A Different Kind of Neighborhood
Mountains in Bitterroot National Forest. (Source: Author.)
Driving down Highway 93 last week, I noticed that The Hardtimes Bluegrass Festival is advertising its 13th annual event this year, and it looks like they got a shiny, new sign. Maybe times have gotten better, I thought.
A new subdivision with a fancy name has popped up, seemingly overnight, near a small town that used to be known only for its haunted corn maze in October, and a bar, fashioned after a British Pub, that served surprisingly good fish and chips. It’s one of those places where the houses all look the same, big garages that seem to be the centerpiece of houses lined up in rows, or huddled around cul-de-sacs, all Band-Aid tan, or dove gray, I can’t remember which.
I was on my way to fire lookout training on the Bitterroot National Forest, about 70 miles south of my home in Missoula. Though I know the route well, driving back to a job I had twenty years ago sharpened my lens for comparing and contrasting, for noticing change.
Lookout training really amounts to a reunion of sorts, a story swap for a group of people who come together from far-flung places each summer to serve as mountaintop sentinels. We review the basics, and run through radio protocols and safety procedures, but there’s not much orientation that needs to be done with a group of people who have done the same job for decades.
The author at her lookout tower. (Source: Author.)
I looked around the room at the cast of characters who will be my neighbors all summer, just a radio signal away. With few exceptions, the crew is the same as it was on my first go-around. It turns out that once a person secures a summer job in a little tower on top of a mountain, they don’t give it up easily. The fact that I got out of line so many years ago and still managed to squeeze back in feels a bit like a miracle, like someone letting you cut in front of them at Costco, or zooming to the front of the queue at Space Mountain at Disney World.
Mark and Rhett, recently retired college professors, are in their 40th season. Considering the way they scramble up the trail like mountain goats, it’s hard to believe they’ve even been alive 40 years, let alone working as lookouts that long. The couple raised their three, now-adult children at the fire tower, and a few summers ago, a new generational leaf was turned over when their oldest daughter hiked up the 8 miles to see them with their granddaughter in a baby sling.
Mark and Rhett are not only the most experienced eyes on the forest, but they are kind of the parents of the operation as well. They have a tradition of checking in each night by radio to make sure all of the lookouts are safe and sound in our little glass houses. Remnants of their Georgian accents still remain, making the evening “tuck-in” call even sweeter.
The fire crew and author on the first day at the lookout this season. (Source: Author.)
Then there’s Bare Cone Mark. Since there are two Mark fire lookouts on the forest, we refer to him by the name of his mountain: thus, Bare Cone Mark. On my first day of lookout training twenty years ago, after showing me the three main tools of the job (maps, a pair of binoculars, and an anachronistic looking instrument called the Osborne Fire Finder), he told me that he often wondered if being a fire lookout was the craziest, or most sane thing he could be doing with his life. This summer will be his 25th season on Bare Cone—it seems he’s come to a conclusion.
Jim and Christie are well into their second decade on the lookout, as well. Back when I first started, their mountaintop buzzed with the activity of their three children. I remember their youngest son used to write to the host of a children’s program on the local public radio station. The host would say hello to him and his two siblings over the radio, and it was probably almost as thrilling for me as it was for them. That young boy is twenty-six now.
Christie, a former wilderness ranger whose knitting skills are no less than bionic, also has a sixth sense for spotting fires. She can pinpoint a curl of smoke drifting up from a narrow drainage miles away with just a glance up from her knitting needles.
Jim is an artist. This could be defined either by his decades of teaching art, his numerous exhibitions, or by the fact that he can’t walk by a pile of rocks without rearranging them into a spiral, or a serpent, or little houses for spiders, mice, or gnomes. His latest side project, an experiment of sorts, involves temporarily hanging his paintings in the forest in a spot monitored by a game camera. “You’d be surprised how interested animals are in art,” he told me, “and [they’re] much more respectful than humans.”
The other lookout tower on our district is staffed by a rotating cast of volunteers: a ragtag bunch of fire lookout enthusiasts composed of retired teachers and wildland firefighters, an independent bookstore owner, an orthopedic surgeon, and a lawyer, to name a few. Back in the early 2000s, there was a rumor that the sign at the trailhead to the tower had been altered, and somehow the mileage was changed from 1.2 miles to 11.2 miles. It remains a mystery who squeezed that extra one in.
One of the author’s favorite ragtag volunteers. (Source: Author.)
Mountaintop neighbors not only fuel the story bank, but they keep an eye out for you, as well. Those at the forefront of a storm rolling in will warn others further down the path of strong winds, lightning strikes, and the size of hail headed our way. High elevation neighbors are the ones who help you see things in your blind spot, since it’s not easy to see what’s directly below you from 8,000 feet. They’ll tell you if there's fire on your mountain, the way you’d tell a friend they have spinach in their teeth.
Sometimes, the desire arises to just chat with another person without using the succinct vernacular one uses over an official Forest Service radio. Dogs can help with this, as can conversations with the occupants of one’s own head.
One summer, a lookout on another forest some fifteen miles away as the crow flies from my mountain reached out to me in a way that only mountaintop neighbors could. It was a hot, dry, August afternoon, and when I first saw the mirror flash I thought it might be a distress signal, but a radio call broke through the static asking, “Do you see me?” right as another flash glinted from the mountaintop to my north east.
The author’s lookout tower. (Source: Author.)
This began a conversation of sorts, a dialogue of simple acknowledgement, a round of call and response. We monkeyed around with Morse code for a bit, but it was too complicated, and not nearly as much fun as just saying, “I am over here! Are you over there?” Sometimes this would go on at intervals throughout the day until the setting sun drew the shades on our chit-chat.
At the end of that season, my mirror buddy had left an envelope for me in my mailbox at the ranger station. It contained a note, and a photograph of landscape, the silhouette of a few bare ridges with one, prominent, pyramidal shaped peak at the center. Even though it was a black-and-white photograph, I could tell it was taken at sunset.
“This is what you look like from here,” he had written on the back. I knew exactly what he meant.
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Karla Theilen is the Neighborhood Storyteller at Strong Towns. Karla is a writer, storyteller, and Registered Nurse based out of Missoula, Montana. Her penchant to explore wild places informed early career choices as a trail builder in the Grand Canyon, and a forest fire lookout in Idaho. Her current writing inspiration comes from a different kind of wilderness, navigating healing journeys with her patients in far-flung places where she works as a travel nurse. Her writing has been featured on NPR, and select stories and essays have been anthologized. She has been Facebook-free since 1972.