My name is Arne Nygaard. I jumped fires for thirty-five summers, and since I retired I spend the summers alone in a glass room on top of a mountain in Idaho, looking for smoke. The snowflake up top is because snow is what ends fire season. It's the thing a lookout is always waiting for.

Sunday, September 26, 1999
in town

Typing all this up at the library, which has a new computer that Tess says is twice as fast. I can't tell.

Erik called last night. He'd heard about the snow on the weather report and wanted to know if I got down all right. I said I did. He put Maren on, and she told me, very formally, that she has a loose tooth. Then Erik came back on and asked if I would drive to Oregon for Thanksgiving. Rachel wants to meet me. Maren wants to know if I really live in a glass house.

I said I'd think about it. I've been thinking about it for twenty hours now. I think the answer is yes, and I am more afraid of that drive than of any jump I ever made.

Thank you to everyone who wrote this summer. There's a man in Montana who was a lookout in 1958 who writes me every two weeks like clockwork, and a woman in Texas who says she reads these out loud to her father, who doesn't talk much anymore. I don't know what I'm doing here, typing to strangers. But it has turned out to be a good place to put things.

Fresh snow on the high country this morning. You can see it from town, if you know where to look.

Friday, September 24
notebook, last page

Closing day. The district called the season yesterday, the first day of fall, which seemed tidy. I spent yesterday afternoon and this morning putting it all away: shutters on, water drained, propane off, traps set, the firefinder under its canvas cover.

Last radio call at 10:30. "Kettle Point, out of service for the season." The new dispatcher said, "Copy, Kettle Point. Have a good winter, Arne." So he's learned.

I folded the second cot and leaned it against the wall with a note on it that says LEAVE THIS HERE. Then I walked out. At the saddle I turned around and waved at the tower with my whole arm, which is a foolish thing for a sixty-year-old man to do, and I did it anyway.

Sunday, September 19
notebook

Flurries this afternoon, the first ones. Little dry flakes that blow sideways past the windows and never land. That's the sign. Another week, maybe less.

The room is the same room. The cot is still set up; I haven't folded it. The second coffee cup sits on the shelf next to mine. Nothing up here has changed, and it's all different, and I don't know how to say it any better than that.

I got out the notebook from the first summer and read the part where I said I wasn't lonesome and didn't know what that said about me. I think I know now. I'd been gone so long I couldn't tell the difference anymore between being alone and being away.

Tuesday, September 14
notebook

He came up Sunday. I saw him from a long way off: a man alone on the trail below the saddle, walking the way I walk, which I didn't know was a way a person could walk until I saw somebody else do it. I went down the stairs and stood at the bottom, and then I went back up, because I didn't know what to do with my hands.

He's taller than me. He has his mother's laugh and my father's jaw. He brought a bag of coffee from a place in Oregon, and a photograph of Maren on a swing that he'd carried up in his shirt pocket so it wouldn't bend.

The first night we didn't talk about anything. I showed him the firefinder. He teaches earth science, so he knew more about why the lightning comes than I do, and I knew more about where it lands. We played cribbage. He beat me twice. We ate chili out of the pot.

Monday was cold and clear, and the elk were bugling in the basin, and we sat out on the catwalk in our coats. He asked me why I always left. Not angry. Like a man asking the name of a peak.

I told him the truth. That I loved it, and I was good at it, and it was the only place I ever knew exactly what to do. That home was the opposite. That I thought if I kept the checks coming and kept coming back in the fall, that would be enough. That it wasn't, and I knew it wasn't by about 1975, and I kept going anyway.

He was quiet a long time. Then he said, "I used to watch for the plane. Every time a plane went over the house I thought it was you."

I don't have anything to write after that.

He walked down this morning. At the saddle he turned around and waved with his whole arm, and I waved back with mine. Then I went in and gave my morning check to dispatch, "Kettle Point, in service," and my voice was fine.

Monday, September 6 — Labor Day
notebook

Getting ready. Loyd brought a folding cot up on Friday's trip, and the mules had their usual opinion of it. I have scrubbed the floor of a fourteen-foot room three times. I've washed the windows so a man can see forty miles clean in every direction, which is my job anyway, but I did the west side twice.

The weather has turned. Cold nights, clear days, the aspens in the draws going yellow at the edges. Bowhunters in the basin; you can see their camps. The elk know it and keep quiet in the daytime. At night they bugle anyway. They can't help it.

I don't know what we'll talk about. I've decided I'm not going to make a speech. If he asks me something, I'll answer it.

Sunday, August 22
in town, days off

I called him Friday night from my kitchen. I dialed it twice and hung up before it rang. The third time a little girl answered and said, "Hello, this is Maren," very formal, and I said, "Hello, Maren, is your daddy there?" and she dropped the phone on the floor and hollered for him.

We talked eleven minutes. I know because I looked at the clock when he picked up and again when I hung up. We talked about the drive, and the trail, and what he should bring. Wool socks. At the end he said, "OK, Dad," just like that, like it was something he'd said every week of his life.

He's coming up Sunday the 12th. He'll stay two nights.

I went to the store and bought a second coffee cup.

Friday, August 13
notebook

Friday the thirteenth. So much for that.

Loyd came up with the mules at noon. He handed over the groceries and the propane and the water, and then the mail, and he'd put one letter on top of the stack. He didn't say anything. He went off and saw to the mules.

It's from Erik. Two pages, blue pen, handwriting that slants like his mother's.

I won't put all of it here. Some of it is his. But he wrote that he got my letter in February and started to answer it eleven times. He wrote that he teaches earth science at a high school. That he's been married six years, to a woman named Rachel. That they have a daughter who is four. Her name is Maren.

That was my mother's name. I don't know if he knew that. I think he must have.

At the bottom he wrote that he'd like to come up and see the tower in September, if that was all right, and he put his telephone number under his name like it was nothing.

I read it out on the catwalk standing up, and then I sat down on the lightning stool. There wasn't any lightning. My legs just went.

Monday, August 9
notebook

Erik is thirty-one. No letter. I wrote "Happy birthday, son" in the notebook again this year, on a page by itself, and this time I didn't tear it out.

Two more smokes, both small, both out by dark.

Wednesday, August 4
notebook

Seven of them woke up. Four yesterday, three today. I've been on the radio since first light: azimuth, legal description, size, color, drift, over and over. The new dispatcher is good under pressure. I take back what I said about the movies.

They sent jumpers to two of mine. I watched the plane circle and the streamers go out and the chutes open, eight of them over the one near Sheep Creek. This time I didn't wish I was in the door. I wished them soft landings and a cold fire by morning. Maybe that's what three summers of this does to a man.

One of the seven I lost in the haze for half the day and found again at sundown, still smoking in the same snag. That one will keep me up. You don't sleep much after a big storm. You wake at two and go to the window, just to look.

Monday, August 2
notebook, by flashlight

The storms came tonight. I watched them build all afternoon to the southwest, tall white thunderheads with flat tops like anvils, going purple underneath. By six the first strikes were walking across the far ridges.

When the lightning gets within a few miles, a lookout sits on the stool with the glass feet and keeps his hands off the metal. The tower is grounded, with cables running down all four legs into the rock, but you sit on the stool anyway. I sat there with the map on my knee and a pencil and marked every strike I saw hit ground. Sixty-three by ten o'clock.

Then it came right over. The air in the cab went thick, and the hair on my arms stood up, and there was a buzz coming off the firefinder like a bee in a jar. A strike hit the rocks below the catwalk, and the whole room went white, and the sound came at the same instant, not after. A sound you feel in your teeth. I said something out loud I won't type at the public library.

Then rain, a little, not enough. By midnight the storm had moved off east, grumbling. Every one of those sixty-three marks on the map is a place I'll be staring at tomorrow and the next day and the next, waiting to see which ones wake up.

Thursday, July 22
notebook

Loyd brought the mail up today with the water. He knows by now, without my ever telling him, to hand me the stack and say "Nothing from Oregon" before I have to look. Packers and mules know everything that happens in a county.

Visitors in the afternoon: a young couple, just married, hiking the whole ridge for their honeymoon. They were sunburned and happy, and they asked what everybody asks, whether I get lonesome. I told them the truth, that I like it. I like that nothing up here needs anything from me except to be looked at. I like that when the sun goes down the whole country goes blue and then purple and then the stars come out, all of them, more than you'd believe, and nobody sees it but me and maybe a couple of other lookouts.

After they left I realized I'd talked for an hour straight. So maybe it isn't as simple as that.

Saturday, July 10
notebook

The women's soccer championship on the transistor this afternoon, all the way from California. I don't know the rules of soccer. It didn't matter. Two hours and nobody scored, and then it came down to kicks, one player at a time against the goalkeeper, and I found myself standing up in a glass room on top of a mountain, yelling at a radio.

We won. The announcer lost his voice. I went out on the catwalk and there was nobody to tell but a Clark's nutcracker on the railing, who didn't care.

Friday, July 2
notebook

Third summer on Kettle Point. I walked up Monday behind Loyd's mules and got here with my knees complaining. The snow went off early this year, so the tower was dry, and the mice had only moved into the silverware drawer.

Two things are new. The district put a solar panel on the catwalk for the radio, so I'm not packing batteries up the trail. And the dispatcher I listened to for two summers retired this spring. I never met her. The new one is a young man who says "Copy that" like somebody in a movie. He's fine. He's careful. But the first morning at roll call I waited for her voice to come on and it didn't, and that was a small loss nobody knows I had, except now you.

Beargrass is blooming on the slopes below, big white clubs of it. The black from last year's fire has gone green underneath, all the way down into Blacktail Creek.

Earlier: January-June 1999 · 1998 · 1997 · back to the top

Tess says I ought to offer to send a note when I've typed up a new batch. If you'd like one, write and say so and I'll put you on the list. In summer it goes out every couple of weeks, when I come down. In winter, whenever something happens, which isn't often.