My First Summer in the Sierra by John Muir and Fire Season: Field Notes From a Wilderness Lookout by Philip Connors.
Fire Season has engrossed me. My reading slowed. Each sentence became a fragment of exquisite flavour and I slowed my reading speed to a crawl to savour it.
Even before I finished it (today) I found myself trying to hustle it to other people. Read this! Read this! Read this!
I knew little about forest fires before reading this. I knew what I'd seen on the news, but because I was from a region where there had been no forest fires in recent memory, then I had no reason to seek more information. But with my growing obsession with National Parks and forests, it was inevitable.
Connor is a beautiful writer, and fortunate enough to be able to submerge himself in a place where writing can flourish. He dapples his personal experiences on the hill with much needed historical and natural history, adding depth to his subject. Then he adds character.
I've seen Jack Karoac on the bookshelves. I have heard of A Sand County Almanac. I have heard of Beat Poetry. I've heard of Smokey the Bear. But they were just symbols, some of them larger than life. Nothing about them drew my eye. But Philip draws them all together in the burning halo of forest fires.
Karoac spent time as a look out. The author of A Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold, was a majour leader and transformative figure in understanding wilderness, both in his country of the United States of America, but more globally. Beat poetry emerged from young men struggling with their place in the world, often looking to the woods as a place where this could happen, spiritually. Smokey the bear is an icon of children's education of the dangers of Forest fires.
Even if you've only ever heard of one, Connors uses them to help you grapple with impact of forest fires on everyone. He is also not afraid to look at the bitter sweet situation we humans have put ourselves in. The short term ideas of what it means to be rural. Our consumption. How we look at history of Native People. The earths old history and how we've changed it so quickly in such a brief amount of time.
It felt very much like the book that wanted me to read it. Haunting me. The cover. The idea of fire. The far away notion in my mind of what someone would do there. When it showed up in my local library, I could not miss my chance. So many North American books I was looking for had not showed up in their broad reaching system and here it was, on the shelf in-front of me with no need for pre-order.
And I felt this book. Not just factually. This man is living a dream of all dreams to me. A far away camped out place where the disconnect is profound, yet plunges so much deeper than we perceive these days. And it reminded me of fire. Of how powerful fire is. How integral it is.
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| Eventually I got a nice hard copy version of this. |
This book is beautiful, and no one will listen to me when I tell them they should read it. :'(
If you do live in the United States, or in a place where such a job as a Fire Lookout is still needed, then take the chance to do something wholey different, and perhaps, dying. You can become Lookout still!
