In July, I backpacked five miles to the top of a mountain in New Mexico’s Gila Wilderness to spend time with an author.
For ten years, Philip Connors has been working as a fire lookout for the US Forest Service. April through August, he lives in a cabin, alone with his dog, on a 10,000-foot peak. He spends ten days at a time up there, and then four days off the mountain with his wife. From the lookout tower, he can see more than a hundred miles in every direction.
For two days and nights, we talked and filmed, and Phil showed me around. His radio squawked at him wherever he went. After dinner we drank bourbon and talked baseball; mornings we woke with the sun. In the months that followed, back home in Portland, I used the footage to make this book trailer (and other stuff, too).
Ecco will publish Fire Season in April 2011.
Wordstock is a year-round Oregon nonprofit that works to promote writing in the classroom. And once a year, the 