Donna Ashworth Interview
| Hear interview excerpts: | Biographical data |
Today is Wednesday, June 20, 2001. My name is Jennifer Kern, and I am here in the Cline Library with Donna Ashworth, a nineteen-year veteran of the Woody Mountain Lookout. Ms. Ashworth is also the author of three books: Biography of a Small Mountain, Against This Ground, and Arizona Triptych. My colleague Robert Marvin Garcia Hunt is also present in the room. This interview will be part of an ongoing project titled "Fire on the Plateau."
Kern: I'd like to thank you, first, for coming in to be interviewed. I watched lots of other videos before, to try to get some practice in. First, a few questions we'd like to ask are about yourself. Could you tell us when and where you were born?
Ashworth: I'm an Arizona native, back five generations. I think that Mr. Garcia Hunt is a longer-term resident of the Southwest than I am. Born in Phoenix. I grew up there and went to school there.
Kern: What was your childhood like? What was Phoenix like as a child growing up?
Ashworth: There were no paved streets or bus service beyond Twelfth Street. (laughs) That's true! I climbed trees a lot. Stayed in the house in the summer, where it was cool. Read a great many books.
Kern: Did spending a lot of time reading wander you into your education as a lit[erature] major?
Ashworth: Probably. What else would I study? I was a history minor and a lit major—taught humanities in the Scottsdale schools for a long time. (chuckles)
Kern: I wanted to ask you if you would mind talking a little bit about those days as a teacher.
Ashworth: That's a kaleidoscope of impressions that's hard to come up with. I liked the students, for the most part, and some of the parents. Other parents were intrusive. It's difficult to teach when a father has threatened to sue you if his daughter doesn't get an "A."
Kern: I would imagine so.
Ashworth: Right. It was so fun when I moved into a college prep course that was senior elective humanities, that I was allowed to design myself. So I had a lot of fun with that. I liked it. I think I'm not the kind of personality that's good as a teacher. I don't like to tell people what to do, and I don't like to be told what to do. So I was not a disciplinarian—the word was foreign to me. I had to be friends, and elicit voluntary cooperation, which worked pretty well most of the time, but there still was the anxiety of having all those people at probably the most critical stage of their lives, looking at me. The barrage of all those eyes was hard to calm down.
Kern: And this was high school?
Ashworth: Uh-huh.
Kern: How long did you teach?
Ashworth: I was at Chaparral High School in northeast Scottsdale for ten years, and at various other schools for another five, so it would have been fifteen all together. I was so naive when I went into it that I thought because I enjoyed the academic atmosphere of college, I probably would like teaching—not realizing that there's nothing academic about high school. (laughter)
Kern: Did you go into teaching at the college level at all?
Ashworth: No. No, I didn't. There were offers, like, "Could you teach an extra class?" and I was so busy just trying to.... One thing I would never do again is teach English—there are all those essays to read.
Kern: That's true—hours, actually. I teach part-time, so I know what you're talking about, especially I'm in middle school. Another generation.
Ashworth: That's a difficult age.
Kern: Yeah, that's the hormonal....
Ashworth: If I'd see a boy running circles around in the hall for no particular reason, I knew he was a freshman. (laughs)
Kern: …juiced hormonally.
Ashworth: But something happens in those four years—they change a little each year. And about the age of sixteen, the world expands a little beyond this. It goes out farther. By the time they're seventeen or so, they're awake to ideas, maybe for the only time they ever will be in their lives—certainly for the first, and it's very exciting to work with them.
Kern: And then you left teaching, and then what happened? Where'd you go and what did you do?
Ashworth: I had a short-season tower down on the Tonto—three months a year—that I did in the summers. About the time I decided my nerves couldn't handle any more, I quit. "Quit" sounds so abrupt. (laughs)
Kern: Politically correct.
Ashworth: And [I] came up here. I had heard that it was.... People sometimes say "How did you get this job?" I knew somebody who told me how to apply.
Kern: And then did you start as a seasonal (Ashworth: Uh-huh.) up on Woody [Mountain]?
Ashworth: Right.
Kern: Okay, and that was nineteen years ago?
Ashworth: Eighteen, I think. I'm not sure—I'd have to count up. I'm a lit major!
Kern: You do the calculations on that. So how was your transition coming out of Phoenix and being around students and a lot of people, to perhaps your first season up on the tower?
Ashworth: I was very happy to have the solitude.
Kern: How has the lookout changed since you've arrived?
Ashworth: It's a little more weathered, but is that what you [mean]? (laughs)
Kern: I guess, first, Part "A" would be the structure. How have things changed since first you arrived?
Ashworth: A new cabin was built the year before I arrived. I went out and settled into it. That hasn't changed, except that it's developing a few little cracks. The tower stairs badly need painting, or they'll disintegrate. About in 1990—I have trouble counting, I almost said 1890!—we initiated a process of putting the tower on the National Register of Historic Places. So there are two little plaques. Did you see those?
Kern: I saw them in your book.
Ashworth: I don't notice that it gets any more money for upkeep as a result. (chuckles)
Kern: Could you give us a little background maybe into the history of Woody Mountain Tower?
Ashworth: The first lookout on Woody Mountain was in 1910. He had no tower, he climbed a tree. He rode his horse up every day, because there was no road. And if from the top of his tree he saw a smoke, he climbed down and went and put it out. This was very early in the organization of fire suppression as part of the Forest Service. I haven't been able to find his tree. It may have fallen down since then. It was probably large, and the mountain was clear cut by the Riordans—Arizona Lumber and Timber Company—in 1904. So it's quite possible that it was on either the north side or the west side, both of which are quite steep. The loggers didn't take so many trees from there. And that would have been places where he could have looked out toward town. So my assumption is that if the tree is still there somewhere with pegs in it to the top, it's lower down on the slopes, places I haven't found yet.
Kern: And who is the "he"?
Ashworth: Judge Croxen's father. I think Croxen has retired now, but it was his father. And he was the first lookout on Woody Mountain. Then there was a little sort of shelter to put the telephone in—there was a telephone line up there—to figure distances and make calls. And finally an enclosed wooden tower that was only one flight off the ground because the mountain had been cut and there were no trees in the way. But in 1936, I think partly with WPA money, the existing tower was built forty-five feet off the ground, mostly of metal with wooden stairs. And the lookouts were all men until the men went off to the war in the 1940s, at which time women began to take over. Most of the people who've been there of recent years—say the last thirty or so—have been women. It's only seven feet square, about as wide as this table, and squared off. We found that young men just can't handle that lack of muscle movement. Older men and women of all ages are a little more comfortable as lookouts. But most of the males would prefer a bigger tower. Towers are all sizes—mine is the smallest one on this forest. Some are four times that size—fourteen feet square—with a kitchen end and a bed, and you stay up there all the time, live up there, sleep in it.
Kern: I'll ask you one of the questions you've probably heard a million times: what is your schedule then?
Ashworth: I have five days a week, eight hours a day, stuck in one little job. Eight to twelve, thirteen at one. We do military time, makes us feel important—1300, 1700. The last three weeks I've been extended sometimes until sunset, because fire danger is high, and the Woody Fire up on the mountain took so many of our resources, that those were a little left. When there's a big fire going, they usually like to keep the lookouts up longer, so that they can find a fire and put it out before it gets well established. So two days a week I get to come down into town, do my laundry, shop for groceries. The rest of the time I go back up there.
Kern: And then you're there those five days straight through, twenty-four hours a day?
Ashworth: Right.
Kern: And so do you go down and take walks and hikes?
Ashworth: Depends on what time they let me off. (laughs) If I'm off at five—especially if the weather is cool—then yes. I've walked all around, trying to learn the area from the ground. Sometimes on my days off I've driven it. Looks different from the ground that it does up there in the air. (aside about water)
Kern: I wanted to ask you—I don't know, sounds like a strange question—but after spending so many years on Woody Mountain, what is your relationship like with the mountain?
Ashworth: It's mine. I feel very possessive about it. But the other lookouts do too. We're almost territorial—especially since there's no other user on Woody Mountain. It's a little different on Mount Elden, with all those people up and down all the towers up there. It's not quite so personal.
Kern: Do you get a lot of hikers and bikers?
Ashworth: Not too many. Sometimes I joke that two dozen is a busy season. Towers down on the Rim, for example, they could get 200 a week. I have no idea what Elden gets now, because it's the one that everyone assumes is the only tower around.
Kern: I would imagine as a woman, do you feel frightened sometimes being up there by yourself?
Ashworth: That's one of the questions I'm asked a lot. Of people, yes, but not of animals. Just the odd camper who might come up, hike up. You can't tell by their faces whether they're nice or not. There's a locked gate half a mile down the mountain, so that people can't drive up unless they try to find a way to get around the gate and around the fence. And then when they do, they generally lie about it. I'll say, "How did you get around the gate?" "Didn't see any gate." You know, I taught high school—I know a liar when I hear one.
Kern: How do you react normally if someone knocks on your door?
Ashworth: When I'm in the tower, I keep the trap door locked, so that I can exclude visitors I don't want. I lean out the window and see who it is—although usually I can hear their voices as they come up. If they're people I would prefer not to be alone in the tower with, I say, "I'm so sorry. As you can see, the tower is too small for me to entertain the public." And they look up and they say, "Oh, yeah, I guess it is." I haven't then said, "I don't think I want to see you." But if they have their wives and children with them, it's not too small, and I open the trap door and let them in—especially if they know the magic word, which is my name.
Kern: And "please."
Ashworth: Yes.
Kern: Have you had a few uncomfortable situations?
Ashworth: Uh-huh, I was threatened by a man with a knife in the tower one day, rubbing his thumb across the blade, staring right at me, and I said, "That's it, no more entertaining the public." And the district said, "You don't have to let anybody in you don't want to have in."
Kern: And he just wandered up?
Ashworth: He was someone I knew, a former lookout. When I was doing the biography, he came up to answer some questions, and came back several times, and then pulled out the knife. (sigh) No more.
Kern: No, I would imagine not. And so who would you call? I know you have radios, but what would....
Ashworth: There is a radio that puts me in touch with about 300 people, but it would take a while for anybody to get there. The code on the forest is Adam Henry, which is an acronym for—do you want the words on the tape?
Kern: No, perhaps we shouldn't. Maybe not.
Ashworth: Just "I need help. There's somebody here, I need help." And if I were terribly excited about it, I'm only four miles from the airport, where they can dispatch a police helicopter if they have to. It hasn't come to that. But we did have a lookout who used to threaten hikers after dark with a broom handle. "I've got a rifle right here!"
Kern: Do you keep any, I don't know, a knife or anything like that with you for protection?
Ashworth: It's against regulations.
Kern: Or mace?
Ashworth: Yes, I have pepper spray. It's against regulations to have firearms in government housing—and alcohol. I suppose they don't want the hotshots getting drunk and shooting each other. Nobody comes up to examine the premises to see whether I have alcohol or firearms, but I do carry pepper spray on a string around my neck—for people. I don't think it would do anything but make a bear angry.
Kern: Have you encountered bears?
Ashworth: Uh-huh. Face to face…we stood and looked at each other.
Kern: And you screamed?
Ashworth: No, he whirled and went—or she—down the mountain. There's a lion up there. I've found places where it had tried to cover up its kills so it could come back. But you can anticipate what animals are likely to do. You can't anticipate humans, I think.
Kern: Unfortunately not. I should use one of my questions here. Training. I know that's probably another very surprising question, but what type of training might you have had?
Ashworth: None. (laughs) None. They handed me my binoculars and my radio and told me how to get there. That was about it. It's a job of self-teaching, so you're not really even a mediocre lookout for about five years. You need to learn all the landmarks, the whole landscape, so that you can say, "All right, it's this side of A-1 Mountain, so that's going to be this many miles." And then learn where campers usually are in the fall, and where the dumps are. And do not report a train pulling up the slope out of Flagstaff. We all do that at least once.
Kern: Everyone starts to giggle.
Ashworth: (laughs) Yes.
Kern: "She's new!"
Ashworth: "Flagstaff, cancel that." I report to the forest dispatch office, which is on Fourth Street in Flagstaff—a little room with one window. The dispatcher is essentially blind. He depends on the lookouts for his eyes. So when I see smoke, the first thing I do is turn the—well, we call it a fire finder, which is a clever name. (laughs)
Kern: I was just going to ask about that, because I read about it in your book. I don't know exactly what the quote was, it was something like, "And I went to the fire finder to look for my..." something else, I don't know exactly what it was. I wrote the quote down, and I thought....
Ashworth: It's on a pedestal, about eighteen inches square, in the middle of my seven-foot-square tower, with a map on which Woody Mountain is in the center, and a ring that rotates around so I can look through the site, put this wire right on the smoke. Down here there are compass readings all the way around, 360 degrees. That's the easy part. The hard part is, how far away is it? So I will report that to Flagstaff. First I say, "Flagstaff, Woody Mountain, fire flash," which is dumb, but that's what they say, so that's what I say. And it catches their attention in the dispatch office. And then I give them the degree reading, which will be where it is relative to my tower, the distance, and describe the smoke—small and white, you need to throw everything you've got at it right away. White is usually just pine needles burning. Large and black, that's different—growing rapidly, something of this sort. And they'll call back every five minutes or so until someone reaches the fire, to ask for a smoke report. "What's it doing? What's happening?" Because, as I said, they can't see. So they depend on me to tell them how to react. And they like to have long-term lookouts, because they know who's likely to become hysterical and who isn't, and who'd be fairly reliable.
Kern: So you, in all cases, call in every smoke, if you see a little bit of smoke?
Ashworth: No, not in hunting season, or if I can see that it's the ranch down at Rogers Lake, and they're starting a barbecue, and I know they're having a party, or something of the sort. Whatever I do at Kachina Village will be wrong. I know where it is, but the trees are taller than the houses, and I can't see any roofs. So if there's smoke over there, and I report it, someone is starting a barbecue—or in one case, firing up his sauna with green pine. [That] made a huge smoke! And if I don't report it, it's kids playing with matches on a vacant lot. So I'll just usually report it. But there are other times when the Navajo—Camp Navajo, they call it—it was the army depot. Often they'd set off smoke bombs, and it would look alarming. But you'd learn after a while that they're playing games over there, don't report smoke on the army depot.
Kern: Let's see....
Ashworth: Another good question?
Kern: Another good question. You're answering all of them.
Ashworth: It's hard to ask good questions.
Kern: I know I've been spending the last couple of days.... Oh yeah, I wanted to ask if you would talk a little bit about the history of Woody Mountain.
Ashworth: How far back did you want to go? (laughs)
Kern: Oh, I don't know, maybe 1,000 B.C.? Maybe perhaps around....
Ashworth: The mountain is an old volcano. It stopped erupting just before the Peaks started. I know that because the Geology Department here sends students up now and then. I find these little plugs taken out of the rocks—they've been brought back for paleomagnetic dating. So I read some of the theses in the library here to dig up how old it is. It has been a lookout facility, as I said, only since 1910. Part of it is privately owned now by a rancher down through sales, from the first homesteader who received title to the land. It has not much of a history before then, but geologists—or we call it the "archy" department—the archaeologists have come up and determined that some of the shale on top of the mountain has been tools roughed out, chipped out by Indians. And another place down at the foot of the mountain, down by the lake, where they finished the tools, probably to hunt for waterfowl, something like that, at Rogers Lake.
But its human history didn't start, its history in human affairs, until the Hendricks-Sitgreaves party came through, and one of the men climbed the mountain. And then John Woody came along and found a spring at the base, and made it the headquarters for his cattle operation. No one has ever lived there permanently, even the lookouts, even me. It's always been seasonal out there. The base of the mountain is 500 feet higher than Flagstaff. The top of the mountain is a little over 1,000 feet higher. So when it's dry in town and the roads are clear, still the snow might be three feet deep at the base of the mountain. Even the ranchers out there close down operations in the winter. (aside about cameraman)
Kern: And so the name. Would you talk about John Woody?
Ashworth: When I first went up there, I first thought, "Everything else around here is named for somebody—Humphreys, Elden, Kendrick, and here's Woody, 'cause it's got trees on it," and discovered that there had been a settler who was here from the very beginning, born in Oregon, whose name was John Woody. He came up here from Prescott, about the time the town was established, which was for the railroad to come through, 1881, 1882, somewhere in there. That was what he used as the headquarters for a ranching operation. So the names were given casually to places then. That was out by Woody's operation, so eventually it became Woody Mountain, Woody Spring, Woody Ridge.
Kern: And Woody Well. Would you talk a little bit about the process of digging the well on Woody Mountain?
Ashworth: There never was a well up there. There's a thousand-gallon water tank buried next to the cabin that's supplied by a tanker truck that comes up from town and fills it. They did a cistern at one point—it's still there—a cistern which collected rainwater from the cabin roof. It's now locked. It was open when I went up there, but it's been locked shut now as a safety measure. That might be one of the reasons why it's never had year-round occupation—there's no water source.
Kern: So you bring up gallons of water?
Ashworth: Uh-huh, someone brings it up, and that'll usually last—oh, two trips filling that tank will last a season. It doesn't take much water to wash your hair, if you know that it's limited, right there in the ground.
Kern: And so you prepare all your food, I imagine, there?
Ashworth: Uh-huh, there's a little stove that operates on propane, and the refrigerator operates on propane. It was manufactured in Brazil, so all the instructions are in Portuguese, which means I can't figure out how to light it, if the pilot light goes out.
Kern: You have your Portuguese dictionary right there? (laughs) "Reference needed!"
Let's see, how about—I'm taking most of these questions from excerpts from your books—but I read about the Fourth of July competitions that the mills would organize.
Ashworth: Oh, here in town?
Kern: Yeah, if you could talk a little bit about that.
Ashworth: The history of Woody Mountain can't be separated from the history of Flagstaff. And the logging company played a major part in that history. So it seemed natural to talk about the host companies. Flagstaff was in a great deal of danger from fire in the early years. The locomotives were wood-burning or coal-burning, to heat water, to [move] the pistons. So one reason this was a railroad stop is that there was a spring here for the railroad to get water. And the result was that sparks were always flying off, and the houses were all built of wood. There were frequent fires, with volunteer fire departments on either side of the tracks. The south side of the tracks where we are, was not Flagstaff—it was Mill Town—didn't become part of Flagstaff until well into the twentieth century. That was one of the competitive things that they did for fun, the racing. The fire companies would get their hose carts out and push. Sometimes the fire engines were pulled by horses, but it was easier, I suppose, to get men on the wheels, instead of getting the horses out and getting them into the traces. So they'd have these competitions as part of the fun and games of a frontier town.
Kern: I guess I wanted to ask about your history in terms of forest land protection, or kind of where you stand on prescribed burning now, and thinning.
Ashworth: You mean you want to get me into controversy? (laughs)
Kern: I'll get you into political trouble! No. But of course I'm very curious.
Ashworth: The mountain being virtually clear cut in 1904, it had no trees until 1918, 1919, when the first good seed crop of the century came along. And nothing has been done to it since then, because there hasn't ever been any thinning down there. The trees are, you know, they'll be no bigger than this (gestures) and close together, and falling down all the time. The side of the mountain looks like pick-up sticks, jack straws, whatever they've been called—which is a serious fire danger. If a fire started on the southwest side of the mountain, I probably would have to run for it. I wouldn't be able to drive off. Sometimes it's a matter of seconds that it takes a fire to get [out of control]. So you often see it like that. And you don't want anybody out in front of a fire. So I'm all for thinning. As for restoration, restore to what? How far back do you want to go? Back to the dinosaurs? Or just back before Anglos came here, because there was a different situation when it was Indians. There are several tribes around here that would use the area and sometimes deliberately fire it to drive game. So a healthy forest is one thing. Restoration is a word I'm not sure I understand.
Kern: It's bringing us a lot of questions as well. That was the same question we were posing this past couple of weeks: when and how do they decide what is the healthiest forest?
Ashworth: Right. The forest that was there naturally when we came in from the East was essentially grassland. There was more actual space devoted to grass than to trees, and the trees were widely separated. The larger ponderosa pines don't take fire easily, so you could have a ground fire sweep across periodically, kill the smaller trees, and it would essentially landscape the forest. That was healthier for the trees that are there. Some of these little trees are sixty years old. They haven't had room enough to grow, not enough light, not enough water. It's not healthy for the trees that are there. It makes it very hard to go hiking, too!
Kern: Has the tower ever been in danger in its history, has fire ever touched it?
Ashworth: Not that I know of. I talked with one lookout who said at one point the fire boss called her—the fire was clear down on 239, south of Rogers Lake—and said, (gruffly) "Rosanna, if we don't"—he talked like that—"if we don't catch this fire short of the road, we're not gonna catch it. Pack up!" So she spent a couple of hours getting everything loaded in her car, and he called back and said they had it, she'd be all right, she didn't have to evacuate. I think that's the closest that threat has come to the tower.
Kern: And since you've been there, you never had any calls like that?
Ashworth: No.
Kern: Luckily. Did you ever think about firefighting?
Ashworth: I tell people I want a job I can do barefoot. There are women on the fire crews. There are women who do the job well. There are men who don't. So I have no objection to a woman being in fire. It never has been a childhood dream. (laughs)
Kern: Not mine either, actually. It's becoming less and less, when I keep going out to the fire, I think. Documenting it is one thing, but being on the front lines is a different thing.
Ashworth: Right. A lot of people in the family have fought fires, so I hear their stories when they come home. It sounds quite dangerous, and dirty, and difficult, and exhausting, and you have to like ham sandwiches, because that's what you get to eat a lot of.
Kern: Were some of your brothers—you just mentioned your family....
Ashworth: Uh-huh. Others who were lookouts. Firefighters. Some patrolmen, one who was sort of an engine driver down on the South Rim, which was very nice when I was learning about it, because I could ask what the fire was like from their point of view. This Leroux Fire up here was fascinating until they all got there, and then they moved over to a frequency I couldn't pick up on my radio. I could see everything about it, but I had no idea what they were doing, because I couldn't hear their voices talking with each other. I had to make guesses about the strategy.
Kern: So do you call in, like in the case of the Leroux, will you call in and ask for updates?
Ashworth: Not really. (laughs)
Kern: Do you get special privileges to information?
Ashworth: (laughs) No. They're busy.
Kern: "Keep your eyes open…don't worry what we're doing down here!"
Ashworth: No, I'm pretty ignorant. It's kind of frustrating to know the beginning of the story and not know all that goes on.
Kern: Was that in your area, did you call that one?
Ashworth: Elden saw it first and reported it. Of course every time Elden says "fire," I'm alert. And he gave the distance and the direction and I said, "I don't see anything out there. Where is it?!" Picked up the binoculars and looked and still didn't see anything, and finally saw a tiny wisp of smoke coming up from the trees, and gave my reading on it. When the reading from one tower comes down here, and from another tower goes across it, they know then that the fire is exactly—where the two lines cross. It's very high-tech. They pull out a string. (laughs)
Kern: Do you communicate throughout the day or the evening with the other lookouts?
Ashworth: Often—especially after hours. But usually it's quite formal. It's potentially an emergency situation at any moment, so we can't get on there and chat with 300 other people listening. We can say, "Did you say 'extend 'til 1800'?" "Affirmative." But there's no question of, "Let me tell you a good story I just heard," or anything like that.
Kern: Do you have a telephone?
Ashworth: I have a cell phone at the bottom, but it's my personal phone, and it's not up in the tower. So in the tower communication is through this radio, which weighs twelve pounds, and was the technology they used in the Korean War. It's old, but I know how to use it.
Kern: So tell us, once you're off officially, what do you start to do with yourself in the seven…
Ashworth: In the winter?
Kern: I actually meant at the end of a day when you're off service.
Ashworth: Oh! That depends on how cold and windy it is, how many ladybugs are flying. One ladybug is cute, a million ladybugs are not cute, when you have to do this (fans the air with hands) to get from the tower to the cabin door because....
Kern: They come in swarms.
Ashworth: They're really thick, all over everything, and they bite. They're carnivores, you know—they eat other bugs. It's not like a mosquito bite that will leave a welt, but it's annoying.
Kern: Are they in season now, or all summer?
Ashworth: This hasn't been a heavy year for ladybugs. Periodic, depending on factors I don't understand. I guess sometimes I hike, sometimes I go around and clean up the area—cans from former years. Whatever I'm in the mood for.
Kern: Any garbage?
Ashworth: I bring it down—and the laundry.
Kern: Okay, so your five months of service is officially over, and then do you have a list of things usually that you're tackling?
Ashworth: Usually questions—a lot of questions—especially now that I'm trying to recover the history of the women in Flagstaff. It's very frustrating. In the biography, I was mostly talking about men, because it was the men from town that touched the mountain, until the women lookouts went up there. But finally I said, "We have to recover the women somehow." And I was fascinated with the woman John Woody married. Two divorces in this town in the 1890s, three children, which she raised alone, and I couldn't figure out how she did it. And she was one of the signers of the incorporation petition in 1894 because she owned property in her own right. So I was trying to find some clue to what kind of person she was. She was married originally, first, to a man named Barney, whose name is on the map for Barney Pasture, pointing south of me down the ridge.
One day I was talking with Duane Miller, down at the DK Ranch on the north shore of Rogers Lake and said, "I kind of hoped that I could find some connection between Barney and Barney Pasture," and he said, "Well, I've got old Dick Barney's Christmas card, I'll send you up his address." He sent up the whole Christmas card with the return address in Albuquerque. So I wrote to the man, Dick Barney, and explained what I had found about this woman, and asked if he knew whether there was any connection with his family. He said, "I think you have discovered my grandmother. We never knew what happened to her." So I said, "Well! Will I use her as a subject for fiction, since you didn't know anything about her and none of the family?" and sent them her coffee cake recipe, and used her as the basis for half of Against This Ground.
The other half, since Biography of a Small Mountain was already pretty big, I hadn't had a chance to say what it's like to be a lookout up here, so I did that in a half, and wove the two together, back and forth, back and forth.
Kern: Yeah, it's great.
Ashworth: Thank you.
Kern: In between sentences. Keeps you going, I've been reading it. (imitates sound of pages flipping fast) "I can't believe she's going to…!" So what are you working on now, in terms of your literature?
Ashworth: Right now, I'm trying to do a history of the medicine in Flagstaff, with a focus on the doctors' wives. The first thing I have to do is find their first names, which is not easy, and they're not usually covered in the newspaper, and it's often a question of guessing from small clues, like, you paid a personal property tax in the nineteenth century. If you had a watch, it was taxed. If you had books, they were taxed. If you had a piano, you paid a tax on it. Or a bicycle. Okay, so I was going through all these old tax records and discovered that one of the doctors had a piano. Well, I doubt he played it. So okay, I can say that Dr. Brannen's wife played the piano. Dr. Cornish's [phonetic] wife had a piano and a bicycle. Dr. Manning's wife didn't have either. And from that I said, "Okay, I can stereotype and say which kind of woman it was, just from a little thing like that in the tax records." It's frustrating, it takes years. You'll pick up a detail that you're so delighted about, and people will say, "How's it going, Donna?" and you say, "She had blue eyes!" And you can hear them think, "I had to ask." (chuckles)
Kern: How about finding journals?
Ashworth: The only journals that I've found that have been of great value have been the correspondence from the AL&T offices; T.A. Riordan's are in the library. Those people, if your grandmother were to die, would you throw away most of her things that didn't mean anything to you? They tossed them, not realizing that that's history, that they do remember.
Kern: And so where are you at right now in terms of....
Ashworth: I'm up to about 1900, and finding some fascinating things. There was no licensing of doctors in Arizona Territory until 1903, for example. So for the first twenty years of Flagstaff's history, the doctors were not operating under any kind of regulation, but could practice medicine as they chose. They cured people (chuckles) I guess.
Kern: When did Flagstaff see her first female doctor?
Ashworth: It was in Williams. There was a woman who came through once, to work on the Indian reservation. But in that first twenty years, there were no women doctors—no women dentists, as far as I know. A woman's career was to marry and take care of the house and the children.
Kern: I imagine that World War II was the big shift for women in terms of entering entrepreneurs?
Ashworth: Women and men. There were professional women in the East, but we were on the frontier out here, and older standards applied, I think—which didn't mean that Dr. Cornish's wife didn't ride her bicycle.
Kern: And have you had luck with photographs such as the ones here?
Ashworth: Some, yes.
Kern: So what would the social life have been like for the women, of, say, 1900, where you're at now?
Ashworth: Mostly through the church, as far as I can tell. There were seven fraternal societies for men in Flagstaff, none for women; but the women were involved with the churches, and they were always holding fairs, selling their handwork to make money for things like that. They seemed to be fairly self-segregated by church membership. There were three churches: Catholic, Presbyterian, and Methodist.
Kern: And how about segregation by class?
Ashworth: It was probably intense. There was no question of segregation by race, as far as I know. The Chinese women weren't here yet. There were very few blacks in northern Arizona, until the 1920s, 1924. There were some Hispanics that had come in from New Mexico, that were here before the Anglo settlers were, but most of them were south of the tracks down here in Mill Town, working for the logging company.
Kern: So were the women working at the lumber mills?
Ashworth: No. No, they stayed home and took care of the house. As far as I've been able to tell, there was no population of Indians from the surrounding tribes until World War II. They call it Navajo Army Depot because so many Indians came out there. After the war, they moved into town, and then you have Indian children in the schools. History of Flagstaff, up until the end of the 1930s was essentially of European extent, which is unfortunate, but that's the way it was. It wasn't like New Mexico, where there were so many more Hispanics. (aside about interviewing process)
Kern: Do you have friends or associates who might have been some of the first women to serve as firefighters?
Ashworth: Yes. Firefighters, or fire lookouts?
Kern: Either or both.
Ashworth: The first women who fought fire did not have an easy time of it. The wives of the men were quite suspicious, and the men were proud of doing this brave, dangerous job, and they resented women coming in to do it, and they.... The women would walk by, the men would hit them on the sides of their hard hats and leave bruises on their bodies. It wasn't easy in most occupations, I think, for women to move in. It wasn't easy for them here.
Kern: When were the doors first opened in terms of firefighting—the seventies?
Ashworth: Title IX, as I remember. That's the word I keep hearing. There are still men who resent women. But there are regulations, and they were supposed to have a certain percentage of the crew female. There's some bitterness. But that also means I get my job because I count as part of the fire organization—therefore I'm one of the token females.
Kern: Title IX. But I would imagine that amongst the tower folks, there wouldn't be the same type of resentment?
Ashworth: No. Lookouts are casually, about half, male and female. I think it's just a question of who applies for the job, who wants it. Women aren't having to fight for their jobs as lookouts.
Kern: Do you have any plans of going anywhere from your lookout anytime soon?
Ashworth: No. I tell them I'm going to be up there until I can't climb the stairs anymore. And if they try to fire me, I'll chain myself to the tower and call the newspapers.
Kern: Is there any movement to do any more logging up in that area that you've heard of?
Ashworth: No logging at all that I know of. Most of what they want to get rid of now is the small trees, and it's the big trees that are profitable for logging companies, which makes it a problem when you're starting to thin. Who's going to do it? What are you going to do with the little trees that you cut down?
Kern: I would think that there would be something they could do with little trees.
Ashworth: Pulp, yes.
Kern: The chips. Firewood.
Ashworth: Right. But commercial logging isn't interested in that kind of scale. So we've worked ourselves into—I'm not complaining about environmentalists, although I realize that in some circles around here it's a dirty word. The ranchers, for example.
Kern: Kind of a pity sometimes. I suppose the environmentalists—and correct me, because I very well could be wrong—but the environmentalists want the cattle off the land.
Ashworth: Uh-huh. I've been with both now, all this time—the cattle and sheep. Sheep especially aren't regulated about how long they can stay on any one piece of land. And frankly, I think the recreationalists do more damage than any kind of grazing does. They tear around all over the place in their ATVs or their motorcycles, set fires that we have to put out, and there hasn't been any lightning for a long time. All these fires we're having were human caused. I don't know how you would restrict human entry into the forest. I also have friends who are ranchers, who have been ranchers for generations, and I know that it's a precarious financial situation for them. Sometimes they barely manage. I don't think that the small ranchers are the villains that they're sometimes made out to be. The Montrose [phonetic], with their sheep around here, do a good job of managing.
Kern: So there aren't any restrictions in terms of the type of vehicles that you mentioned?
Ashworth: Not that I know of. They drive around my gate or under it. We've tried—"we," collective pronoun—I don't close anything. I just sit up here in the air. The area that I'm in is crisscrossed with old logging roads that have been used for decades now. There's been a move to try to close those off to vehicles, which is one of the issues with the Leroux Fire, whether the Friedlein Prairie Road should have been closed.
Kern: So what do you think, what is your opinion on that, that road?
Ashworth: I've driven that road, and I like to be up there. If we can make humans more responsible, we wouldn't have the problem. But I don't know how you do that.
Kern: I was wondering…do they have workshops? Do they offer some sort of "this is how you camp, and this is how you extinguish...."
Ashworth: Sure. You should have to have a license. (laughter)
Kern: Well, you know, we're all laughing about it, but do you think after you get to a certain point....
Ashworth: Yes, if you're going to be there. Something happens to people when they get off the pavement and out there in what they think is pristine wilderness, although it's all second growth, and helicopters are going over all the time. They do things they would never do in town. They'll come roaring up there on their motorcycles, put 'em up on the rack, wash over, and peer into through the window of my cabin, trying the doorknob, to see if they could get in. And they probably wouldn't do that in town. They wouldn't throw a cigarette into a pile of flammable material. But there's some sense that, well, regulations don't apply, for one thing. It's kind of funny, especially during hunting season. They can't see each other, and they don't know how many are out there, and they all start their campfires at the same time. I see all these little smokes come up from all over the place, and they think they're out there in the wilderness—not realizing that there's a different kind of courtesy to the land, a different kind of attitude you need to take, that you need to be aware of. And usually they say, "I just didn't think."
Kern: In situations like the Leroux Fire, started by an abandoned campfire, is that an accident, or is that negligence? Where do you stand?
Ashworth: Or ignorance. They may have thought it was out when they left it. The winds had been ferocious, and the wind came, blow what looks like a dead campfire back into life. I don't know, they may have just not cared. People are not all alike.
Kern: No.
Ashworth: You noticed! (laughter)
Kern: You just mentioned that situation where you have, once again, someone knocking, or folks maybe often hunters or campers. Would you call any of that in, or how do you react when....
Ashworth: When people come up?
Kern: Not even come up, but maybe when you hear a lot of noise, and maybe a fire gets a little out of hand.
Ashworth: Sometimes I'll call the patrolman. He has, what is it, fifteen sections, thirty sections—anyhow, it's a huge area, to cover. And I'll say, "Ed, I hear gunshots," or "It looks to me like there's a lot of vehicles down there at the side of Fry Park." And he'll go down and check. Or if I see somebody down at Rogers Lake trying to find the gold. Did you get to the story of the gold in Rogers Lake?
Kern: No!
Ashworth: Almost every year there's somebody there with geiger counters or sophisticated equipment, trying to find the fictional gold in Rogers Lake.
Kern: Is Rogers Lake a natural lake?
Ashworth: In a sense. It's shallow, like a soup bowl, ringed with lava flows, so snow melt and rain run down into it, and there's no exit, so sometimes, if there's a lot of entry (aside about tape) it will get very deep. I've seen sailboarders out there. There's no exit, except that it's on a fault line, and it drains away as the season goes on. Now it's just a meadow where cattle graze. But Tony Richardson, who was a writer around here, who used any kind of detail to make a saleable story, did one about people who robbed a mine and got all these big gold bars up here on mules. And they realized they were being pursued, so "they took them to the deep water in Rogers"—there's never any deep water! (laughs)—"and threw them off the dock." And they went into town and robbed a bank and came back with gold coins, and they threw those in. I think Tony Richardson's the only person who's ever made any money out of that story. But there are people all over the world who read versions of it, and they're down there. Once I saw this big grid of men through the binoculars, so I called the patrolman and said, "It looks like a baseball game down there at the south end of Rogers Lake, but you might want to check it out." A half an hour later he called me, laughing, and said, "Score one more for the 'gold in Rogers Lake'!" They were gridding it, very systematic. People have come out there with backhoes, digging up the lake, trying to find this gold that isn't there.
Kern: All from this book?
Ashworth: Right.
Kern: Amazing. How about have you ever found folks who kind of homestead in the modern sense, that they'll go and kind of live out?
Ashworth: Try to—in a cabin they think is abandoned. Any place there's a cabin, it's homesteaded property, and it's privately owned. And they don't realize that 'til the owner comes along and tosses them off.
Kern: Gosh, let's see. Hm.
Ashworth: That's a good list of questions! You've left space so that you can read each one and write things in there.
Kern: And of course, I could write, but you know, after we were doing an interview yesterday or the day before, every time that—actually, Robert was doing it—every time that the person would write "the narrator," the interviewee would kind of get a little startled, so I thought, "Maybe I won't take notes. I'll just listen and see how good my memory is."
Ashworth: Well, it's on the tape, isn't it?
Kern: Exactly. That's true. My two last questions. What would be your favorite part of your job; what aspect of it do you enjoy the most?
Ashworth: I like the isolation. I like the illusion of wilderness, the contact with the world that hasn't been developed yet—not human. That's my favorite part, humans.
Kern: And then the least?
Ashworth: The least! (laughs) I can't think of anything about it that I don't like. I'm very happy up there with no running water, and a Portuguese refrigerator.
Kern: And I guess you get a lot of your writing done, and you have a laptop up there as well.
Ashworth: Yes.
Kern: Would you suggest that other folks look for a similar....
Ashworth: It would depend. Some people need more contact with other people, or a chance to move around a little more. They need direction. We don't have anything to do. You have to have things you like to do by yourself.
Kern: Would you describe yourself as a shy person?
Ashworth: Yes.
Kern: Because, to tell you the truth, people have noted that quality. And when I hear you speak I thought.... Of course I didn't know you at all—I was just watching you from a distance.
Ashworth: People have thought I was shy?
Kern: Oh, I don't know. A few folks around here have said....
Ashworth: I cover well, don't I? (chuckles)
Kern: So you don't think you're shy—or you do?
Ashworth: I do, yes. I think so. Of course now we need a thirty-minute discussion of defining that word, the definition of that word. I'm more comfortable when I'm alone. You've been very easy to talk with, you've made it easy.
Kern: Oh! Well, thank you!
Ashworth: You're welcome. I don't know how Robert would be. Come and ask me a question, Robert, so I'll know whether you're easy to talk with.
Kern: You must have a few....
Garcia Hunt: I was wondering what type of—do you do your art work, or do you write poetry? Do you have any with you to share with us—like poems or....
Ashworth: Well, the poems in Against This Ground. I've been working with.... Is that bound?
Kern: Yes, it is, from the Cline Library.
Ashworth: Oh! I didn't know they'd done that with it. But the lookout has some little poems in there—they're mine. I work with art pencils up there. The tower is so....
Ashworth: ... round as it is in there. If I said, "There's a fire!" and I was trying get wet watercolor paper out of the way, it would be a problem, yes. Would you, if you were there? Would you work in pencil?
Garcia Hunt: I'd probably explore the…(unclear, too far from mic)
Ashworth: It's difficult to use the landscape around me, because it's so big. I've tried. Let's do this little place where Pumphouse Wash turns and goes down to Oak Creek Canyon. I like looking at it up there, but there's so much, that I have trouble framing anything. You're welcome to come up and try, though.
Garcia Hunt: (unclear)
Ashworth: Thank you, I'll try that. I think the ravens try to talk to me, but I can't understand it. I answer, "What?!" That would be an interesting thing to try. Thank you!
Kern: How about music? Do you play any instruments?
Ashworth: I had a little practice keyboard up there that doesn't make any noise—I just play finger exercises on it to keep my fingers connected to my brain.
Kern: And then you have a piano down....
Ashworth: An electric piano, with a solar panel on the roof.
Kern: For some reason I see you with a flute. (laughter) I was thinking, "I'm sure she's going to say 'I play the [flute].'"
Ashworth: Trevor used to play his flute off the catwalk around his tower.
Kern: I guess there's no regulations, you can have visitors if you wish, if they can fit?
Ashworth: Uh-huh. No one has said anything about restricting visitors yet.
Kern: Do you get maybe some camp groups or the 4-H Club? Do they come on occasion?
Ashworth: Boy Scouts. Uh-huh. They hike up. Sometimes it's fun. Adult hiking groups will come up sometimes. But I'm not pining for company.
Kern: You never get a sense of loneliness? You always feel accompanied?
Ashworth: Uh-huh. Oh, yes. I live with birds, I live in the sky…clouds…and inside my head.
Kern: So when you come back down to Flagstaff....
Ashworth: The traffic is awful and I can only see down the block. Can't tell what's going on. I can see clear across the Painted Desert this way, and down onto eighty miles away, and the mountains west of Prescott. And here, it's.... And lightning is below me. Rainbows will be below my level, and so are helicopters, and so are eagles. So it requires an adjustment of mind.
Kern: Has the tower ever been struck by lightning?
Ashworth: Uh-huh, frequently. It's taller than anything there, and it's metal. There's a brilliant flash of light all around. You don't see the stroke, the bolt, and (smacks hands together) crack! Very loud noise. One drilled a hole in the roof of the tower, but I was down in the cabin, and it was at night. Tower's grounded.
Kern: Okay, so you're safe.
Ashworth: Yes.
Kern: Well, I guess that's good for now.
Ashworth: Got any more questions?
Kern: Robert?
Garcia Hunt: Jennifer's compiled together a lot of the questions…(unclear, too far from mic)
Ashworth: (laughs) It's difficult, too, to encompass in words what the situation is, what I see. It's a good place to think. I still have this if you have time to fill (referring to essay she has written on fire lookouts).
Kern: If you'd like to read that, I'd like to hear it, myself. But like I said, if you're kind of tired, or if (unclear).
Ashworth: [Karen] said plan on an hour-and-a-half, so....
Kern: I'd like to hear it.
Ashworth: You're very courteous.
Kern: No, curious!
Ashworth: Okay, it's only five-and-a-half pages. You still filming? You can decide whether this is poetry or not.
* * * *
Sometimes hikers climb to the top of my mountain. Sometimes I unlock the trap door on the floor and invite them to crowd into my seven-foot-square, glass-walled tower room. They look around at Flagstaff, a toy town from there, and beyond it to the Painted Desert sixty-five miles away, at the Mazatzals eighty miles to the south, and the cliffs of Oak Creek Canyon, and the mountains west of Prescott, at the long line of old volcanoes across the north. They look around and they say, "Wow! This is really neat! I'd go crazy in a place like this." They mean first, the size of the view, and then the size of the room. Judge Mangum says if he were to sentence someone to serve time in a space that small he would be accused of cruel and unusual punishment. The hikers don't entirely trust my sanity. "What are you trying to do, be a hermit?!" Retreat from a world of speed and noise and pressure, from people who complain and throw temper tantrums. Then it doesn't sound so strange to me.
In the morning I stand in the open doorway of my cabin and look around, look down on ranch buildings two miles away, brushing my teeth. There's no need to hurry through tasks—I am responsible to no one but myself—and the dispatcher. No meetings, no shopping, no driving to work. I'm free to stand, brushing my teeth, listening to birds and looking at the sunrise.
Well, okay, it's not a job that would suit everybody. They ask, "Don't you get lonesome?" (laughs) On the Coconino radio I'm in touch with 300 people, hear their voices, know their names, but I don't have to deal with gossip or office politics. All day KNAU plays music I like, and news I don't like, often as not. In books, I'm in touch with the most interesting minds in the country. Lonesome? I've been there eighteen years and lonesome doesn't occur to me. Don't assume too much. It's a myth, no more, that lookouts are eager for visits from strangers. Usually I welcome people who know the magic word—my name.
It's hard to make a fool of yourself when you're by yourself. With no one else around, I can be what I want to be, ease into the peace and beauty lacking in other places. Our Milky Way Galaxy probably contains 200 billion suns, and I can see most of them from my mountaintop at night.
"Don't you get scared?" Lookouts aren't afraid of heights, obviously. Most of us have come face to face with bear, with upset mother elk and deer. They were more afraid of us than we were of them. There's a lion on my mountain. I found a dead fawn covered with branches. Coyotes sing in the evening. A dozen vultures ride the updrafts above me. Wind shakes the tower, lightning strikes it. Rain makes the stairs slick. I'm more likely to be hurt driving a car on city streets.
Probably I won't be mobbed by all three dozen of my hummingbirds. Several times a day they visit the tower, whirring in to examine book covers, my shirt, a flowered cap that keeps sun out of my eyes. If I imitate a statue, they rest on my shoulder. One day last summer I was sitting at an open window, reading, when a tiny bird buzzed in. I moved my eyes, but not my head. It perched on my book and looked at me. Wings blurred, they moved so fast, and it approached my face until I could feel moving air, closer and closer, until I couldn't focus. Tentatively, gently, it put its bill into my left nostril, about the size of a darning needle, clean and smooth against the membrane. When I laughed, the bird zipped out the window. I bet I'm the only woman you know who's had her nose mistaken for a flower.
Last year, a television reporter came up to my tower with his cameraman and sat around for a while, asking questions. Seeking marketable sensation, he asked several times whether anything about the job frightened me. I told him no, each time he asked. That wasn't entirely true—I'm afraid of people—but I didn't want to advertise that. A man threatened me with a knife in my tower a few years ago. Another talked for two hours about why his divorce was all her fault, which was almost as bad. A couple of weeks ago, Jim reported that a man in camo clothing was up in a nearby tree, pointing a rifle at his tower.
But the worst fear all of us lookouts have is that ground units will think we are stupid when we get our distance wrong—again. It would be awful to repeat the record of a lookout who reported the dome at Lowell Observatory as smoke so often that finally the dispatcher's response was a long silence. Jean says we deserve "H" pay—not "H" for hazard, "H" for humiliation. We're afraid of going to sleep after lunch and missing a fire. Once I went to sleep standing up and fell into the fire finder.
Pilots heading for Pulliam Airport frequently line up with my tower and pass close by. I hope their depth perception is functioning. I don't go hiking after duty hours during hunting season. I've watched teenage boys hop off their ATVs and begin to break into my cabin. "What did you have in mind?!" "Oh, hi!" They're always friendly afterwards. People are the real danger, as far as I'm concerned. Shirley agrees. She has elk and bear and lightning strikes, and wind at 90 miles an hour, and wind chill at 40 below. She's more upset by the people who come every summer to pick the ferns that grow in the forest around her. Like the rest of us, she feels protective of her territory.
We have one fear in common with employees everywhere: the new boss, simmering with ideas, who changes things around. A decade or so ago we were told that new employees would be classified as contractors who would be expected to bid for their jobs. The result was forestry students who bid a dollar an hour, undercutting Ed Abbey; and a Navajo patrolman—you know, drive around and talk to people—who didn't have a driver's license and couldn't speak English. There was a while when we didn't know what to do. He bid low to get the job.
"Why did you take this job?" Good question. I had taught high school English for ten years. When I began to have my semi-annual nervous breakdown in September, I wanted privacy, quiet, trees, a long view, company rather than contact, freedom, time. Everybody has a different reason. James says, "I'm just an ol' cowboy [who] needed a job." Eric hurt his knee skiing and took a summer off from firefighting. Ed hurt his foot. Ray liked fire, but was too old to fight it. Scott says, "To tell the truth, he had no idea what he was getting into. He didn't have a car when he reported for duty." Jim says, "Solitude, when controlled and voluntary, is good for the soul. It makes you appreciate people more, not less." We work together by radio, communicate in notes carried by patrol people, but we see each other, if we're lucky, once a year. Shirley, who's been a lookout for sixteen years, says she took the job that first summer because she anticipated big fires. Now she can't think of any place she'd rather be. Sandy's reason, "I come here to feel alive."
Visitors to my tower can see books, pen and paper, knitting, a practice keyboard, an exercise bicycle, and they say, "What do you do up here?!" I scan the land for fire, for one thing, but I can't rotate slowly all day. Sometimes weeks go by without smoke anywhere, and the radio's so quiet I check to be sure it's on the right frequency. You have to have something to do, or you'd be talking on the radio all the time, making a pest of yourself. The Coconino used to have a man who drove around in the forest after hours, smelling of alcohol, introducing himself as a ranger, and inviting people to come up to see him. Lookouts who last long enough to learn the landscape are people who can structure their time without someone else to give orders: people who have things they like to do by themselves.
Towers are different sizes of small, and activity inside is restricted. Beth wrestled an electric keyboard in, put a generator on the catwalk, and practiced for hours. Amy painted watercolor landscapes. Paul worked on chess problems. Scott plays his guitar. Shirley quilts. Ray is classifying ground strikes: he says there are at least four different kinds. Bob built a zither. Jim says, "Everybody thinks he wants to be a fire lookout, but there's no such thing as a normal one. We're all a little nuts."
I've known men who tied flies, and women who carried babies up the stairs on their backs. Once we had a lookout who hung blankets over the windows and watched wrestling on a battery television, but he didn't last long. Shirley Pierce [phonetic] said, "It's been my life," in the hospital, just before she died. Takes all kinds, they say, and it's a good thing, because all kinds is what we have. Usually—although it's not planned that way—we're fairly evenly divided between men and women. A few of us are mid-twenties, some of us are sixty, seventy, or more. Chris is eighty-one, she's been a lookout for thirty-seven years. She won't quit, and they can't fire her—like J. Edgar Hoover. Mavin outranks us all. She's been a lookout for forty or fifty years—at least we think so. No one else on the Kaibab was working there when she started.
All of us are part of a long historic line, going back almost ninety years, that has served as early detection to keep forests, ranches, subdivisions, whole towns, from burning. We live in the sky. It forms three-fourths of what we can see. A lookout lives with weather, not land, not fire. The sky moves and changes—the land doesn't, unless there's something like cloud shadows passing over. Wind blows from varying directions, a different speed every minute. Temperatures rise or plummet. Clouds are not linear thinkers. In ever-changing textures, they move and combine, separate, reform, turn dark, flare with lightning.
On average, half of the fires on this forest are caused by lightning. They're often in hard-to-get-to, hard-to-drive-to places. Ground crews carry in tools and water on their backs and request assistance from air tankers and helicopters. Despite years of the Smokey Bear campaign, the other half of our fires are human-caused: cigarettes, campfires, party bonfires. They're usually on or close to roads, started by people who don't know or understand outdoor reality, and don't want to go more than twenty feet from their cars.
The fire season from 2000 started with red-flag winds that blew down trees in Flagstaff, and tore the roof off the Hutch Mountain lookout tower, causing Jim some inconvenience longer than he liked. The Clover Fire burned 120 acres, and overran a Forest Service fire engine, nearly trapping a newbie crewman inside. And then the Pumpkin Fire on Kendrick started. It was Jerald's first year as lookout up there. He left the mountain on a run, slid through shortcuts, and got to his car at the bottom before a rescuing helicopter could arrive. Several of us were close enough to see every detail, see smoke rising out of the slopes, and soaring upward, not a straight line anywhere, see fountains of flame a hundred feet long on the summit ridge the night the fire ran to the top—in forty-two seconds, according to Ray—lighting the smoke from beneath in golden red. I was eighteen miles to the south, Chris was eight miles to the north. She said, "Man! That thing went!"
A blaze that started near Vultee Arch went across the ridge and was stopped just before it could sweep over Slide Rock. After that, there was a long pause—hot and dry and windy—but no lightning, no rain, no fire. And we were waiting. One big, dry, electrical burst could have been the disaster we were afraid of, the one that could destroy Flagstaff. In the third week of July, active storm cells developed and we spotted twenty to eighty fires each afternoon. Ground personnel were spread thin, moving from one place to another in service after dark, before sunrise. Wildfires all over the West drained our resources away, and left us short of trained firefighters. "Line 'em and leave 'em" and go on to the next was a necessary tactic. On a Tuesday, Ed, patrolling, reported that a small blaze north of Bellemont had been blown out of its line and had gone to 10, 30, 100 acres within an hour, torching, flame length four feet, strong winds blowing out sparks out ahead. It grew to 600 acres before it could be stopped.
In June of this year, Ray saw smoke on the lower slopes of Agassiz before I did. "Where?! I don't see anything." Finally, through the binoculars I spotted a tiny wisp rising above the treetops near little Leroux Spring—right on a road. The superintendent of our hotshot crew was there within a few minutes, reporting less than an acre burning. Wind was savage that day, blowing in advance of an approaching cold front. Within an hour the fire had grown to 30 acres, three hours later to 300. I stood all day watching a fire ten miles away, smoking white, brown, black, even orange, feeling a personal loss.
Smoke is different on every fire: sometimes early in the morning it flows like water. I've seen a river of it move at ground level across five miles, plunge off Woody Ridge like a waterfall, make a right turn into Pumphouse Wash and rush down into Oak Creek Canyon. Sometimes a thick, boiling column will rise straight up until it hits an invisible barrier, and then flatten out.... (blank tape for 2 seconds) ... followed to rain, until it draped over a ridge and sank downhill in the direction of Doney Park. Smoke makes invisible air movement visible.
On our towers we spot smoke, figure locations, report by radio to Flagstaff Dispatch. There aren't many of us: on the Coconino, nine lookout towers are in full service, with cooperation around the edges from seven towers on the Kaibab, others on the Tonto and the Apache-Sitgreaves. Chris says, "Sure I like it! I wouldn't be here if I didn't." We like our jobs, most of us. It's not often that one of our towers comes open. Helen calls her eighty-five-foot-tall perch "a great office job with a view, and a built-in Stairmaster." Nights in my little cabin, alone on its mountaintop, are a joy. The moon shines on treetops and makes long shadows on the ground. In a storm, trees roar and thrash, wind whistles through cracks, and I'm cozy with a book under blankets. I'm working on a theory that if phone calls and business decisions, lawsuits and legislation were conducted from a cabin on a stormy night, this would be a happier country.
Those of us who are long-timers use the isolation, the freedom. Ray says its fun and exciting. Jim says that after thirty-four years as a seasonal employee, he's a fire lookout because it's an easy, honest, necessary job, and because he's lazy. Shirley's reasons for coming back are sunsets and sunrises, birds and elk and bear, and the sound of the wind. Fall is the saddest time for her, because it means she has to wait all winter before she can start again. Sandy lives in a treehouse with panoramic views, sunsets that restore her spirits, and fires for challenge. I make my regular sweep of trees and parks and canyons and mountains, and remember Louis Armstrong singing, "And I say to myself, what a wonderful world!"
Visitors, when they're through with their incredulous critical questions usually have two more: "How much do you get paid?!" and "How did you get this job?"
* * * *
Kern: I've never thought of it in that way. I've never spent time…
Ashworth: Right. You don't even know it's moving, until something is in it like that. (aside about camera) (to Garcia Hunt) So they put you on camera for what kind of people?
Garcia Hunt: We've just been taking turns.
Ashworth: I was wondering how I'd have answered questions if I'd been talking with you, instead of with Jennifer. I don't know.
Garcia Hunt: We kind of mix our questions up…I choose more (unclear) questions and Jennifer has the (unclear) questions.
Kern: I'm obliged to that. We like to switch. It's fun to hear other people. It looked interesting do all the questions with…come back tomorrow, we'll have Robert interviewing. It'd be interesting to see.
Ashworth: It would, wouldn't it?
Kern: Yeah, because I always talk about when I started to learn Spanish, because I lived in Spain for three years. I always would say, even as I was going out of the country on my last day, it all depended on the people with whom you spoke, because I could sound completely fluent and confident, speaking to someone who made me feel calm; and then someone in a business way could say (yammers), and I would just turn into a little child.
Ashworth: Yes.
Kern: So I guess it speaks a lot to the interviewee/interviewer.
Ashworth: It makes a big difference. I have a lot of people up on Woody Mountain, because you can drive all the way up there, and the road's not bad. Elden is a terrible road—you'll ruin your car, try to drive up there. So once a year somebody will say, "Well, I've never read an interview with a fire lookout," and the Forest will send them up. And some people are really difficult to talk with: they're not listening—like the man who kept asking me what I'm afraid of. He knew what he wanted me to say—frankly, I was afraid of him.
Kern: I read the article that was in the newspaper just recently. Then I started to think, "I wonder if she did get a lot of reporters and folks like that?"
Ashworth: That's part of the job, I guess. Most of them are pleasant. I don't exclude a lot of people from the mountain. Well once, (aside about tape), I heard a man coming up the road, talking and talking and talking and talking. His voice never stopped. And I looked down through the trees, and here came this man holding a little five-year-old girl by the hand and talking and talking. She looked up at me and I waved down at her, and she waved back up at me, and he didn't notice. He's just talking and talking. He was saying, "And if you get real lucky, sometimes there's a ranger up there, and they'll let you come in." And he talked all the way up the tower stairs, all the way up, and he got to the top and I pulled open the trap door, and he said, "Oh!" I said, "She can come in." So I brought her in and closed the door on him. (laughs) I let her use the binoculars and find a fire and all kinds of things while he was down there on the top landing. But that was just sort of my own joke.
Kern: I'd like to come up—inviting myself! Robert wants to go too! I mean, that's, of course, at your convenience. I know Karen said...
Ashworth: There's usually plenty of time. I'll give you a map.
[END OF INTERVIEW]