Firewatch

GeoCities.us » Yosemite » Lodge

Get your FREE home page!

Notes from Kettle Point Lookout
1997 — the first summer, and the winter after

[ Newest entries ] [ Next page: 1998 >> ]

This is the oldest page. It looks plain because I didn't know how to do anything yet. I've left it the way it was.

Friday, December 26, 1997

I went to see the Titanic movie last Saturday because the paper said it was the biggest thing ever made and I had nothing else to do. It is over three hours long. The theater was full of teenagers, and they cried. I thought mostly about how cold that water must have been, and about the men who put the women and children in the boats and then stepped back.

Christmas I spent alone, which was my own choice. Rudy and Bea asked. I cooked a steak and called nobody. In the afternoon I took the box down from the closet shelf with Erik's school pictures in it. Kindergarten through tenth grade, one a year, the same crooked part in his hair. Then they stop.

There is three feet of snow in the yard. I shoveled Mrs. Ostrander's walk next door and she brought me over a plate of krumkake, which I have not eaten since my mother died. I sat down at the kitchen table and ate the whole plate.

Thursday, November 27, 1997 - Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving at Rudy and Bea's. Rudy jumped with me for twenty-two years, until he broke his back on a rock pile in '84. He walks with a cane now and still beats me at cribbage. Bea cooked a turkey the size of a sleeping bag. Their grandchildren were there, four of them, all loud. The littlest one climbed onto my knee and asked why I don't have a wife. Bea came and took her away.

Driving home the snow was coming down slow under the streetlights. I sat in the truck in my own driveway for a while with the engine running before I went in.

Sunday, October 5, 1997

Home. The house smells like a house that has been shut up all summer.

I've been to the library twice this week to type up the notebook, and it turns out there are letters for me in the e-mail. Tess showed me where to find them. A man in Ohio wrote to say he liked the one about the huckleberries. A woman in Washington wrote that her father was a lookout in the 1950s and used to say the tower was the only place he could hear himself think. And a fellow I jumped with in 1974 found this page somehow and wrote, "Nygaard, you old goat, you've gone soft." He is right.

I'll keep writing through the winter, though I don't know what about. Nothing happens in winter. That was always the trouble with it.

Sunday, September 28, 1997 (last page of the notebook)

Rain Tuesday, snow Thursday night. The district called the season on Friday morning. I spent Friday and Saturday closing up: shutters on, water drained, propane off, mouse traps set for next year's mice. The firefinder gets a canvas cover like a birdcage.

Last radio call: "Kettle Point, out of service for the season." The dispatcher said, "Thank you, Kettle Point. Have a good winter, Arne." It was the first time all summer she said my name.

I walked down through the snow with my pack and didn't look back until I got to the saddle. Then I did.

Sunday, September 14, 1997

First hard frost. The water in the bucket on the catwalk had a skin of ice at six this morning. The elk have started bugling in the basin below me, a sound like a rusty gate that turns into a whistle at the end. They go all night now.

Hikers came up yesterday, a man and his grown daughter. She was about my son's age. They signed the register and ate sandwiches on my steps, and he pointed out every peak to her by name, and she let him, though I think she knew them. When they started down he put his hand on the back of her neck for a second. I watched them all the way down to the saddle.

People ask a lookout if he gets bored. I'm not, mostly. That's not the word for it.

Sunday, August 31, 1997

The radio this morning was all about the Princess of Wales, killed in a car crash in Paris in the night. I never followed the royal family. But I sat with my coffee and listened for an hour, because they kept talking about her two boys, how old they are, and where they were when somebody told them.

Smoke haze from fires somewhere east of here all afternoon. I couldn't see past twenty miles. On a day like that a lookout mostly looks at the haze and worries about what's inside it.

Saturday, August 9, 1997

Today is my son's birthday. Erik is twenty-nine.

I don't talk about this much, so I'll be short. His mother and I were divorced in 1985, when he was seventeen. I was gone every summer of his life from June to the first snow, and a boy's birthday in August falls right in the middle of fire season. I missed most of them. I sent a card from wherever I was. Some years I forgot the card.

When the marriage ended he went with his mother, and he was old enough by then to decide what he thought of me. He decided. I haven't heard his voice in twelve years. I don't have his telephone number. The last I heard, he lived in Oregon.

I don't blame him. I want that written down somewhere.

The huckleberries are ripe along the trail below the saddle. I picked a coffee can full on the way back up from my days off and ate half of them before I got to the tower.

Thursday, July 17, 1997

My first smoke. A lightning strike from Monday's storm that sat in a snag and thought it over for three days, which they do. We call those sleepers. About 10:40 this morning a thin blue string came up out of the timber on the far side of Cougar Creek, eleven miles off.

I lined up the firefinder and got my azimuth, 247 degrees, found it on the map for the legal description, and called it in. My voice was not as calm as the dispatcher's. She read it all back to me, and that was that.

An hour later I heard the airplane before I saw it. The jump ship came up the drainage and circled twice and threw out streamers, the long colored paper you drop to read the wind. Then two chutes came out. Then two more.

I've made something over three hundred jumps, and spotted I don't know how many more. I have been the one in the door saying "get ready" and slapping a man on the shoulder. I had never once watched it from the ground. I stood at the window with my binoculars, and I couldn't tell you what I felt. Proud, some. Old, some. Mostly I wanted to be in the door.

By evening the smoke was gone. They'll pack out tomorrow with a hundred pounds apiece on their backs. I know exactly how their feet will feel.

Friday, July 4, 1997

On the transistor radio tonight: they landed a machine on Mars. It came down wrapped in balloons and bounced across the ground until it stopped rolling. I laughed out loud, alone up here. That's about how I landed my first year.

Clear all day, no smokes. The dispatcher calls the roll at eight every morning and each lookout answers in turn: in service. There's a woman down there with a low, calm voice who I've never met. I know her voice better than I know most people's faces.

After dark I thought I could see the fireworks from town, if I knew where to look. Tiny. Like somebody striking matches in the next county.

Sunday, June 29, 1997 (from the notebook)

Five days up. The packer, Loyd, brought my things in on four mules Tuesday: groceries for two weeks, propane, water in five-gallon cans, my books, and a box of dishes somebody's mother gave away about 1950.

The lookout has been shut since last September. There were mouse nests in the cupboards and a dead moth on every windowsill, and snow still drifted against the north side of the tower as high as the first landing. I took the shutters down and washed every pane of glass inside and out. You don't know how many windows a lookout has until you wash them.

In the middle of the room is the firefinder, a round map under a ring with two sights on it. You line up the sights on a smoke and it tells you the direction, to the degree. I spent Thursday learning the country: which ridge is which, which peak has what name, where the river bends, how far off everything is. It's harder than it sounds. Everything looks close in the morning and far away at noon.

The nights are what I didn't expect. No wind, no people, nothing but the radio clicking now and then when some other lookout checks in forty miles away. I lay on the cot and listened to the quiet for a long time. I thought I would be lonesome. I wasn't. I don't know what that says about me.

Friday, June 20, 1997

The librarian here says a person can put his writing on the computer and anyone in the world can read it, for free. I asked her why anyone in the world would want to. She said I'd be surprised. So this is a test of that.

My name is Arne Nygaard. I am 58 years old. For thirty-five summers I was a smokejumper, which means I jumped out of airplanes onto small fires in the backcountry and put them out with a shovel and a Pulaski and whoever jumped with me. The last eight years I was mostly the spotter, the one who stays in the plane, picks the jump spot and tells the others when to go. Last fall the government retired me. They do that at fifty-seven whether your knees agree or not.

This summer I am going to be a fire lookout. The district hired me for Kettle Point, a fourteen-foot glass room on top of a thirty-foot tower, a little over seven thousand feet up and four hours' walk from the end of the road. I go up next week and stay till the snow comes.

I'll write in a notebook up there, and when I come down to town every couple of weeks for groceries and mail I'll type it up here. Tess, the librarian, showed me how. If there are mistakes, they're mine and not hers.

[ Newest entries ] [ Next page: 1998 >> ]