fire season field notes from a wilderness lookout

But Connors discovered he wasn’t done exploring what that had to offer, so the column became a 5,000-word essay, then a 10,000-word one, then “A Song for the River” was born.īut the voices aren’t all melancholy. That ponderance became a column in the Daily Press. He was literally walking in his friend’s footsteps - something he only ended up doing because he could not hike into his lookout that year due to problems with his hips. It was while walking in the burn scar on Signal Peak the year following his friend’s death that the seeds of the story began to germinate, Connors said. “It felt like a story about my friends and neighbors for my friends and neighbors.” “This was a way to honor them and bring them into a community story,” Connors said. It is about the deaths of the three young Aldo Leopold High School students, Ella Kirk, Michael Mahl, and Ella Myers, who were killed along with their pilot, Peter Hochla, an Albuquerque-based psychiatrist, while flying over the Signal Peak burn when their plane crashed. John was engaged to marry fellow fire spotter Teresa Beall, who later returned some of John’s ashes to the Gila. It is about the death of his friend John Kavchar, a fellow fire spotter, the Signal Peak lookout, who spotted the Signal Fire, and was later found dead in its burn scar - pinned beneath his dead horse, who likely stumbled on some rubble.

It meanders, lyrical, rippling over stones. It’s about fires and floods in the Gila, ashes, and what grows back out of the ashes, love and loss and resilience and what people can bear, and what they can bear with grace.”Ĭonnors’ writing flows with the rhythm of the river. It was like a stone in a pond and each ripple became a thread. “The other books were linear,” he explained, answering a question during Thursday afternoon’s reading.

In his third book, Connors returns to the land he loves - the Gila - and the people - and characters - who call it home. His second book, “All the Wrong Places,” published in 2015, is a memoir about living in the shadow of his brother’s suicide. Amazon also named it best nature book of the year in 2011. His first, “Fire Season: Field Notes From a Wilderness Lookout,” published in 2011, which detailed one of his then nine seasons working as a fire spotter on the forest, won the National Outdoor Book Award, the Sigurd Olson Nature Writing Award, the Reading the West Award for nonfiction, and the Grand Prize from the Banff Mountain Book Competition. This is Connors’ third book - his second about his beloved Gila (the forest and the river). Surrounded by some of his former neighbors and friends in what he said was the equivalent of his second living room when he lived in Silver City - Javalina Coffee House - author Philip Connors read from his latest book, “A Song for the River.”

Fire season field notes from a wilderness lookout