A finalist in our Pilgrimages competition spends a night in a Grand Canyon fire lookout tower, recreating the journeys taken by his favorite writers in an attempt to use solitude as a spark for literary inspiration.
Picture a workplace on stilts, a workplace the size of a garden tool shed. Could you find the raw stuff for literature in such a place? Some people do. In the 1950s and ‘60s, Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, Doug Peacock, and Edward Abbey whiled away entire summers spotting wildfires for Uncle Sam. Suspended above treetops, ensconced in cubicles too hot or too cold, they surveyed the public domain for little pay and even less glory.
What lured these writers into lofty seclusion far from home? The job came with unusual fringe benefits: stillness of mind, clean air to breathe, trees of feathery fragrance yet solid as bridge pylons, mountain lions, and deer among the few neighbors. Sunsets and sunrises fueled their seasons, fleshing out time; like the omnivorous fires, they took a life’s measure. For once, men (and men they mostly were in those days) looked down on the world’s turmoil instead of competing in it. Their ability to travel light grew with each stint in the woods — simplicity seemed within reach. I’d always suspected, however, that something more prosaic, some drab relative of the muse, drove these hermits to put pen to paper. I was willing to find out for myself.
I chose the Grand Canyon’s North Rim fire lookout for an experiment in self-confinement to contemplate the man whose books turned me into a writer. Less than two miles from the entrance station, Edward Abbey had manned it through four “bittersweet hilarious” seasons. The park’s highest point provided the setting for his romantic novel Black Sun as well as material for a puckish essay in Abbey’s Road. Kerouac processed his Northern Cascades lookout experience in Desolation Angels and Dharma Bums. Snyder penned mountain haiku and a Beat sutra, casting Smokey Bear as Buddha reincarnated.
I would be in good company.
The heydays of ground-based fire spotting – like those of sequestered poets on government payrolls – are over. Aircraft and satellites largely replaced binoculars. This shrine to a curmudgeon stays shuttered now; officially inactive. Forest Service lore holds Abbey himself responsible for the cutback: “Fire bursts came and went with hardly a word from the North Rim tower,” the wildfire historian and former North Rim crew boss Stephen Pyne recalled. Wayward as ever, Abbey went AWOL — napping or cobbling together sentences in the tarpaper shack at the tower’s foot, entertaining visitors or romancing bookish groupies and “rangerettes” — proving this particular lookout to be expendable.
After numerous rounds of telephone tag, I tracked down and borrowed keys to Abbey’s roost, convincing a Forest Service official that I was not homeless, suicidal, wanted by the law, or a souvenir hunter.
Walking up the access road from the entrance station after a long canyon hike, I pass through aspen stands that buffer the lookout. Its steel skeleton rises 75 feet, crowned by a hutch more glass than tin. Wind whips through the cables and metal struts like a madman unleashed. Some girders are bent where they shouldn’t be. Did falling trees dent them? Did the construction crew raid a Kanab scrap yard? But the thing is older than Hoover Dam and, I figure, unlikely to collapse anytime soon.
Up, up, and up, I climb flights of stairs steep as ladders to the padlocked trapdoor through which one enters. My hands lobster-claw onto the railings. Counting 97 steps, I feel short of breath and exposed. Inside, an Osborne firefinder — the lookout’s most essential tool for gauging the distance and direction of a fire — takes center stage. A true antique, it sits atop a wooden cabinet like an object of worship. You can rotate the round base plate and map to align brass sights and wire crosshairs with any smoke plume to take its bearing. The other fixture in this forest-green shoebox is a rickety chair. Disappointment wells up at the absence of Abbey’s “electric chair,” the swivel seat with glass insulators that protected rangers from lightning strikes, but the light-flooded interior and expansive view more than make up for it.
That view. It causes sensory overload, charging from all sides as if hitched to sun rays. A sea of trees laps the tower, breached by the canyon’s limestone maw. About 60 miles away is the San Francisco Peaks pleat space, imperturbable against the deep blue. Ravens gambol like stunt pilots, dodging the grasp of aspens. Jet contrails slash the sky’s lining — scratch marks of humanity. Graffiti on a wall of the ramshackle cabin at the tower’s base not only includes Abbey inscriptions of dubious authenticity but also a quote by conservationist and forester Aldo Leopold: “Of what avail are forty freedoms without a blank spot on the map?” Indeed.
I expected silence to twin with solitude inside the shelter, but its tin roof and windowpanes are rattling. Metal joints groan. Clanging noises make my gut flinch. It sounds as if a tanker is breaking apart on a reef. The whole structure sways like a storm-battered crow’s nest.
To distract and better acquaint myself with the fine women and men who once staffed these observation posts, I leaf through the lookout’s water-stained, bloated log. Seasonal rangers, trail crews, and some Navajo scouts signed in. I scan the pages in vain for Abbey’s handwriting — the entries merely go back a few years. While most record wind velocity, fire direction, distance, and the smoke’s color with the dry prose of accountants, the ledger also hints at quirkier personalities. Watching the Vista Fire take off. Nice-looking column, notes a fan of conflagrations. Prince, Piss Pump, and Harebell commented on the lack of air conditioning: It’s hot like a sauna in here. The enthusiastic (Viva Fire Use!) mingle with the simply worn out (8 more days!), and some joker informs me that he cleaned the insides of the windows, suggesting I’d do their outsides. Unlike other lookouts, this one does not have an exterior catwalk.
Settling in, I pull dinner, a stove, sleeping bag, pad, and cooking pot from my backpack, hang my socks from the firefinder to dry, put odds and ends into the cabinet’s cubbyholes, and doctor my blistered feet with some old duct tape courtesy of the Forest Service. Within minutes, a monk’s cell becomes a bachelor’s pad, cluttered but aglow with domesticity.
Beyond the windows, the wind still raves. Oblique light is strafing aspen crowns. Tree shadows have stretched like elastic bands and now striate the clearing below. An orange sun lingers above the Uinkaret Mountains, singeing the bellies of drawn-out clouds, harbingers of worse weather to come. I fire up my stove. Its sputter and roar are no match for the brawling outside, its corona of flames but a weak imitation of afterglow that infuses the western skyline. Pinesap bubbles from a floorboard where hot metal meets wood, spicing the air with the scent of freshly milled lumber. Worried by the contraption’s fickleness, I watch it closely — imagine torching a fire lookout!
After mac and cheese and tea from a battered mug, I wash dishes using the light of my headlamp. The beam’s pale finger probes darkness. Reflections scurry across inked windowpanes, and the silhouettes of the chair, firefinder, cabinet, and spread-eagled clothes jig crazily on the walls; from the woods below, it must look like Abbey’s ghost working overtime. As the last housekeeping chore, I dump dishwater through the trapdoor. The wind instantly whisks it away.
Before bedtime, I catch up with my journal — it is a writer’s retreat, after all — and then switch off the headlamp. Tilting on the wretched chair, I sit enveloped in night’s fluorescence, legs propped on the windowsill. Venus glints where the day has been snuffed out. Airplane lights wink red and green. On the South Rim, constellations flicker to life as residents of Grand Canyon Village flip light switches. At my back, the Big Dipper opens like a catcher’s mitt to receive Polaris, the celestial pole in line with the tower’s north wall — the building sits squarely on an imagined compass rose, oriented to true cardinal directions. Through the windows, I watch framed tableaus, stars spattering rectangles of firmament. Their assemblage spins ever so slowly on the tower’s fulcrum, which grounds me despite its shaky height. While I stay put, the universe shifts like a planetarium. I listen to its creaky gears. Snatches from one of Snyder’s lookout poems float up: “A few friends, but they are in cities . . . looking down for miles, through high still air . . .”
Eons pass, or perhaps only minutes.
Snug on the floor of my kitchen-bedroom suite, I wait for the storm to rock me to sleep. Hope I won’t have to go to the bathroom tonight, I think before closing my eyes. Needless to say, I do have to go. Rather than face the fire escape and decrepit two-seater outhouse at the foot of the stairs, I let loose with a carefully timed arc from the uppermost landing. While I’m trying to steady myself, I wish for a climbing harness to clip into the railing.
Back in the loft, I toss and turn and sleep doesn’t come. The next time I look out the windows, I find the Milky Way gone; a new note has joined the crescendo as precipitation pelts the lookout like rice flung at a wedding limousine by an angry ex.
Dawn. Clouds blank out my surroundings. The furies still press against the glass and tap claws impatiently onto tin, but the lookout tower is standing. Perhaps its loose-jointedness helps keep it upright. I have not slept one whit. No dreams of Glen Canyon Dam cracking or of scantily clad women visiting.
Feeling hungover, I brew coffee from the dregs in my food bag. I already look like a dharma bum and cannot see spending another day — let alone four or five months — up here. Abbey’s weekly escapes to the bar at the North Rim lodge make sudden sense, as does Kerouac’s daydreaming of San Francisco. I now realize why so many lookouts bunked downstairs; why they had to recover from summer jobs the rest of the year.
I’ve now sampled the force behind much literary output — ennui laced with moments of panic — and come to the conclusion that regardless of its perks, the immobile life – the Zen life, the life eye-to-eye with woodpeckers and squirrels – is not for me. Despite boredom and atmospheric disturbances, some poets gained a measure of clarity on the peaks, though not always the kind they’d expected. In the lookout’s windowpanes, Kerouac beheld his mirror twin, “a rugged-faced man in a dirty ragged shirt,” who frowned and needed a shave. He had taken the job to discover “the meaning of all this existence and suffering and going to and fro in vain.” Prepared to confront the void, he ended up mostly facing himself.
