In 1913, Hallie Morse Daggett became the first woman
to spot fires from Klamath Peak in Northern California, 6,444 feet above sea level.
A wide-awake woman of 30 years
is how the fire ranger described her after rejecting male applicants
who, in his words, lacked cardinal virtues and were enamored
of guns despite poor eyesight.
Predicted to fail, that first summer
and for fourteen after, Daggett traveled by horseback,
then by foot to Eddy Gulch Lookout Station, a four-sided structure,
built almost entirely of windows, and a 12 x 14 log cabin
in which she slept, although, alone, night watch was hers too.
The fires, she writes, looked like red stars in the blue-black background of moonless nights.
***
Before I knew Daggett’s job was nearly obsolete, I wanted it
and had wanted it since my childhood in the Blue Ridge Mountains.
Our farm straddles the continental divide that runs
the high ridges and determines into which ocean
river systems flow. About a mile above us ,a 100-foot-tall fire tower
accompanied by a small house and barn
punctures the sky. Now, the house and barn have fallen,
the tower is encircled by a chain-link fence,
12 feet high and studded with danger signs,
but each time I’m home I scale it,
climb into the glass hexagon
around which mountains swirl in all directions.
The V in vertiginous looks like an inverted peak, an upside down fire tower.
My body wants to understand its definition: To be marked by turning.
***
This spring the fire tower echoes with birdsong,
their hunger brimming the nests.
How quickly wrens grow. How quickly an acre succumbs
to flame. It astonishes me.
I think of Henri Bergson’s relationship to experimental time,
which, he says, math and science fail to measure.
Pure duration, he writes, is continually in the making.
Was Daggett reveling in this when she wrote: what glorious freedom from four walls
and a time-clock. Later, watching the birds fledge,
I, too, want to revel in how bodies turn continuously
and are marked by it. I haven’t always wanted this.
Years ago, I left a man whose namesake, a king,
ordered a married woman he’d seen bathing to sleep with him,
after which he sent her husband to the frontlines to die.
I watched myself become this story, both the husband
and the wife. Her name was Bathsehba.
The etymology of the king’s name comes from the Hebrew noun for beloved
and the verb meaning to flow with weakness.
I bury birds fallen from the nest under moss
as green and full as silence.
***
Steep pasture punctuated with boulders and gentle cows
surrounds the fire tower. If you sit still enough,
the cows swing their faces close to yours,
inhale your breath. My favorite cow can hardly see.
Her eyes, clouded with cataracts, look like opals
set in the rich gold of her face. I bring her apples and carrots.
When she eats, foam falls from her happy mouth.
Daggett declined the offer of a cat on account of its destructive intentions
on small life—a pair of owls proving satisfactory as mouse-catchers.
She writes of porcupines who kept her from being lonesome,
grouse and quail around her cabin door, raising a chipmunk
on condensed milk, how it burrowed her pockets for biscuits and corn.
She writes of lightning and campfires gone awry. Now, humans
start most forest fires. Power lines. Cigarettes. Burn barrels.
Arson. Campsites. In 2017, an off-duty border patrol agent in Arizona
shot an exploding target at a gender reveal party igniting a fire
that consumed 47,000 acres. Again in 2020, a gender reveal party started
a blaze that killed a firefighter. This year, an ‘eye of fire’ boiled
in the Gulf of Mexico, and for the first time in recorded history
smoke from Siberian wildfires reached the North Pole.
The man named after the king was angered
by how well I start fires, how carefully I put them out
with my boots, stones, dirt, ditch water vibrating
with tadpoles, all of them always spared.
Daggett writes: I grew up with a fierce hatred of the devastating fires… Not until the lookout stations…
did there come an opportunity to join what had up till then been a man’s fight.
***
It took years to understand why the man named after the king
never joined me in the fire tower. The closest he got
was one fall day we made love on a wide rock tucked
in a holler visible only from the tower. The stone against my cheek
burned, the mountains threw our pleasure back.
Bergson writes: the concept extracted from the object
has no weight, being only the shadow of the body.
Before the fire tower was shut down, it was looked after by a woman
with a young son. I’ll never know if my memories
are second hand: waist-length black hair, grey eyes, face tan,
so beautiful you’d look away. Up there she was winter’s prey.
When the snow rose too high to ride her horse,
toddler strapped to her back, farmers hiked up provisions. Her name?
No one remembers. I call her the Fire Watcher.
***
Until this year, the number of acres burned in California never
surpassed two million. As of October, four million acres
have succumbed to more than 8,200 fires. A vein of flame
along the ridgeline, bitter smoke, visited us once —
Our neighbor refused to leave, sprayed the barn
all night with garden hoses. One of her fields contained
a pond into which goats and sheep fled.
Singed, water-logged, dead, we buried them all.
Newspapers featured Daggett’s appointment—
Lonely Forest Post Guarded by Woman;
Girl’s Lonely Vigil in Forest—reporting that never before had fires
been identified so swiftly. The fire our neighbor fought
was started by five drunk hikers.
That night, I dreamt of flames so high
the sun, moon, even the stars melted,
glazing valleys, animals, towns.
***
It’s fall again. Below me, mountains whorl like red-ink fingerprints.
The Fire Watcher was heavily pregnant her first season.
I know what it is to be pregnant, but not heavily,
and certainly, unlike Bathsheba,
I’ve never given birth to a wise king.
I like to think we—the Fire Watcher, Bathsheba, I, Daggett—
forsook whatever life we had before out of wisdom;
though, wisdom and resignation can feel the same.
The mountains teach me beauty makes the heart
malleable, a consolation,
but that beauty can, on the other hand,
inure us to destruction.
A dry fall yields bright leaves. We marvel, forgetting
the heat wave in the North Pole.
Two fires set against each other
will burn out. We’ll burn out.
The earth shows us this. Forgiveness, like beauty,
used to overtake me.
The man named after the king
had inuring eyes
the color of lichen and stone. All I had to do
was focus on the upset in his face
and I’d ask for forgiveness, or give it. So many stable views,
writes Bergson, of the instability of the real.
Before drowning, one of the ewes caught fire. I found her
floating in the reeds, fleece charred,
a bloody lamb hanging halfway out of her.
Burnt wool smells like human hair,
and all triploblastic animals have cardiac cells that keep
the heart beating—even briefly after death—
but only humans know the cells exist. To fire, it’s all the same.
Unlike us, it burns to live, not to kill. It harms
without intention, without sentience.
I admire how it survives.
Fire’s purity draws a line between nature’s instinct
and the cruelty of modern life. Look closely, history shows us
the past is a crime; still, human cruelty doesn’t make sense.
We’re cruelest to those on whom we most depend
and those who most depend on us.
Children, lovers, the earth.
***
I began to fear the man named after the king when his tenderness
began to give way to cruelty—
precise and unexpected, until I began to expect it, always,
as horses beaten around the head do,
eventually shying from hands holding grass, grain, even sugar.
Though I’d known of him for years, I’d never
so much as glanced his way until the morning we
embraced, each leaving the ground in the other’s arms.
That whole day spent talking.
He listened to me. He followed me home.
Bergson writes: Our inner life may be compared to the unrolling of a coil… for our past follows us, it swells
incessantly with the present that it picks upon its way; and consciousness means memory.
The Fire Watcher gave birth alone. The father? A mystery.
The old country doctor did nothing
but sign the birth certificate. With the last contraction,
as the baby’s shoulders rotated from her body,
the head—round, wet, velvet—between her legs
must have felt impossible as time.
Impossible as Dagett thriving all alone.
Impossible as Bathsheba, raped, giving birth
to a wise king. Impossible as the earth in its persistence.
Impossible as wildfire. Impossible as the man I love,
finally, gone. Impossible as spring. Impossible as fall.
Pure duration. Impossible.