Rim With a View

A Writer Comes Back to the Smoke, the Long Views and the Howling Wind

Keeping Watch Over the Mogollon Rim

Wires and cables howled in the wind. I climbed a well of metal stairs trying to get as high as possible, up to the tiptoes of the Earth. Climbing 120 feet to the top of this fire tower, I felt as if I were rising through the taut riggings of a sailing ship, the view opening straight down beneath my feet between hatches of galvanized steel.

With each upward turn of the stairs, the land revealed itself in another 10 miles of view in all directions. Dark forests lapped against a break in the geography below, a sharp edge running from horizon to horizon, as sudden as a sea trench plunging into an abyss.

Like a one-sided Grand Canyon that cuts the Earth in half, the Mogollon Rim is among the decisive landmarks in the Southwest. Here south splits away from north. The barren, articulated buttes of far northern Arizona have been banished, replaced thousands of feet below by rolling mountains of pine.

I had spent good parts of my childhood down there, exploring logging The High View [ABOVE, RIGHT] The Promontory fire tower rises above the trees on the Mogollon Rim. roads with my father, living for brief spells near the eastern end of the Rim at the New Mexico-Arizona border. There were times I believed I would never leave these highlands south of the Mogollon Rim, and I walked for months at a time in my early 20s through rifts and forested canyons, rarely seeing a hiking trail or a human being and spotting 700-year-old masonry buildings on cliff crags, sprouting like stone mushrooms from shadowy depths. I once knew the face of this landscape by its every wrinkle, like November blazing with blood-red maple trees.

For that time in my life, I believed I had found my place in the world, my beloved country, but eventually the desert called me back.

There are times up here you would wet your pants, he told me. No doubt.

Watching the land grow larger as I ascended this fire tower, I felt suddenly ashamed, faced with an old lover I had not called or written in far too long. Coming up these steep stairs, I felt a recessive fear of heights dripping into my blood. Bolts of wind made the tower buck like a frightened mule. At the peak, some 8,000 feet in elevation, a trapdoor stood open above me. I stuck my head up through it into a square observation room and was greeted by a jubilant man, a South Carolinian sitting up here all summer to watch the fires. He beckoned me up, excited for company as I climbed the ladder into his cramped quarters. The wind shrieked at the trapdoor, crying to be let in.

"Yes, come in, come in," the fire spotter said. "I've been watching you for a few minutes."

I looked down the trap door and could see straight to the bottom, every turn of stairs visible. I must have appeared ponderous, thudding up step by step.

I shook his hand and slipped off my day pack, hardly enough space to move inside this one-room lookout. A tall fire-spotting table took up most of the floor space. Huge windows offered views in every direction. Brands of local ranches had been burned into the wooden frame. I noticed right away the man's sitting stool, each of its legs capped with glass insulators pulled from an antique power line.

"You get a lot of direct lightning strikes?" I asked.

"There are times up here you would wet your pants," he told me. No doubt.

The wind hammered at 60 mph against this tiny building, straining the metal cables all the way to the ground. The air was so still in here, and the building shuddering so hard, it felt as if we were ignoring some urgency, shrugging our shoulders in a hurricane.

The fire spotter's Southern twang was disarming. He was probably in his 50s. He introduced himself as Rodney, sitting on his stool to snap off a few comments about the dimensions of the lookout, dry fire conditions and living up here all summer with no task other than staring across this enormity.

I envied him for his job, his view and his patience.

"That's Aztec Peak, right?" I asked. "And then FourPeaks back farther, the Mazatzals over there?"

Rodney raised his eyebrows, but I was not trying to impress him. I needed to know.

"Right?" I asked.

"Right," he said. "So, you know this place?"

I had never climbed up one of these Mogollon fire towers, and the view was like my whole life spread out, one of the rare pinnacles that defines an entire geography. I was right up against the glass nodding, "Yeah, I know this place."

A lightning fire was burning below the Rim, 20 miles south. Its royal-blue smoke highlighted the topography, shifting the shadow patterns so that I could more easily make out forms in the land. In straight sunlight, the country below looks gentle, a sweet blanket of forests-but that is deceptive. The smoke revealed long claws of canyons running side by side down to the Salt River. From this tower balanced atop this grandstand Rim, I could see nicks and highpoints where my memory could stir up a mountain lion walking through camp at night, and then an Apache taking potshots at me with a .22 rifle as I prowled through an ancient ruin.

Rodney kept picking up his binoculars to scope the fire. He said it looked restless, but still a long way off. No crews had gone out there yet. Too remote, he said. We'll see if it gets much bigger.

"Would smoke jumpers parachute in?" I asked.

"That fire?" he asked himself, checking his map. "Yeah, I imagine they would. There really aren't any good roads, and it'd take forever to get in there on foot."

When he said it, I knew the place. Days of crawling in and out of canyons, rigging up rope for a slow freefall off

Gap in Time

Monsoon thunderheads billow up in this view looking south from Promontory Butte on the edge of the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forests. The limestone that forms the cliff face was laid on sea bottoms up to 340 million years ago. Fossils in the cliffs record at least one planet-wide mass extinction. NICK BEREZENKO To order a print of this photograph, see page 1.

See Forever

Views south from Baker Butte on the Mogollon Rim can often encompass more than 100 miles of terrain. Spotters in towers with such views throughout the state pinpoint fires before they get out of control.

along a ledge with an 80-pound pack on my back, wishing I had taken some other route. Send fire crews into that place and they might not find their way out for weeks.

Some people might just end up staying, living off trout and raspberries-not the obscene grocery store raspberries, but tiny, faceted rubies by the hundreds. They would suddenly see an elk in heavy timber, astonished by her dark body as she moves through narrow bands of sunlight. Seeing that, they might never want to leave.

The area below the Mogollon Rim is ecologically abundant, a wealth difficult to imagine from the rust-colored desert to the north-the dry mesas of Hopi, the mittened buttes of Monument Valley. This is an ecotone, a place where one distinct environment meets another, a mixing zone where all manner of creatures mingle.

To the south, I have walked through trembling heads of columbine flowers and bracken ferns, a far cry from the desert north of here. To the south, outcrops of rock are dappled with bear grass, agave and smooth-skinned manzanita, an endpoint of an environmental corridor that runs in a river of plants and animals down into the almost tropical mountains of northern Mexico.

I went back and forth from the windows to the fire-spotting tool, a circular table with a permanent map and a movable sight. I asked if I could use the sight, and Rodney said by all means. It was an Osborne Firefinder, a brass plate set at one end with a hairline slot cut horizontally through its center. At the other end was a set of crosshairs, and I bent down, aligning them with one eye. With the spotter lined up, I looked down at the map to check the landmarks: Black River, Point of Pines. Places invisible to my eye were revealed.

"Remarkable tool," I commented.

Rodney patted it and thanked me.

The radio crackled with a voice, a man in another fire tower. The voice said, "Red flag day, hold your post for 19 hours. Pass it on to Deer Springs. Over."

Rodney excused himself and picked up the handset, verifying that he would keep his post. His tone turned direct and official, alert to the gravity of his job, as if he were a sentinel standing guard between warring nations. He switched channels and then called ahead, "Red flag day 19 hours... pass it on to Gentry. over." The wind was up, the forest as parched as 2-by-4s, and July lightning had touched ground without a speck of rain. Red flag day.

Another crackling voice came back, driven through a repeater antenna, moving the message from tower to tower across the Rim.

I borrowed Rodney's binoculars and focused on the tower The wind was up, the forest as parched as 2-by-4s, and July lightning had touched ground without a speck of rain. Red flag day.

tower he had just called, a gray steeple 6 miles distant. Another stood 10 miles farther. The towers faded beyond sight, each close enough to hear a radio signal from the last, a fail-safe line of communication stretching from the Grand Canyon to New Mexico, the Great Wall of Mogollon. The towers peer down on the barbarian hordes of flame, unpredictable armies that rampage each summer with flaming pine spears.

When Rodney replaced the handset, I turned to him and said that I was glad he was here. It seemed essential that sentries should perch on these needlepoints, keeping watch over this vast country below.

I said, "It will be an unfortunate time when these fire towers are all empty."

He sat back on his stool and agreed, complaining about the government, about technology. He told me that many of the tower networks sit empty these days. Now, orbiting satellites serve as fire spotters, as if a satellite could know by the smoke what sort of forest was burning.

"I don't make enough living to hardly pay for my food," he said. "It can't be that expensive to keep us out here."

Then, we both stared out the window, I who had so long loved this landscape, and Rodney, who had graciously taken my place on the Mogollon Rim.