In a superficial sense, Philip Connors's engaging memoir, Fire Season: Field Notes From a Wilderness Lookout, is an attempt to convince its reader that he has found the ideal summer job - "a blend of monotony, geometry, and poetry, with healthy dollops of frivolity and sloth" - even if it's one most readers have no chance of getting. For one thing, 90 per cent of the lookout towers that used to populate the American countryside have been decommissioned, and only a few hundred remain. For another, Connors emphasises - OK, brags - that the ideal job candidate must be free from fear of fire, confined spaces, being alone, heights, being forgotten or ignored, the dark, wild animals, birds, thunder and lightning, forests, wind, clouds, fog, rain, stars and the moon.
That said, for those inclined towards natural splendour, the gig has its obvious perks. "On clear days I can make out mountains 180 miles away," Connors writes from his tower. "To the east stretches the valley of the Rio Grande, cradled by the desert: austere, forbidding, dotted with creosote shrubs and home to a collection of horned and thorned species evolved to live in a land of scarce water. To the north and south, along the Black Range, a line of peaks rises and falls in timbered waves; to the west, the Rio Mimbres meanders out of the mountains, its lower valley verdant with grasses. Beyond it rise more mesas and mountains: the Diablos, the Jerkies, the Mogollons. A peaceable kingdom, a wilderness in good working order - and my job is to sound the alarm if it burns."
In the spring of 2002, Connors quit his desk job as a copy editor at The Wall Street Journal in New York and moved west to New Mexico's Gila Wilderness, taking low-paying employment in the most fire-prone region of the country. This is not a leap one makes without serious soul-searching: "I surveyed my past and saw only blind striving; I played out my future and saw an abyss; day after day, the guillotine of an evening deadline, stretching into the murky distance. I looked long into the abyss and I jumped. This is where I landed." Connors happily replaced his Lower Manhattan office cubicle (and the pleasures of sociability, urban or otherwise) with a seven-by-seven-foot enclosure at the top of a lookout tower, 3,000 metres above sea level at the summit of Apache Peak. He lives and sleeps in a small cabin beneath the tower. His sole duty is to observe his surroundings, scanning the region for smoke. Using a compass device, the lookout pinpoints a new fire's precise location, gives the fire a name, then radios headquarters with the information, letting the firefighters take it from there. By Connors's estimation, he's the first to see a smoke only five to 15 times a year. The rest is waiting and filing weather reports. His self-proclaimed "aptitude for laziness" comes in handy.
A few months of fully unplugged alone time may cause one's social skills to atrophy, but ideally it enables the writer to get in touch with what Connors calls his "best self". (His canine companion, Alice, tempers some of his loneliness and, as if in solidarity, sheds the trappings of her own domestication.) The distractions are minimal, and Connors prefers it that way. Inadvertently echoing David Foster Wallace, he writes: "Once you struggle through that swamp of monotony where time bogs down in excruciating ticks from your wristwatch, it becomes possible to break through to a state of equilibrium, to reach a kind of waiting and watching that verges on what I can only call the holy."
He is keenly aware of the literary prospects occasioned by extreme isolation: Henry David Thoreau is invoked as an obvious inspiration, as are fire-lookout forebears such as Gary Snyder, Edward Abbey, Norman Maclean and Jack Kerouac, all of whom kept a diary.
Fire Season doesn't read like the work of a literary opportunist. Though Connors has written searing autobiographical dispatches for The Paris Review and n+1, he clearly did not move to the Gila in order to sell a book about the experience. This memoir is a chronicle of his eighth consecutive summer on Apache Peak, and he has no intention of quitting.
Owing to his wife's seemingly superhuman indulgence, his summer sojourn is also an exercise in compartmentalisation: "In winter I'm married," he tells a hiker. "In summer I have a girlfriend who pays an occasional visit. Lucky for me, they're the same woman." She's used to waiting: much of their initial long-distance courtship played out through what we now call "snail mail".
Our mountain-man narrator faces the requisite encounters with bears, snakes, rodents and, most heartbreakingly, a mewling fawn, but mostly the book is light on incident and heavy on historical exposition. We learn that in 1924, the Gila region became the first patch of land in the world to become designated wilderness, thanks to the work of the ecologist and forest service employee Aldo Leopold, whose classic Sand County Almanac promoted a "land ethic [that] changes the role of Homo Sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it". Leopold's plan for the Gila banned roads, hotels, hunting lodges and other marks of human dominion from a 306,000-hectare area. Leopold's wilderness should not be confused with the equally ambitious US system of national parks, all of which are networked with tourist-friendly roads and trails.
The existence of fire lookouts reflects shifting historical dynamics surrounding the management of fire. For most of the 20th century, the US forest service considered every forest fire a potential travesty and combated its enemy accordingly. But trial and error proved that fighting every fire damages forests instead of protecting them, depriving the land of mature trees that offer habitat to mammals and birds. The fire lookout is in a position to speculate upon the necessity of fighting a nearby blaze. Every fire Connors spots will be contained; not all will be fought.
But can the Gila be considered purely wild country if lookouts like Connors work to monitor its development? As Connors admits, "the paradox inherent in the concept of 'managed wilderness' is as stark as ever. Which fires are good and which are bad? Can wild wolves and domesticated cattle coexist on public lands? Does poisoning streams of non-native fish to restore native species have consequences for amphibian and invertebrate life that we can't yet comprehend? These questions remain unresolved in our time, the politics surrounding them as prickly and polarising as ever."
Connors is generally comfortable with such ambiguities, but one occasionally detects a hint of reproach in his manner. From his lofty perch, he rails against modern connectivity with perceptible superiority. (You can theoretically bring a computer or mobile phone to Apache Peak, but he chooses not to.) "Up here I'm not a six-foot-tall billboard or a member of a coveted demographic," he writes. "I'm a human being."
In the context of a short rant about internet-era social networking, this certainty can feel smug - and at the very least imprecise. Is it only possible to be a human being when isolated from all other human beings, including one's wife? A paragraph later, when Connors refers to solitude as "a seduction", he seems closer to the mark. Fire Season depicts a deeply attractive lifestyle choice, and the book cuts deepest when admitting that the pleasures of solitude are, in some ways, no more admirable than the pleasures of sociability. A world of hermits would be no world at all.
To Connors's credit, he seems at peace with an ethic of self-sufficiency. "I produce nothing but words; I consume nothing but food, a little propane, a little firewood. By being virtually useless in the calculations of the culture at large I become useful, at last, to myself." He challenges the reader to provide a better definition of good work. But certainly Connors realises the difference between Kerouac's private, unpublished lookout diary - which he tracks down at the New York Public Library - and a mass-market book like Fire Season. The latter is a social gesture, an invitation to share an uncommon experience in the present tense.
The practical value of Connors's chosen profession remains an open question, though I'm willing to continue diverting my US tax dollars to subsidise a group of solitude seekers if their summer sabbaticals provide more meditations like Fire Season - a soul-searching, often bracingly earnest reminder of the private pleasures we sacrifice at the public altar.
Akiva Gottlieb is a contributor to The Nation and the Los Angeles Times.
