You are listening to Season Four of

Future Ecologies.

Ironside Lookout’s a goner: burnt to ash in an

instantaneous explosion in last year’s River complex fire.

As a U.S. Forest Service wildfire spotter, Ironside’s

little glass cabin had been the subjective centre of my world

for 12 years. That adds up to roughly a sixth of the Lookout’s

eight decade lifespan and nearly the same percentage of my own

age to date. Tenanting the cabin — and, even more so, coming to

terms with its sudden extinction all these years later — has

taught me plenty about memory, ghosting and phase change.

Welcome back. Mendel here, and today we have

something a little different for you. My friend and neighbour,

Lincoln Kaye, brings us a story about how we can change the

place we call home, and how it too can change around us.

Broadcasting from the unceded, shared, and

asserted territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and

Tsleil-Waututh, This is Future Ecologies: exploring the shape

of our world through ecology, design and sound.

Now in physics, given a sharp enough jump in

temperature or pressure, a seemingly substantial solid – a

forest, building or a road – can bypass the intermediate states

of Phase Change, skipping liquefaction to “sublimate”, as

they call it, straight into a gas. Wildfires can do the trick,

much as they can force traumatized humans to elide the

five fabled stages of grief.

Such sublimations are triggered by a particular temp-to-pressure

quotient, called “specific latent heat,” which is unique to

each substance.

My own unique specific latent trigger is jingoism. When it

reaches a certain pitch, I just steam into a cloud of alienation

and drift off into exile. That's how the silent majoritarianism

of Nixon's 1970s and the dawning of Reagan's Morning in America

propelled me right out of my native USA into decades of

drifting around Asia.

And there, I married a Taiwanese artist, raised three children,

and covered half a dozen countries as a staff

correspondent for a slick news weekly magazine. But then, when

we were living in India around Y2K, the country erupted in

mutual Hindu Muslim pogroms, and that was another jingoistic

flection point for us.

We were ready to try exile from our exile and head back to my

the US — specifically to northern most

California. And homey enough it seemed too, at least at first.

We settled into our one acre mountaintop homestead and busied

ourselves adding garden terraces, a goat barn, and a

paddock. Until 9/11 launched us all into the War on Terror

quagmire, and local teens started coming back to Trinity

County in body bags. By fall of 2004 when the W Bush war cabinet

looked set for reelection, my specific latent heat kicked in

again. Exile once more seemed a promising career option... but

maybe internal exile this time rather than abroad.

And in this brooding mood, I sublimated my way all the way up

the tallest peak I could see from my deck: a 7000 foot

Trinity Alp, looming over our county seat. I hardly expected

to find anyone living at the trail end summit, but there in a

regulation 14 by 14 foot glass-walled US Forest Service

fire lookout cabin, I ran into a shy local housewife that I'd

vaguely met before at the town library. Now though, she shed

her personal identity and reincarnated simply as Weaver

Bally, so named after the mountain itself. The same

dashing nomenclature applied to all the other lookouts in the

Bonanza King, Plumber Peak, Backbone, Hayfork Bally,

Eagle Rock, Mad River, Horse Ridge, etc. Radio handles for

mountain kings and queens with multi-thousand mile view pans of

their own. And each of them wielded a BK two-way radio as

scepter of office. Such dignities, Weaver Bally felt,

more than amply compensated for the lookout's lowly GS-5 status

at the bottom of the US Civil Service pay scale.

"Amazing enough isn't it to be paid anything at all just to sit

here and look at scenery all day" she confided. "After all,

that's what I'd be doing at home anyway for free."

"Pretty nice work if you can get it" I nodded.

"See that peak over there?" She pointed out Ironside mountain,

west-northwest about 35 miles away as the turkey vulture

flies. "That cabin is about to go begging" she said. "I bet you

could nail it, if you filed your online application real quick."

"But," she cautioned, "lookout work is not for everyone. Many

are called, but few are chosen."

And just what she meant was brought home to me the very next

day, when I drove the 63 twisty, semi-paved miles from my Trinity

homestead up to Ironside for a look-see. The incumbent lookout

there was already packing up to leave. She was fed up, and she

scoffed when I reported Weaver Bally's comment about being paid

to admire the view. "Scenery, she calls it?! Gets to seem more

like just wallpaper before long, or maybe tiling on an unpadded

isolation cell. It'll drive you crazy for loneliness after a

while. Unless of course, you're made to go in for that sort of

thing..." She eyed me suspiciously.

Well, I guess I must be made that way. Right from the get go,

Ironside's viewpan struck me as the most hypnotically dynamic

wallpaper imaginable. A vista that would change color month by

month. It could shroud itself in mists, or dazzle with frosts,

blossom with ground fogs, festoon itself with rainbows,

and sometimes crackle with lightning.

As a US Forest Service fire lookout, my mission was to

optically scan the full circuit of my 2000 square mile viewpan

every quarter hour, and report any suspicious smokes, flares,

Strange to think of that cabin as a goner now. It seemed so

lightning strikes or thunder heads. I'd peg such anomalies

according to their estimated distance and azimuth on a 360º

compass, as measured from the very center of a century old

gunsight-like contraption called an Osborn Fire Finder, mounted

on a pedestal in the middle of my 196 square foot tiny house.

eternal atop its rock spire perch, at the craggy mile-high

end stump of 170 million year old batholith. Its very

dimensions projected an air of for square permanence, and it's

breadth-to-height-to-pediment proportions, the lookout

happened to replicate the sacred Golden Ratio quotients of the

Athenian Parthenon. I doubt though that that's what its

make-work Civilian Conservation Corps contractors had in mind,

back in the Great Depression of the early 1940s when they

knocked the cabin together out of locally-milled Doug Fir

lumber from the Shasta Trinity national forests.

Still, Ironside persists in my mind as a temple of sorts.

Although over 25 road miles from my nearest neighbor, I never

felt entirely alone there. The mountain seemed haunted, not

just by the spirits of prior lookouts, but also by the

its endemic Native American First

Nation — now federally derecognized and allegedly

extinct. Nevertheless, I'd still happen upon their moss-shagged

ceremonial rings on my walks through the forest. Then too

were the ghosts of three Chinese miners who died in a cataclysmic

1890 mudslide that still scars Underwood mountain across the

river. But by far the most charismatic mega-spook of the

mountain had to be the elusive Sasquatch or Bigfoot: a gigantic

proto-human akin to the Himalayan Yeti. On a plot map in

the downriver Sasquatch museum, Ironside turns out to be the

epicenter of reported Bigfoot sightings.

Tree ghosts stalked the very forest itself! Truncated stumps

of primordial firs and cedars loomed like colossal Easter

Island heads grimacing amidst the swarm of second and third

growth successor trees. And even some of these successors had

already grown 100 foot crowns, festooned with ectoplasmic

fringes of beard lichen that flailed restlessly in any wind.

Enough to set my mind toying with notions of transience and

timelessness.

These thoughts were just idle conceits that first season.

Before the real onrush of 21st century wildfires forced me to

engage more earnestly with notions of ephemerality and

ghost hood.

Luckily, for a green horn like me, we didn't see a lot of fires

late in the summer of 2004. And that left me with plenty of time

in between horizon scans to pour over Geologic Survey sector

maps. Learning to spot local landmarks, the better to situate

reportable fire traffic locales. On some clear days, I got to

play mirror tag with roving engine crews on distant peaks.

The field teams would angle a signal glass so as to bounce a

sunbeam straight at the lookout. I'd reciprocate with a mirror

flash of my own.

Quite a relief to point my mirror outward, rather than back

at myself. My interlude of internal exile came at a stage

when Ahloong, my bride of over 40 years, felt she could use

about 63 miles of daylight between us. We'd communicate by

flip phones, signal permitting, and reunite awkwardly on my

fortnightly weekends. But even so, I was starting to feel a bit

canceled and ghosted myself. Whenever I chanced a glance at

the silvered side of my signal glass, the face that greeted me

looked so spectral that I soon gave up shaving.

The resulting gray beard plus my solitary mountaintop aerie might

have lent me the superficial air of a hermit sage — at least in

the eyes of one runaway teen who lived alone in the flats below,

caretaking an isolated ranch. Now and then he'd crashed

straight up the slope through thickets of poison oak, in the

vain hope of ringing some life-affirming wisdom out of me.

Not that I had much to offer him beyond a sympathetic ear. All

the while nervously scanning the horizon for smokes.

What few actual smokes I did see were mostly crowded into the

60-odd degrees of my viewpan that encompassed the Hoopa

Indian Reservation way to my West-by-Northwest. That sector

of arc was notably different from the rest of the forest:

taller evergreen profiles, but an airier scrim of tree trunks

to filter the Western light. As viewed from Ironside, the rez

was always the glowing heart of every sunset. They must be doing

something right in there. But early on, I was advised

(nevermind by whom) not to be too hasty about radioing in

those fire starts. Odds were they were ad hoc controlled

burns — deliberately torched by the tribal firefighters

themselves according to immemorial Hoopa rites, rather

than official Forest Service protocols. Such fires were

technically arson, but so what? They were quickly quelled. The

Hoopa were the best fire crews around: much prized by the US

Forest Service on mutual aid firefights. And the ceremonies

were presided over by tribal elders. So the spirits were

propitiated, the forest curated, and everyone earned a little bit

of overtime. Win win all the way around.

So those first few seasons, I luxuriated in spectacular

sunrises and sunsets, the ebb and flow of diurnal shadow, and

the intricate clockwork of starscapes without any light

pollution. As never before, I honed a gut feel for the

procession of seasons and the Zodiac parade. Even asleep in

bed at night, if I happen to half open my eyes, I'd like us

not be rewarded with a spray of shooting stars. Just to live in

a lookout tower around the clock was a priceless privilege.

Well, not exactly priceless. California once had over 600

fire towers. Less than 200 of them still stand, and barely a

fifth of those are still staffed — a number that declines each

year, as human lookouts are supplanted by satellite and

aerial surveillance. Some of the unstaffed towers though, get

rented out by cash-strapped firefighting agencies as

upscaled honeymoon cottages and the like.

My own honeymoon years seemed long gone that season. But I

could at least console myself daily that I was augmenting my

meager wage with several hundred dollar's worth of beauty every

day. Other aesthetes after all, we're paying even bigger bucks

for far lesser views. Sighting westwards down the Trinity River

Gorge, I could see more and more multimillion dollar mansions

further overloading the fire hazardous and increasingly

yuppified urban-forest-interface. Various

movie stars and hedge fund magnates were mentioned as

possible tenants. So too were a few high-rolling pot lords who'd

begun clearing and terracing some of the more accessible

in-holding hillsides — to cash in on our incomparable Emerald

Triangle terroir for the burgeoning medical marijuana

industry. The lower Trinity gorge was starting to look like

a nouveau riche chateau country.

And there I sat, with the best vista of all — but not much of a

chateau to match it.

Living in such tight quarters, I had to quell my inner slob and

keep everything shipshape. The cabin's tidy domestic

arrangements came to take on the fixed predictability of cardinal

viewpan landmarks in their own right: kitchen corner to the

Southeast, with its propane stove and fridge; bed to the

Southwest; desk, due West; solar-powered laptop, printer,

two-way radio, and spotting scope, Northwest; chart library

and bookshelf, due North; wine cellar and glassware, Northeast.

Such a cozy layout could have turned me into a kind of hermit

practically fused into my borrowed integument. To get out

of my shell, mitigate my sedentary day job, and try to

salvage my marriage, I started scouring the mountaintop for

little love tokens I could bring back to Ahloong on my homestead

weekends. When we were first courting back in the 1970s, I

used to offer her bangles and nose gays. Now, I drove home

with truckloads of neatly bucked and split firewood, and bales of

sun dried cow pies. I was allowed to harvest dead and down

tree trunks along the lookout road — a crucial feedstock for

the woodstove that was our only winter heat source. And while

Ironside manure was not quite manna from heaven, it was sure

top-grade organic poop — dropped by free range cattle that roamed

the mountaintop under Forest Service lease. A mother lode of

premium compost for our homestead garden beds.

As the fire season edged from spring to summer, the longer

days allowed me more daylight hours for this sort of foraging

before and after my 8am to 6pm lookout shift. Untethering from

the Osborne firefighter gave me a whole new, more fluid and

intimate sense of Ironside. Freed from the long view of

azimuth and star charts, I could zoom in on the mountain in

sighting along the 24 inch length of my chainsaw bar,

or even closer at the level of lilacs and mushrooms that

cropped up around the cow pies, or the mealy bug colonies that

swarmed for cover whenever I flipped over a nice, plush

manure patty. I came to be on nodding terms with my free range

bovine benefactors, as well as the local tribes of mule deer,

ants, butterflies and beetles. Rattlesnakes, basking around my

front doorstep, eyed me companionably, as though to

signal that, unprovoked, they were no likelier to sink teeth

into me than I'd be to chomp into them. Occasionally, I'd

startle a black bear in a forest clearing. With a dyspeptic

grunt, he'd just plomp back down in the meadow and calmly resume

his blackberry feast.

Human fauna too put in occasional cameo appearances on

the mountain top.

At the confluence of two rivers, Ironside is sacred to three

federally recognized Indian tribes, who'd each crop up once

per summer to ceremoniously chant and drum and picnic.

They'd generously invite me to share their bologna sandwiches

and even to take a turn with the talking stick. Forest Service

engine crews would periodically show up to to replenish the

lookouts' water tanks. Day tripping families brought their

children to load up on Smokey Bear swag and play with the

firefinder. Triathletes would now and then huff up the lookout

road on BMX bikes. Once a hang gliding daredevil came to case

out Ironside as a potential launchpad, but chickened out at

the last moment. Forest Service botanists, entomologists,

zoologists, and archaeologists happily shared their fascinating

lore, when they'd drop by looking for endemic species and

conservation worthy artifacts.

Most welcome visitor of all, though, was Ahloong — when she'd

impulsively drive the 120 mile round trip to surprise me with

an impromptu conjugal visit on Ironside's jolly, jouncing,

government-issue spring mattress. An unexpected dividend

of lookout life! Maybe there was something, after all, to her

couples therapy prescription of "daylight".

Four idyllic fire seasons into the job, in the hopey-changey

year of 2008, my internal exile was starting to feel almost

embarrassingly comfortable. In early June, I opened up the

lookout in a mood of giddy anticipation: sashaying the

circuit of the wraparound deck to whirl my sling psychrometer

like a kid on day one of summer camp

Day one that year started like all Ironside workdays: with a

set of weather observations, wind speed and direction, fuel

moisture, wet bulb, dry bulb, relative humidity and dew point.

But when I phoned these stats in to Brenda, the forest

meteorologist, she promptly squelched my optimism.

"Scary stuff" she said, "Numbers like that you don't ordinarily

see until August or September, and this on top of the past

three years of below normal rainfall."

"But didn't we just last month get drenched by our first decent

rain of the year?" I asked.

"Yeah, sure. But it only lasted a couple of days and that too,

on the heels of record heat and winds. If the trend goes on,

that little cloudburst would only make for a bit more

underbrush that are just dry out into an extra load of ground

fire Tinder. We could be in for a wild ride."

Within a few weeks, her fears were borne out. Over a three day

period, June 20 to 23rd, a series of thunderstorms rolled

on shore into the forest — strafing the bone dry underbrush

with 1000s of lightning bolts. And not just in my immediate

At each storm's crescendo, all of us mountain kings and queens

were under orders not to touch our Osbornes, our radios, or

even the cabin floor. Rather, we were to cower on glass insulated

stools or bedsteads. St. Elmo's fire flickered intermittently on

Ironside's wooden catwalk railings. As soon as the

lightning strikes eased up for a moment, and we could climb down

viewpan either, but all up and down the coast: from the Bay

from our pearches, we were kept busy reporting spot fires and

Area deep into Oregon. Over 5000 recorded strikes in just 33

smokes so thick and fast that the forest headquarter

hours as I was later to learn.

dispatchers had to slow us down — to keep us from treading on

each other's transmissions. Struggling to distinguish

between fire start smokes versus canyon-hugging raindogs, I

finally grasped the real import of the phrase "fog of war".

And then a new volley of lightning would hit. By the end

of the three-day lightning siege, the spot fires were

already starting to merge into far-reaching, intractable

blazes, as local fire crews raced to outpace them.

When a conflagration grows too big or persistent, the

firefighters can no longer be directed from local ranger

stations or division headquarters. It's then

proclaimed an "incident" or "complex", and it gets its own

Incident Command Center or ICC, comprising an interagency team

of federal, state, tribal, and private fire crews, with

logistical support from independent contractors.

Within days, I found myself boxed in on all four sides by

such complexes. These merged fires, as it turned out, raged

on all summer long, right up until the onset of autumn rains

— eventually consuming over 500 square miles of my viewpan.

Ironside lookout soon bristled with antennae, as each ICC

communications team rushed to install its own radio repeater.

Battling triple digit heat, double digit winds, and single

digit humidity, hand crews and bulldozers raced to scratch

containment lines around the blazes. Smoke jumpers parachuted

into remote road-inaccessible fire starts. Helicopters scooped

giant bladders full of water, called Bambi buckets, out of the

rivers and lakes to quell the flames. Bomber planes doused the

fires with more water, and with bright orange chemical

retardants. But then fresh firebrands would loft right over

the containment lines, and updrafts would fan fire straight

up the gullies and canyons of the rugged terrain.

These faraway fire runs cast a lurid light in the lookout as I

stared up at my ceiling through insomniac nights. From my bed,

I'd watch whole trees go up in flames in a matter of seconds,

like incandescent lollipops on distant mountains.

And then, suddenly, not so distant after all. Pretty soon,

the slop over from the nearby Lime complex got too close for

comfort — racing from the Trinity riverbed right up the

buttresses of Ironside mountain itself. My battalion commander

boss ordered me out of the lookout on just 30 minutes

notice. Amidst torching trees, I threaded my way down the

hairpins of the lookout road and spent the night camped out on

the floor of the Big Bar ranger station.

And even though I did manage to get back up Ironside before too

long, my return turned out to be pointless. Barely a day later, a

thermal inversion smothered all of Northern California and

Southern Oregon in choking smoke. With planes and copters

grounded, my eye in the sky blinded, and my escape route

blocked by intermittent road closures, I was trapped in the

lookout. In the stifling 100 degree heat, I couldn't even

open a window for fear of the corrosive air.

It took nearly a week for the smoke to thin out enough for me

to once more make out any of the landmark peaks out there in my

viewpan. And when I did, the spectacle was appalling. Whole

ridges burnt black. By now, through earlier foraging forays

on Ironside, I'd acquired an intimate sense of what I'd come

to think of as "my own mountain": an exquisitely

balanced symbiotic system, a self perpetuating universe of

intertwined life. But surely, each of these charred slopes a

dozen miles away must have been, just a month ago, an equally

exquisite and uniquely detailed mandala in its own right — and

now snuffed by some lightning strikes and gales of wind. Awe,

sorrow, and an almost religious sense of dread. Holy smokes

indeed.

But my mood of reverence solemnity soon gave way to a

kind of humdrum habitude as the public-private fire industrial

complex dug in for the long haul. For each duly designated

incident, an inter-agency ICC has sprung up practically

overnight. A mini city of tents and trailers, each with its own

streets, helipad, assembly hall, ER hospital, publicity agency,

print shop, mess hall, bath house mechanic shop, even a

prison wing for convict labor.

Commuting fortnightly between lookout and my homestead, I'd

drop by the Iron-Alps complex ICC to pick up the latest press

release, and maybe help myself to some of the boundless and

ubiquitous free doughnuts. The place was always bustling in the

morning as firefighters clocked in on regular shifts and marched

off to the blaze like assembly line workers to a factory floor.

Every two weeks would see a complete top to bottom turnover

of incident staff, so as to keep all units fresh. That way,

underpaid seasonal fire crews from all over the country would

get a chance to rack up a lot of extra overtime and reconnect

with old buddies from bygone incidents. Savvy engine captains

who knew how to play the system could look forward each year to

an exciting season of nationwide or even international fire

tourism.

Incidents were cropping up all over the US, stretching

resources way too thin. My Ironside viewpan, with its

rugged terrain and sparse settlement, was relatively low

priority compared to the populous urban-forest interfaces

of Southern California and the Central Valley. Still tens of

thousands of firefighters and millions of dollars of ordnance

cycled through the Iron-Alps complex over an unprecedentedly

long fire season. Some hand crews were flown in on charter

jets. Others drove in with their engines all the way from the

East Coast. Eventually, some units were even called up from

Australia and New Zealand, where the winter slack season

coincides with our summer fire storms.

In the name of privatisation, independent contractors also

enjoyed a feeding frenzy:

running all ancillary services

enjoyed a feeding frenzy:

from kitchens, to showers, to helicopters. Radio traffic

enjoyed a feeding frenzy:

crackled with a babel of regional accents, including

enjoyed a feeding frenzy:

strains of almost unintelligible 'strayan. Hawker stalls cropped

enjoyed a feeding frenzy:

up around the ICC perimeters selling souvenirs, which lent

enjoyed a feeding frenzy:

the little tent city something of a carnival air. Emblazoned on

enjoyed a feeding frenzy:

T-shirts in gaudy manga hues, hastily commissioned tableaux

enjoyed a feeding frenzy:

commemorated particulars of the Iron-Alps Complex: muscle bound

enjoyed a feeding frenzy:

tree fallers squaring off against flaming snags,

enjoyed a feeding frenzy:

helicopter escadrilles, hand crews rappelling down sheer

enjoyed a feeding frenzy:

cliffs, yada yada yada... Seasoned firefighters boasted

enjoyed a feeding frenzy:

closets full of such merch from past fires. I shelled out for an

enjoyed a feeding frenzy:

overpriced T-shirt celebrating the 2008 "Summer of Smoke", with

enjoyed a feeding frenzy:

a picture of a pack mule in a gas mask.

enjoyed a feeding frenzy:

But the circus atmosphere gave way to a more somber tone

enjoyed a feeding frenzy:

towards the end of July, as fireline accidents claimed the

a teenage newbie and a veteran

Engine Captain. And then on August 3, just at the close of

my lookout shift, radio traffic suddenly went eerily quiet. It

was only days later, when the dispatcher declared a solemn

minute of morning that I finally learned what had happened: a

charter helicopter with a contract crew of firefighters

had lost altitude and crashed into a tree in route back to the

ICC, killing 13.

In that rare minute of radio silence, I took stock of how

drastically the fires had transformed my viewpan: on the

one hand, where black fire scars ran right up the Ironside flank

to within 100 feet of the lookout, new sprouts were

already showing spring green between the scorched trunks of

twisted Manzanitas. Yet at the same time, down below on Hoboken

flat, the Oak trees were already taking on their fall hues —

fully a month and a half earlier than usual. Presumably due to

the merciless dryness and the sun-blotting smoke poll. Early

onset autumn.

In this seasonal limbo, the 2008 fire season or Ironside lasted

all the way to Halloween. Unprecedentedly long at that

time, though such a duration would become routine in

succeeding years. Still, I stuck it out at the lookout for

several seasons more. Amassing my own modest collection of

the Backbone and Coffin fires, the

2011 Ruth fire, the Flat and Reading fires of 2012. But by

the 2015 season, I could no longer bring myself to buy such

souvenirs. Those dayglo T-shirt tints seemed all wrong. To my

eye that year's River and Humboldt route complexes

drained, rather than enhanced, the world's color.

Before those mega fires, the season started off vividly

enough. For openers, the Forest Service sent up a contract labor

crew of chainsaw wizards, to clear overhanging limbs away

from the shoulders of the lookout road. Latinos, mostly,

and understandably reticent about their visa status when

they turn up at the lookout after their work shift. They

weren't coming up there for the pleasure of my company. Rather

because the Ironside summit was the only place around where they

could get cell coverage to phone home.

Still, they were cheerful enough, and courteous, and the

nightly conclaves took on something of a party air with

singing and joking. I came to look forward to the Sundays when

they cook up a kettle full of menudo on the lookout stove. But

these fiesta colors started to fade, after a midseason

lightning bust ignited fires that would soon merge into a

month-long inferno.

Those initial fires first presented themselves to me as an

encroaching haze over JimJam ridge to the east, and Ziegler

point to the west, respectively. By the time the two incidents

were ready to converge right at Ironside, the sky was already

blanched bone white. This go round at least, my evacuation

wasn't quite so frantic. There was still time for an engine

crew to come up and wrap the cabin in protective

heat-deflecting mylar, in case the flames should crest the

mountain and sweep right over the lookout. The scene was

metallized plastic film covered "my" perfect little

Parthenon of a cabin. The mylar mirrored the blank sky so

perfectly as to render the building almost invisible,

except for the firefighters in their bright yellow,

fire-resistant Nomex uniforms — hanging mid air, as though

suspended in the mirrored clouds, as they swarmed over the

walls and roof to cinch down the shiny sheeting.

And for my part, I was issued a personal fire shelter of the

a "shake and bake" in Forest Service

slang. In this cozy little cocoon, I could bundle up prone

on the ground with my face buried in a wet rag, as a last

ditch safety measure if trapped in the path of an onrushing

blaze. And with that, I was dispatched to my new temporary

posting for as long as the lookout stayed closed: Trail

Boss at one of the access points for far flung fire crews working

the front lines of the firefight.

Poised at the very end of the forests' remotest vehicle access

roads, such trailheads serve as supply depots, communication

nodes, and logistic hubs. At my trailhead, truck runs from the

ICC (some two or three hours away) would bring in everything

from saw gas to Mars bars. From there, every day, sometimes

twice a day, trains of pack mules would then thread their

way over 20-odd miles of torturous terrain, to bring

food, fuel, gear, and meds to the frontline crews. And as

trail boss, I got to sign in for these consignments, and keep an

eye on the growing piles of miscellaneous materiel. But my

main job was to act as concierge to a trio of muletteers: a

taciturn patriarch, a middle-aged varmint, and a

breezy teen. These "packers", as they were called in Forest

Service jargon, were a crucial last link in the supply chain to

the forward fired bases. They commanded top dollar too.

Calculating the value added at every step of the way. I worked

out that each bottle of Gatorade cost about $50 By the time it

reached the firebase. Nevertheless, the packers'

horsemanship, jack droving, hoof trimming, sawbuck saddle

balancing, and veterinary field medicine know-how were all

indispensable — so much so that the Forest Service has to

cossett them, in defiance of regulation, with special

coolers full of steaks ,and cases of beer. These were

invoiced respectively on the ICC manifests as "meals ready to

eat" or MREs, and "packer oil". It was up to me, as trail boss,

to have the packer oil well cooled in a nearby stream, and

the MREs grilled to a turn when the muletteers returned for

their supper around a charcoal pit.

In the ongoing smoky miasma, these campfires were ghostly,

sepia-toned occasions — like scenes from an early Western

talkie. True to that genre, dialogue was terse: in the

"Yep... Nope..." Gary Cooper mode. But even so, the nights

were long, and the topics far ranging. In attitude, all three

packer generations at the trailhead were as nostalgically

retrograde as their 19th century roadeo skill sets. They bemoaned

the loss of harvestable timber:

so uselessly conserved in forest

the loss of harvestable timber:

lands, only to go up in smoke at last in lightning fires like

the loss of harvestable timber:

these. And they scorned the human "scum", as they called

the loss of harvestable timber:

them, that they glimpsed along the trail — spitting choice

the loss of harvestable timber:

ethnic slurs for cartel workers from upland clandestine pot

the loss of harvestable timber:

farms, as well as even some hermetic PTSD war vets, all

the loss of harvestable timber:

fleeing the fires alongside the cougars, weasels, elk, deer,

the loss of harvestable timber:

bears, and skunks, escaping down to the riverbeds.

the loss of harvestable timber:

It was from these packers too, that I first took stock of

the loss of harvestable timber:

Donald Trump's launch into that year's Republican presidential

the loss of harvestable timber:

primary fray. I guess I tuned it out as just too implausible when

the loss of harvestable timber:

he descended his golden escalator, less than a month

the loss of harvestable timber:

earlier. But now, by firelight, I heard glowing recaps of

the loss of harvestable timber:

Trump's take on Mexican "rapists" and Asian "cheaters".

the loss of harvestable timber:

Could this be the savior of the (ironically migrant powered)

the loss of harvestable timber:

feudal order of the California ranch lands that these packers

the loss of harvestable timber:

called home? Could Trump, they dared hope, really make America

the loss of harvestable timber:

great again, along the lines of the 19th century Wild West

the loss of harvestable timber:

Frontier? I didn't stay around to find out.

the loss of harvestable timber:

This kind of American Greatness left me queasy when I thought of

the loss of harvestable timber:

my Ironside menudo fiestas, my Hmong neighbors at the

the loss of harvestable timber:

homestead, and my Muslim colleagues in my pre-lookout

the loss of harvestable timber:

days as a foreign correspondent. Now in this battered forest,

the loss of harvestable timber:

surrounded by wasteful mounds of surplus ordnance, it dawned on

the loss of harvestable timber:

me that internal exile might no longer be enough. 2015 was my

the loss of harvestable timber:

last full season at the lookout.

the loss of harvestable timber:

Our eldest daughter, unnerved by our rustication was pressing us

the loss of harvestable timber:

to migrate up to Canada to join her in Vancouver. Lest, in my

the loss of harvestable timber:

mountain top solitude, I'd somehow managed to behead myself

the loss of harvestable timber:

with a chainsaw and leave Ahloong a widow. By late

the loss of harvestable timber:

October, with the River fire officially declared contained,

the loss of harvestable timber:

we took the plunge and moved North. Our youngest daughter

the loss of harvestable timber:

stood ready to take over the homestead, there to deliver her

the loss of harvestable timber:

first son in a home birth a couple of years later. Her Hmong

the loss of harvestable timber:

neighbors were wonderfully supportive, even embroidering

the loss of harvestable timber:

beautiful papoose pouches for the baby. With the legalization

the loss of harvestable timber:

of recreational marijuana, Hmong had bought up more and more

the loss of harvestable timber:

property on our homestead hill — reconvening from their

the loss of harvestable timber:

hard-pressed and far-flung diaspora to resume their

raising drugs in mountains. No need

anymore for clandestine plantations on forest lands,

they could now overtly set themselves up in the Emerald

triangle as artisanal small holders. Wonderful, hard working

farmers they turned out to be too, with fine Asian family

values. Their children promptly emerged as valedictorians and

Prom queens in the local schools. But the Hmong influx

quickly tripled the cannabis micro farms on our hill. Such

startups can't always afford to be overly eco-conscious.

Irrigation sprinklers soon drained the water table, as most

of the remaining Oak and evergreen forests gave way to

terraced slopes, and soils doused with weed killers and

rodenticides.

And meanwhile, the droughts worsened, the fire seasons

lengthened, and the incidents swelled to magnitudes that would

have seemed unimaginable back in my Ironside tenure: a total of

nearly 1500 square miles in 2020; at least 1000 square miles

just last year. And the fires encroached ever closer to both

the homestead, and the lookout.

By last year, with biblical pillars of flame and smoke

lingering for weeks on the horizon, our garden beds coated

with ash, the air unbreathable and the well run dry, our

daughter and family evacuated to the coast and decided to stay

there.

On August 16, the Ironside cabin went up in a blaze. An amateur

astronomy buddy of ours from Burnt Ranch below, trained his

telescope on the mountain top and phoned us in Canada to

describe the instantaneous explosion of the propane tank

that proved the final coup de gras.

With Ironside gone, it's now time to ruefully let go of our

to to stage it for sale, we've got to bland the

place out — purging it of all of our accumulated eccentricities,

so it looks as generically exurban as possible. Not much we

can do about our already installed farragoes of ad hoc

the undulating 108 foot straw-bale garden

fence, the wonky solarium-cum-potting shed, the

koi pond, the goat barn, the rampart of stacked firewood. But

at least we could get rid of the mounds of salvage junk we'd

piled up for further, now never to be realized, whimsies is of

so-called vernacular architecture.

Early in the fall, rainy season, when burn permits are issued, we

paid one last call on Trinity County to clear out all our

salvaged and now redundant treasures. We took our time

driving down to treat ourselves to a romantic getaway. Much

needed after a year of pandemic curbs and family tensions. There

was an elegaic, septuagenarian feel to this umpteenth honeymoon

of ours. Our marriage is still as avid as ever for daylight,

but now as a light to be shared and leisurely cherished in the

autumnally gathering dusk.

Once we reached the homestead though, we quit lollygagging and

set ourselves to scouring the grounds for disposable flotsam.

After multiple dump runs to the county transfer site, whatever

was left had to go up in smoke:

yard trimmings, clapped out

was left had to go up in smoke:

furniture, salvaged door and window frames from that long

was left had to go up in smoke:

abandoned greenhouse project. Under brooding skies, we fed

was left had to go up in smoke:

blaze after blaze for most of a week. Ennervating work, but also

was left had to go up in smoke:

exhilarating in its way. We became, for once, proactive

was left had to go up in smoke:

agents of combustion, if only on a bonfire scale, after so many

was left had to go up in smoke:

years at the receiving end of mega burns beyond our control.

was left had to go up in smoke:

We stood by with garden hoses and sand buckets at the ready,

was left had to go up in smoke:

close enough to toast our eyelids. Oddly cathartic to feed

was left had to go up in smoke:

the flames. Item by item, everything we tossed onto the

was left had to go up in smoke:

pile was fleetingly recognizable, evoking an

was left had to go up in smoke:

evanescent memory of how it came into our lives, before it's

was left had to go up in smoke:

turned into undifferentiated embers and ash. Last to go, was

was left had to go up in smoke:

our piano. Took me all day with a screwdriver, monkey wrench,

was left had to go up in smoke:

splitting maul, and handsaw, to strip it down to its strung

was left had to go up in smoke:

steel frame. It burnt an eerie green. Varnish? Copper cladding

was left had to go up in smoke:

on the harp frame? I'd half expected a last climactic twang

was left had to go up in smoke:

of the melting strings, but instead, they just sagged.

was left had to go up in smoke:

No matter. It had been over a decade since any music had come

was left had to go up in smoke:

out of that instrument anyway. We never knew where it had

was left had to go up in smoke:

lived, whether in a whore house, or a choir loft, or a genteel

was left had to go up in smoke:

parlor, in the 100-odd years since it first came up here,

was left had to go up in smoke:

presumably by mule train. But by the time we found it, abandoned

was left had to go up in smoke:

on a backwoods roadside with a "free" sign propped on its

was left had to go up in smoke:

keyboard, that piano was unplayable, held together solely

was left had to go up in smoke:

by the rust. In our basement, it came to house a dynasty of

a mouse pup nursery at the treble end,

and a well used murine latrine down in the bass registers. A

pity, admittedly, to torch this ancestral family mansion. But

why beat oneself up about it? Ahloong and I had surprised

ourselves with our equanimity about incinerating this mouse

house, just as we had with our shrug off of the news of

Ironside lookout's demise. We felt ourselves wrapped in a kind

blankly reflective.

Wasn't each event, after all, just one more unsentimental

iteration of phase change? Taking the long view, longer

than any lookout azimuth, isn't the whole of creation just a

from ethereal big bang stardust; to

galactic sunlight; to the panoply of elements and

compounds; the solid state logs and cabinetry and glass and

metal hardware of the lookout; the tight-wound copper of harp

strings; or the shaking, baking flesh and blood of all of us

transient tenants; And now, the gaseous burst of the lookout's

climactic blowout; and the flickering green of this piano

pyre — mere phase change, all of it.

And wouldn't the same karmic shrug apply equally to the

gathering pace of multi-thousand acre conflagrations from one

fire season to the next — just phase change on a grander scale,

is all. Or so we convinced ourselves, as our piano sighed

its last. Was that nihilism or realism? Or just a figment of

our sheer physical and mental exhaustion after a week of burn

piles?

Raking up the flames in the gathering dusk, we felt

ourselves as auxiliary agents of entropy — sort of the opposite

of Maxwell's devils. Not that this made us exactly any sort of

angels, either. More like... ghosts. All the more so, as the

twilight drizzle was just now phase changing into frost, soggy

snow was starting to stick on our garden fence and orchard,

just limning the shingles and tree branches — lending an

almost ectoplasmic air to the whole homestead. And hadn't we

just finished a week of parsing our little acre in detail:

laminating decades of layered memories from every cranny

before consigning their tangible tokens to the flames. So that

now all those memories were, in a sense, disembodied: existing

only in the charged and waning daylight between the two of us.

And we ourselves would be disembodied soon enough. Kind of

a privilege, though, to experience even a fleeting

intimation of ghosthood without having to actually die quite

yet. And if individual humans can do that, can whole forests,

or species, or planetary epochs haunts themselves with a karmic

shrug? Heedlessly and ceaselessly anyway, phase change

goes on.

This episode was written and read by Lincoln

Kaye, and was produced by me, Mendel Skulski, with help from

Adam Huggins.

Another version of this story can be found, along with many

others, in the pages of Fire Season II, out now at

fireseason.org.

Music in this episode was produced by Tomoko Sauvage,

Benjamin Kilchhofer, Modern Biology, Christina Vantzou,

Michael Harrison, John Also Bennett, Kanahuaxtli, and

Thumbug

Future ecologies is an independent production, and is

supported by our community of listeners on Patreon. You can

join them for as little as $1 each month, at

patreon.com/futureecologies. We really appreciate it.

Special thanks to Hsu Mei-Lang, to Brandon Hocura at Séance

Centre records, to the Sitka Foundation for supporting our

4th Season, and to Liz, Amory, and all the Fire Season

contributors for 2 beautiful publications.

Okay, that's it for this one. Thanks for listening.