June 1
More than four inches of rain fell in May—very unusual. This season has felt more like a paid vacation than work. So far.
I was taking a nap in the tower this afternoon when a group of maybe three dozen ravens came overhead, calling to each other and circling. They wheeled and dipped and sang cronk, cronk, cronk. Two or three would fly seemingly straight up in the air, corkscrewing around each other, and then they would break apart and float away in big looping curlicues. Eventually they drifted off to the north.
As the sun moves overhead the dog likes to sit in the shadow cast by the tower. Like me she is mostly indolent, but also like me she serves as a first-alarm system, a lookout in canine form: at the first sight or sound of hikers she barks and howls to let me know our solitude is about to be sullied.
June 4
A thrill today: first fire of the year, for me anyway—the Loco Fire, just northwest of Loco Mountain. A little plume of gray-white smoke twenty-two miles as the crow flies. It showed at five o’clock. I got a cross from Black Mountain, so we knew it to the quarter section. To be the first to spot a smoke is a sublime feeling. You know you’re the only person in the world who sees it.
A new smoke often looks beautiful: a wisp of white like a feather, a single snag puffing little fingers of smoke in the air. You see it before it even has a name. In fact, you are about to give it one, after you pinpoint where it is and call it in to dispatch. We try to name the fires after a nearby landmark—a canyon, peak, or spring—but there is often a touch of poetic license involved. I might have called the Jackass Fire, spotted by the Mogollon Baldy lookout this morning and named for Jackass Park, simply the Ass Fire, to see if I could get away with it. Worked when I named the Drum Fire after Drummond Canyon last year.
June 6
Simply being in the tower tests my resolve today. The wind gusts to near eighty miles an hour—my anemometer only goes to seventy, and the little ball marker shoots straight to the top, signaling a reading off the chart. The dog took one look out the door of the cabin this morning and went back to bed. Standing in place in the tower I feel like I’m dancing the jitterbug. There is a lip of metal overhang to the tower’s roof, to shunt off the rainwater, and when the wind gusts the overhang sounds as if it’s going to bend or snap upright and shear the roof off. Those CCC boys did a marvelous job erecting this old tower, still sturdy after seventy years in a high and windy place. Sturdy, but not impervious to an eighty-mile-an-hour wind. Luckily there are no big fires at present, and none along the Mogollon or Black Range crests, or they’d be hurling burning pinecones a quarter mile ahead and starting spot fires a dozen at a time.
The Loco Fire is down in the low country, where the winds are much lighter. With all the rain we’ve had it hasn’t burned very hot yet at all—maybe a few dozen acres.
I hung on in the tower all day except for lunch and another break mid-afternoon. The guy-wire cables twirled like jump ropes. I couldn’t write or read. I lay on the cot with my eyes closed listening, rising now and then to make sure no fool had left a campfire unattended or thrown a cigarette from a car. The wind was a menacing symphony, discordant and brutal in the trees. An awesome performance—though not a show I’d pay to see again.
June 13
As a lookout in high country, I often tell people I get paid to look at trees. But I find myself lately thinking more and more of grass. For millennia fire and grass worked in tandem here. Grass burned quickly and fertilized the soil, from whence came more grass. Fires moved quickly through the forest understory, rarely torching in treetops. Fire kept the saplings in check.
Trees lived in mature stands where most were hundreds of years old. An ancient juniper from the heart of the Gila shows that fire burned around it, on average, every seven years; fire helped it thrive. Ponderosa covered much of the forest in open parkland with trees forty to sixty feet apart, surrounded by grass. Then, in the nineteenth century, the cow arrived.
The grass fires became fewer, brush began to encroach on grassland; piñon and juniper crept down the foothills. With the coming of the Forest Service at the beginning of the twentieth century, two values prevailed: respect for cattlemen and disdain for fire. The goal became to put out every fire by ten o’clock the morning after it was spotted. As late as 1826 a white explorer reported being “fatigued by the difficulty of getting through the high grass, which covered the heavily timbered bottom” of the Gila River drainage. The cattle that came soon after devoured the grass, trampled the stream beds, pushed the Gila trout to the edge of extinction, and subsisted many places with the aid of stock tanks rigged to capture running water. Low elevation canyons saw beaver slaughtered for the whims of Eastern fashion; dammed wetlands were drained and with them went the waterbirds.
A century of fire suppression allowed the fir and pine and spruce to grow unchecked in the higher elevations, crowding out the aspen, which love big stand-replacement fires. Brushy ladder fuels took hold and created a link to old-growth crowns; the fires became harder to suppress, so the Forest Service responded with ever more military technology: airplanes, helicopters, chemical drops, a full-scale techno-industrial war on fire.
Now, for the first time, we see catastrophic fires that burn so hot they sterilize the soil on tens of thousands of acres. Prescribed fire is needed more than ever but has been used too capriciously, too often, diminishing the constituency of the reasonable. (Burn down someone’s house with an intentionally lit fire and see if you win a friend.) “Wildland fire use” fires are the preferred tool here now: fires started naturally by lightning and allowed to burn within predetermined areas, mostly within the wilderness, far from human settlements. Burn, baby, burn—that is the mantra now in the Gila, and for that reason among others this place is healthier than most places like it in the West. But does it even remotely resemble its optimum post-Pleistocene state? Not by any means. Too many cows, too few fires. - Paris Review
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