I have been a ranger in the Sierra Nevada for twenty-two years. People ask me what the work is. Mostly, it is paying attention.

These are some places where I have sat still long enough to learn something. It is not a complete list. I am still sitting.

He kept dairy cows and did not say much. In the evenings he sat on the porch with his coffee and watched the field go dark, and I sat beside him and watched him watch. Once I asked him what he was looking at. He said, "It's all out there."

I was seven. I have spent forty-three years working out what he meant.

A room fourteen feet square, glass on four sides, a fire finder in the middle like an altar. For three months my whole job was to look.

I learned that looking is not the same as seeing, and that seeing takes about six weeks to begin. By August I could tell dust from smoke at twenty miles. By September I could tell the hour by the color of the ridges.

The rock keeps the day's heat long after the sun is gone. I lie on my back and feel it come up through my shoulders, and the stars arrive one at a time, like people coming late and quietly into church.

Granite is patient in a way I am still trying to learn.

Snow takes the sound out of the air the way a cloth takes up water. I skied in once with another ranger on a winter patrol. We stopped at the edge of the meadow, and after a long while she said, "Listen." There was nothing. We listened to it.

Sitting still in a garden is mostly kneeling. The deer believe the garden is theirs, and some years they are right. I include it because the trowel has taught me what the granite did: nothing hurries, and everything arrives.

I came to California in 1972 with a teaching certificate and a car that burned oil. I taught fourth grade for three years. I was good at it, and I was not happy, and I did not know why. The summer in the lookout told me. I wanted a life in which the work was mostly attention. I put on the uniform the next spring and have not taken it off.

People assume rangers stay because we love the land. We do. But I stay because every summer someone from a city walks out to an overlook, still talking, and then stops talking. I get to watch it happen to them. It happened to me once, on a porch in Minnesota.