The Lookout
I believe that the most defining event in my life, without question, was getting the job of manning a fire lookout tower in the Clearwater National Forest in my youth. For three consecutive summers, at the ripe old ages of 20, 21 & 22, I spent 9 to 12 weeks living in a 14-foot by 14-foot glass house on top of 50-foot stilts, in the middle of the Idaho Primitive Area. My job was to stay awake and watch for forest fires, yet as far as I could tell I had died and gone to heaven.
It all came about quite serendipitously. I had landed a job for the summer between my freshman and sophomore years of college with the Clearwater. I was hired as a member of the summer fire crew, whose job it was to fight forest fires. As the summer days passed by without a single fire (not even a lightening strike) I learned that the Kelly Creek Ranger District of the Clearwater Forest, the one where I was working, had three fire lookout towers, Osier, Junction Mountain, and Horseshoe Lake.
On one of our days off, a couple of fellow firefighters and I hiked up to Junction Mountain Lookout, the one closest to the ranger station, to visit Junction John, as we called him. It was a short three or four mile hike and as we climbed up the stairs to the top of the tower I was amazed at the view. As we popped up through the hatch on the catwalk surrounding the house on top of the tower, I could see for miles. I could see ridge after ridge of the beautiful northern Idaho forest land. I knew then and there that I wanted this “job”.
After our visit we headed back down the trail to the ranger station. We all thought it would be so cool to be a lookout, but we also all knew how hard it was to get the job. We all understood that hundreds of people tried to get the handful of lookout jobs every summer. Still, that evening as I was sitting on the bunkhouse steps after dinner, my boss, the Fire Control Officer, Clark, came walking by so I stopped him and asked that if ever there was an opening in one of Kelly Creek’s three lookouts, I would like to be considered. He said “sure” and walked on. The very next day, the young woman who was up on Horseshoe Lake Lookout, the most remote lookout in the Kelly Creek District, quit and wanted to come down. Clark tracked me down and asked if I wanted to take over Horseshoe Lake, and “oh, by the way, you have to go up tomorrow”. I jumped at the chance and took the job.
I had one day to prepare and make all the necessary arrangements for a summer of isolation and solitude. Fortunately, perhaps again, serendipitously, I was able to catch a ride with the Forest Service supply truck into town. It took about three hours for the 60 mile trip through the back mountain and logging roads into Orofino, Idaho, the closest town to the Kelly Creek Ranger Station. When we got there I went to the only grocery store in the town and set up an account. All of the Clearwater lookouts had accounts there so the process was quick and simple. I loaded up with a two-week supply of groceries and headed back to the station with the supply truck.
We returned to the ranger station in late afternoon and I had the evening to pack up my few clothes and belongings and say so long to my new-found firefighting buddies. I went to everyone on the fire crew and even bugged all the forest survey crew to try and scrounge up as many books as I could. Fortunately everyone came to the forest with several books which we all shared back and forth and I was able to abscond with several books to add to the dozen or so I already had. I was actually worried about getting bored up there.
The next morning, we headed for the lookout. Normally, the trip up to Horseshoe Lake Lookout is a quick 20 minute flight by the Jet Ranger helicopter, but the day of my scheduled departure it was raining and cloudy and the woman I was to replace at Horseshoe Lake, Jenifer, reported in by radio that the peak was completely socked in, so we were going to have to drive up. So I hoped into the truck with Clark and we headed out for the four hour drive on back mountain roads up to Horseshoe Lake.
After three or four hours of bouncing along rarely-traveled ridge roads and crossing flooded creeks, we were approaching Horseshoe Lake. About a mile or two from the Lookout, Clark pulled over to show me a beautiful little spring, surrounded by pink monkey flowers, bubbling away just off the road. “This is where ya git yer water” Clark drawled in his Idaho redneck accent, while spiting out a wad of his chew. We then walked about 100 yards into the trees to the shore of Horseshoe Lake. The pristine horseshoe-shaped (of course) mountain lake was surrounded by tall Douglas firs, grand firs and lodge pole pine. The water was crystal clear and cool. If straightened out the lake would have measured about 300 yards long and about 100 yards wide. “It’s great fer a swim on a hot afternoon and clean enough to drink” Clark said. We headed back to the truck for the final climb up to the lookout.
We entered the clouds just after we left the lake and were pretty much whited-out for the last half mile climb to the top. Clark parked the truck at the base of the tower and I opened the door and stepped out into another world. The air was very cool and we were shrouded in a dark, damp, gloomy-gray cloak of mist and fog. Vague silhouettes of trees and large granitic rock outcrops were barely visible through the fog. The air was redolent with the smell of pine, mountain heather and rain-damp earth. It was actually kind of spooky. Utterly sublime, but spooky.
In his book The Art of Travel, Alain de Botton dedicated a whole chapter to the sublime. He wrote about setting out to visit the Sinai desert – “I set out for the desert so as to be made to feel small”. He went on: “There are few emotions about places for which adequate single words exist; we are forced instead to make awkward piles of words to convey what we feel as we watch the light fade on an early-autumn evening, or when we encounter a pool of perfectly still water in a clearing. But by the beginning of the eighteenth century, a word came to prominence by means of which it became possible to indicate a specific response towards precipices and glaciers, night skies and boulder-strewn deserts [and lookout mountain tops]. In their presence one was likely to experience, and could count on being understood if one reports that one had felt, a sense of the sublime.”
De Botton discusses the sublime in detail, delving into the origin of the word (first used by the Greek author Longinus circa 200 AD), how other traveler/authors like Joseph Addison, Hildebrand Jacob and the poet Thomas Gray used the word; the use of the word in the bible and how it is used to describe the link between God and landscapes, a theme that would play in my daily during my weeks on the lookout. “Sublime landscapes do not therefore introduce us to our inadequacy; rather, to touch on the crux of their appeal, they allow us to conceive of a familiar inadequacy in a new and more helpful way. Sublime places repeat in grand terms a lesson that ordinary life typically introduces viciously: that the universe is mightier than we are, that we are frail and temporary and have no alternative but to accept limitations on our will; that we must bow to necessities greater than ourselves. This is the lesson written into the stones of the desert and the ice fields of the poles. So grandly is it written there that we may come away from such places not crushed but inspired by what lies beyond us, privileged to be subject to such majestic necessities. The sense of awe may even shade into a desire to worship.”
De Botton concludes his chapter on the sublime: “If the world seems unfair or beyond our understanding, sublime places suggest that it is not surprising that things should be thus. We are the playthings of the forces that laid out the oceans and chiseled the mountains. Sublime places gently move us to acknowledge limitations that we might otherwise encounter with anxiety or anger in the ordinary flow of events. It is not just nature that defies us. Human life is as overwhelming. But is the vast spaces of nature that perhaps provide us with the finest, the most respectful reminder of all that exceeds us. If we spend time in them, they may help us to accept more graciously the great, unfathomable events that molest our lives and will inevitably return us to dust.”
I was about to spend a great deal of time in this “vast space” atop Horseshoe Lake Lookout, and I wasn’t quite sure I was ready.
We carried my few belongings up the four flights of steps and then carried down the retiring lookout’s gear. The little house on top of the tower was the perfect little efficiency studio. The 14’ by 14’ glass house was oriented with the compass so each wall faced exactly north south east and west. The walls were solid windows all around beginning about three feet off the floor and extending all the way to the ceiling. A small single bed was in the southwest corner, a little propane range with four burner stove and oven and a short little propane refrigerator were along the north wall. A waist-high counter with cupboards containing all my dishes, utensils and pots and pans was located along the east wall and little kitchen table was along the west wall. Right smack in the middle of the floor, in the exact middle of the house, was the fire-finder. The fire-finder consisted of a 2-foot diameter, rotating circular map of the forest with Horseshoe Lake Lookout in the exact middle, on top of a about a four and a half-foot high pedestal. The map covered an area about a 10 mile radius from the lookout. Range finder sights were located on the outer ring of the map that you looked through to spot a fire that allowed you to determine a relative bearing to the fire. If a second lookout could see the same fire, an exact location was easily determined by the ranger station by plotting out the intersection of the crossing compass azimuths. A single lookout, with a little practice and experience could still accurately place a fire by referencing the surrounding ridges and valleys, relative to the fires location.
After all my gear and food was unloaded and Jenifer’s belongings were all loaded into the truck, Clark and Jenifer were ready to return to the Ranger Station. Just before he was ready to leave, Clark pulled me aside for a little chat. “Now I want ya to be careful up here, ya hear? That tower’s way up there and it’s a long way down. Yer all by yerself and help is a long way off. Now ya gonna be alright?” I said, a little nervously, “I’ll be fine Clark”. “Ya radio in at 8:00 a.m. and again at 5:00 p.m. and of course whenever you see a fire, or if you leave the tower for water.” He hopped in the truck and they drove off into the fog and quickly disappeared from site.
And I was all alone. Alone as I had ever been. Alone, on top of a 7,000 foot peak in the middle of the Idaho Primitive Area without a living soul (human anyway) for very many miles of very rough country. Solitude as I had never experienced.
I climbed the stairs back up to the lookout and sat down to survey my surroundings. Unfortunately I was still completely socked in. So much so I couldn’t even see the ground. It started to rain again and the wind was picking up and …. I was alone. “Oh my God what have I gotten myself into?” I thought. “Am I going to be able to handle this?” As these thoughts were going through my head, I tried to keep myself busy by putting away my food, arranging my books and trying to make myself at ….home.
I turned on my little portable battery-powered radio and had a very welcome surprise. I could receive the University of Idaho’s FM radio station, KUOI. The station where just a few weeks earlier I was a DJ during the second semester of my Freshman year, holding down the Sunday night 10:00 p.m. to 2:00 a.m. broadcast slot. I tuned into KUOI and then figured out how to work the stove. I heated up a bowl of canned chili for dinner and went to bed shortly after it got dark, which in July in northern Idaho was past 9:30 p.m. I turned of the gas lamp and climbed into bed. I stared out the window but because of the cloud cover there were no visible stars and it was pitch black. I fell asleep not at all comfortable with my surroundings and not at all sure I was going to survive the ordeal.
And I began to dream…
In my dream I was standing on a white sandy beach, but I was looking down from on high upon the ocean (these vagaries in perspective that often happen in dreams). And in my dream it was a brilliantly sunny day but completely silent, and while still asleep, still behind the curtain of the dream, I remember wondering, “It’s so quiet. Why can’t I hear the waves?” And at that moment I woke up. I opened my eyes and saw that the lookout was flooded in brilliant soft-white moonlight cast by a gigantic full moon. I struggled for a moment with the stark incongruity between my sunlit, ocean-side dream world and moon glow mountain top reality. I got up out of bed and saw that all the clouds that had earlier blanketed my mountain (already I was thinking of the place as “mine”) had settled and my lookout mountain top was the only peak above the clouds, looking exactly like a solitary island in the middle of a vast billowy white ocean. It was achingly beautiful, deafeningly silent, and unbelievably surreal. Again, sublime. I gasped at the majesty of the sight and all my apprehensions from earlier in the evening were instantly gone and I just started laughing. It was incredible! I was ecstatic, delirious with joy.
The next morning I woke to a brilliantly clear sweet-smelling morning as the sun began to inch up over the Continental Divide of the Bitterroot Mountains and sunlight flooded into my little house through the east windows. I rose up out of bed, this time bathed in real golden sunlight, and caught my first glimpse of the beauty of my mountainous surroundings, displayed in all its rain-washed glory. Endless blue sky, green mountain ridge after rolling ridge spreading in all four directions for miles, glistening streams in the valleys below, the jagged peaks of the Selway Crags to the south. The rugged back bone of the Bitterroots, a hawk soaring above. I was home!
