For five months of the year Philip Connors (once an editor at the Wall Street Journal) has a fascinating job: he is a firewatcher in the vast Gila National Forest in New Mexico, USA. He lives in a hut five miles off any road and, from a high tower, watches for tell-tale plumes of smoke that mark the start of another forest fire.
The job only lasts from April to August because such forests only catch fire in the summer; some of the fires in the Gila are caused by human stupidity, but most are started by lightning. In between watching and reporting fires, Connors gets to roam through, fish and look at one of the great stretches of remaining wilderness in the USA — and read, maintain his cabin and write. He writes beautifully about the forest, both its wildlife and its history, about himself and about fire (which he finds slightly alarmingly exciting.)
This is a lovely little example of what is being called ‘new nature writing’ — what makes it ‘new’ is the personal voice and personal story that writers like Roger Deakin (Waterlogged), Robert Macfarlane (The Wild Places) and Richard Mabey (Nature Cure) have brought to their deep knowledge of the natural world. It is proving to be an immensely popular genre and certainly one that I enjoy and find satisfying: poetically written gossip really, but none the worse for that. It works best when it both incorporates and goes beyond the purely personal and explores larger issues. For me at least Connors’ reflections on the history and culture of wilderness conservation and forests in the USA met that greedy desire richly.
Fire Season has been a great success in the USA and it will be interesting to see if it works as well here. Although it has so many of the right elements so well executed it is still profoundly foreign. The scale of things is almost unimaginable (in 2002 the Rodeo-Chedinski fire in Arizona burned out 720 sq. miles of forest; Kielder in Northumberland and Scottish Borders, Britain’s largest forest, is only 250 sq. miles in total.) Connors’ forest is full of bears and other animals, fish and insects that do not strike any chords with British forest lovers; the legal framework for conservation is very different, and the ‘wilderness’ history is more cultural loaded in the US than here. Despite these caveats, though, it is a rich and rewarding read.
One of the things that makes it rewarding is his underlying meditation on solitude. He experiences himself as having access to an extreme degree of solitude – and he is thoughtful and moving about what and why he needs this for a sense of personal fulfilment, while generously admitting that not everyone does..But what I found strangest in this was the insight into how, socially, we interpret ‘solitude’: Connors does ten-day stints in his Wilderness Lookout, and then gets a few days off throughout a five-month season. He is in daily radio contact with the outside world, and not just for business purposes; he can summon supplies at any time and his wife comes to visit whenever they choose. This is no criticism of Connors; it is a sad observation about how dependent we have all become on constant connectedness and communication; and how very little actual solitude now feels like an extreme adventure.
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