I look out over a stretch of country with nearly a million acres of roadless wilderness, where an annual upsurge of moisture from the Gulf of Mexico combines with the summertime heat of the Chihuahuan Desert to create massive cumulous convection and wicked lightning shows.
In an arid land with brief but intense storm activity, wildfire is no aberration. My lookout tower is situated miles from the nearest road on a 10,foot peak. Although tens if not hundreds of thousands of acres are touched by fire here every year, I can go weeks without seeing a twist of smoke. On clear days I can make out mountains miles away. To the east extends the valley of the Rio Grande, cradled by the desert: austere, forbidding, dotted with creosote shrubs and home to a collection of horned and thorned species evolved to live in a land of little water.
To the north and south, along the Black Range, a line of peaks rises and falls in timbered waves; to the west, the Rio Mimbres meanders out of the mountains, its lower valley verdant with riparian flora.
Beyond it rise more mesas and mountains: the Jerkies, the Diablos, the Mogollons. It is a world of extremes. The work has changed remarkably little over the course of the past century, except in its increasing scarcity. Ninety percent of American lookout towers have been decommissioned, and only around five hundred of us remain, mostly in the West; nonetheless, when the last lookout tower is retired, our stories will live on.
He wrote two essays on the subject and made a fire lookout the main character in his novel Black Sun, the book he claimed he loved most among all his works. After cleaning up the mess left by overwintering rats and mice, putting up the supplies I get packed in by mule, and splitting a good stack of firewood, I begin more or less full-time service in the sky, 9 a.
