Connors, Philip Fire Season ISBN 13: 9781444812091

Fire Season - Softcover

9781444812091: Fire Season
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In the tradition of Desert Solitaire and Shop Class as Soulcraft, this is a remarkable debut from a major new voice in American nonfiction -- a meditation on nature and life, witnessed from the heights of one of the last fire-lookout towers in America.

For nearly a decade, Philip Connors has spent half of each year in a seven-by-seven foot fire-lookout tower, ten thousand feet above sea level in one of the remotest territories of New Mexico. One of the least developed parts of the country, the first region designated as an official wilderness area in the world, the section he tends is also one of the most fire-prone, suffering more than thirty thousand lightning strikes each year. Written with gusto, charm, and a sense of history, Fire Season captures the wonder and grandeur of this most unusual job and place: the eerie pleasure of solitude, the strange dance of communion and mistrust with its animal inhabitants, and the majesty, might, and beauty of untamed fire at its wildest.

Connors' time up on the peak is filled with drama -- there are fires large and small; spectacular midnight lightning storms and silent mornings awakening above the clouds; surprise encounters with long-distance hikers, smokejumpers, bobcats, black bears, and an abandoned, dying fawn.

Filled with Connors' heartfelt reflections on our place in the wild, on other writers who have worked as lookouts -- Jack Kerouac, Edward Abbey, Norman Maclean, Gary Snyder -- and on the ongoing debate over whether fires should be suppressed or left to burn, Fire Season is a remarkable homage to the beauty of nature, the blessings of solitude, and the freedom of the independent spirit.

As Connors writes, ''I've seen lunar eclipses and desert sandstorms and lightning that made my hair stand on end. I've watched deer and elk frolic in the meadow below me and pine trees explode in a blue ball of smoke. If there's a better job anywhere on the planet, I'd like to know what it is.''

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From the Back Cover:

For a decade Philip Connors has spent nearly half of each year in a 7' x 7' fire lookout tower, 10,000 feet above sea level, keeping watch over one of the most fire-prone forests in America. Fire Season is his remarkable reflection on work, untamed fire, our place in the wild, and the charms of solitude. Written with narrative verve and startling beauty, and filled with heartfelt reflections on his literary forebears who also served as "freaks on the peaks"—among them Edward Abbey, Jack Kerouac, and Norman Maclean—Fire Season is a book to stand the test of time.

About the Author:
PHILIP CONNORS has worked as a baker, a bartender, a house painter, a delivery man, and an editor at the Wall Street Journal. His writing has appeared in Harper's, Paris Review, the Nation, the Chicago Tribune, Dave Eggers' Best Nonrequired Reading anthology, the bestselling State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America, and more. Originally from Minnesota, he lives in New Mexico with his wife and their dog.

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  • PublisherUlverscroft
  • Publication date2012
  • ISBN 10 1444812092
  • ISBN 13 9781444812091
  • BindingPaperback
  • Number of pages368
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