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Far From the Maddening Crowd

I LIVE In a glass house atop an old volcano somewhere in northern Idaho. For several months of the year I look at clouds, mountains, rivers, encounter various kinds of wildlife and a few people—and, occasionally, report fires. I’m a fire lookout. With each sunrise my house is flooded with light, and I wake up to it, along with the sounds which accompany the dawn. The wind accelerates, rippling the windsock which hangs from the southwest corner of the cabin. A rock wren trills maddeningly as it flits from perch to perch. Several golden-mantled ground squirrels clatter over and beneath the volcanic rubble, searching for last night’s dinner scraps. In early July a snowbank still clings to the mountain’s north face. I walk down to it and with some gritty snow scrub the sleep from my eyes. Slowly, then, the world comes into focus, and I take in the view, the poems of geography surrounding me. Dim with distance, the Montana Bitterroots to the east and the Selkirks to the north form rugged horizons. Closer to home, to the south, loom the lower Clearwater Mountains. The wheatfields of eastern Washington stretch interminably into the west. Immediately below, the river snakes through the valley on its way to merge with the lake. At this time of the morning both are a deep blue, darker than the sky, part of the mosaic of colors—conifer and meadow greens, golden and russet browns, rockslide reds and grays—spread over the landscape. Chilled by the breeze and snow, I scurry upstairs to the cabin and tug on some clothes and boots, then mount my backpack with an empty six-gallon water container secured to it. Time for a walk down the two-mile trail to the spring. The first half-mile is over the volcanic talus that forms the mountaintop. It’s heavy metallic rock, and my boots clank on the slabs,