more people than live in the whole of Montana.  For me, that fact alone is enough to keep me here.  Add to it, the beautiful, wide open scenery, I may never leave.  Yet my feelings of empathy are strong, and it is not difficult for me to imagine the sinking feeling of losing loved ones, of the sheer scale of such a tragedy.  To experience that sort of loss, and even to just imagine the feeling is part of being human, no matter where you are from, or where you are going.  For all  our lines of division, there are things that unite us.  In a golden age the lines of unification are stronger than those of division.  And just as some of our lines of division are abstract and defined differently, the things that join us are sometimes challenging to put into words.  Sometimes it is a look on someone’s face, or the quiver in their voice.  Sometimes it needs to be nothing more than recognition of something in their eyes that pulls us from the inside and makes us empathize with the pain we can recognize from just a twitch or twinkle in the eyes.

As beautiful as a day as it is where I am, my stomach is churning and sick.

Caleb, the French Malamute (Eurasier). One of the best dogs to ever roam the earth.