Peshtigo, Wisconsin — ever heard of it? We in the West live in the wake of its history. In October 1871, the deadliest wildfire ever to scorch the United States tore through the little town near Michigan’s upper peninsula. In all, more than 1100 people lost their lives and 1.3 million acres of drought-stricken forest went up in smoke.
Until that time, as Ira Spring and Byron Fish noted, Americans viewed forests as an “endless resource.” Only when the western frontier drew to a close and woodlands appeared finite “did anyone look upon their future as a matter of public policy.” The American Forestry Association was created in 1875, leading to an 1891 act in which “Congress gave the president authority to withdraw public lands and establish forest reserves.” Thus followed Teddy Roosevelt, Gifford Pinchot and the U.S. Forest Service, a new federal agency with dominion over hundreds of millions of acres, mostly in the West.
Soon after, the fire lookout was born.
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Come summertime, when I venture into the high country of the North Cascades, I pay homage to Peshtigo and the influence of wildfire in my life. My favorite journeys are always to fire lookouts, wee pagodas strapped by gravity and guy wire to thumbnails of glacier-polished stone. It’s there amid the wind-twisted fir and delicate heather, when my breath settles and my gaze turns to deep-green valleys and serrated ridges, that I recall the American story symbolized by a firewatcher: the rugged individualist, adventurer turned steward, poet on a peak.
Sourdough Mountain fire lookout, North Cascades National Park (Todd Burley).
I met my first lookout when I was 21, while a senior at DePauw University in Indiana. At the end of a modern poetry class, professor Opdahl asked us to “discover a masterpiece,” to find a poem we had not discussed as a group and deliver a paper and presentation about its merits. Here’s what caught this Hoosier’s eye:
Mid-August at Sourdough Mountain Lookout
Down valley a smoke haze
Three days heat, after five days rain
Pitch glows on the fir-cones
Across rocks and meadows
Swarms of new flies.
I cannot remember things I once read
A few friends, but they are in cities.
Drinking cold snow-water from a tin cup
Looking down for miles
Through high still air.
Its author was new to me, a West Coaster named Gary Snyder. He penned the poem in the early 1950s when he was only a little older than I was upon reading it. I was captivated by his attention to landscape: crisp, archetypal images, as if the words had been forged by Sourdough Mountain itself. The poem fell into my hands like a rare gem, like a river-worn rock you find on a journey and can’t put down.
I started reading everything I could find by and about my newfound hero. His poetry, essays and translations ran the gamut of his life, from mountain climber, logger and ship hand to Zen Buddhist, environmental activist and Pulitzer Prize winner. I soon learned that Snyder, born in 1930, influenced (and continues to influence) countless people across the globe. I was hardly the first to be moved by his words, the breadth and wisdom of his experience. But all the while, I kept returning to where I first found him — on lookout.
Up to that point, the only thing I knew about lookouts came from a childhood experience in southern Kentucky, when my brother and I joined a bunch of cousins we barely knew in a reckless Fourth of July game halfway up a fire tower. We threw M80s into a distant hollow, watching brilliant white flashes of mini-dynamite explode in hazy dusk light, each roar echoing across creek and cabin on down to Tennessee. Snyder’s lookout was a different sort, and I longed to learn more.
What I found were earthy backcountry tales not only by Snyder, but a handful of his contemporaries. “In the 1950s,” as James Martin explained in a recent essay, “a weary America turned its attention to getting ahead after enduring the Depression and World War II — and in that era of the man in the gray flannel suit, a group of literary rebels hit the road and the trail.” We know them today as the Beats, a string of counterculture writers from William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg in New York to Michael McClure and Lawrence Ferlinghetti in San Francisco.
A few of them landed in the North Cascades.
In the summer of 1952, Snyder manned the fire lookout on Crater Peak, an 8100-foot summit just east of Ross Lake, a 25-mile-long blue jewel that runs north into Canada. Crater was the uppermost post in the range, exactly what Snyder sought when he asked the ranger in Marblemount for “your highest, most remote, and most difficult-of-access lookout.” He returned in 1953 to man Sourdough, bringing with him a friend and fellow poet named Philip Whalen, who served on Sauk Mountain down the Skagit River about 20 miles. In ’54 and ’55, Whalen took over the Sourdough post.
Then in the summer of ‘56 came another friend, a prolific yet unknown 34-year-old writer named Jack Kerouac. He chose Desolation Peak at the head of Ross Lake. When Kerouac walked off the mountain in September, two months after climbing up, few people knew his name — or any of these poets, for that matter. But within a year everything changed. In ’57 Kerouac’s On the Road took the country by storm, introducing coat-and-tie Americans to the Beat Generation.
Some 50 years later, the Beats keep shaping our literature and culture. We can celebrate the originality, the populism or even the vulgarity in their writing, or chuckle at the satiric spoof “beatnik” (a take on Sputnik) that followed, including Maynard G. Krebs, the goateed hipster-goofball in the television series “The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis”? (Yes, Krebs was Bob Denver, who later starred on “Gilligan’s Island.” He can thank Kerouac for his shot at fame.)
For me, though, a journey with the Beats always circles back to life on lookout. The seasons Snyder, Whalen and Kerouac spent in the North Cascades may be their most compelling legacy. From these mountains they drew inspiration for some of their best work, which in turn broke trail for popular nature writing and a modern wilderness ethic.
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As lookouts go, Snyder is my first love, but my favorite is a buddy down the street. Gerry Cook, my neighbor in Marblemount, is the salt of the earth. He’s the kind of guy whose friendship adds meaning to your life by the sheer generosity of his spirit. Gerry is the most senior employee in North Cascades National Park, having worked on Ross Lake since before the park’s creation in 1968. He’s an artist and naturalist with a passion for wild places and good stories. And in the early 1970s, he served as a fire lookout on Desolation, Sourdough and Copper Ridge, all still maintained by the National Park Service.
Gerry’s the real deal. When he describes how on lookout “everyday, all the time, those mountains look different,” you understand it, if only by witnessing how the memory moves him. You laugh, too, as he talks about his first stint on Desolation when he took little food and no entertainment — and a monk’s idealism. Or later when on Sourdough, a lot looser and wiser, he waited for a Cessna pilot he knew only by radio to drop cartons of ice cream and beer on nearby snowdrifts. When a can busted on impact, Gerry says, you’d hustle to suck down the brew on the clock or not.
For 10 years, Gerry and I have taught a class on Ross Lake called “Beats on the Peaks.” Come late July, we gather a dozen people — young folks, teachers, closet Beatniks — and board a barge Gerry has captained for decades. It’s called the Mule. Camping three days at lakeside, we study natural history and discuss the Beats and other writers who have spent time in these mountains for labor or adventure. Published work, lookout logs, an explorer’s notebook — all of it suits our reading list. We also learn about backcountry jobs like fire watching and trail crew, how to read a map, work an Osborne Firefinder or hop on a glass-footed stool before the lightning hits.
Hozomeen Mountain from Desolation Peak fire lookout, North Cascades National Park (David Pluth).
The best part is rising early on Saturday to hike up Desolation Peak and meet the lookout on duty. It’s a full day, about 12 miles roundtrip with an elevation gain of nearly 5000 feet. But the journey brings the words to life, and the words deepen our experience. We swap stories around the campfire and fill our journals with field notes to inspire poems of our own: plant species at trailside, colorful remarks, how pink alpenglow bathes the glacier on Jack Mountain, what Kerouac called a “hundred football fields of snow.” Most of all, we have a good time together, outdoors — “collective Cascadian joy,” as one student put it.
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In the summer of 2002, Gerry, a few friends and I spent a day on Ross Lake with Gary Snyder and his son Kai. The day before, Snyder had participated in a Park Service event called “A Lookouts’ Rendezvous,” including a celebration of John Suiter’s book, Poets on the Peaks, a first-rate history of Beats in the North Cascades. The weekend was the first time Snyder had ventured up the Skagit since 1953.
Aboard the Mule, as cool winds kicked waves across the bow, I asked Snyder how he felt about the impact of poems like “Mid-August at Sourdough Mountain Lookout.” When writing them long ago, did he expect to have such a profound influence on the culture of the North Cascades?
“I was just a kid,” he replied. Those poems started out as “journal sketching notes, with a little haiku mixed in. The flavor of (the Sourdough poem) is the flavor I caught from Chinese poetry,” which he was studying in earnest during his lookout years.
He described Hanshan, the ninth-century T’ang Dynasty poet who lived in a place called Cold Mountain. I was familiar with Hanshan from reading Snyder’s translations, but had never fully grasped the tradition of which he was a part. Hanshan was but one in a long line of poets, century after century, who wrote about the Chinese mountain country and lessons of a hermit’s life. Finishing this, Snyder looked at me as if waiting for a nod that I understood. Still, I needed to hear more.
“You see, ours is a baby culture,” he said, adding that we needed a hundred poets on Sourdough and a thousand other peaks to create a rooted culture here. “I was only one.”
With that I understood.
Over the years, I’ve returned to the poets on our peaks many times, and I’ve never grown tired of them. Just like I never tire of hearing Gerry’s stories or hiking with literary pilgrims up Desolation. That would be like growing weary of wildflowers in the high country or the chill of snow melt in a summertime stream. Every lookout journey — every story we share about Peshtigo, the Beats and busted beer cans — sustains us.
Indeed, retelling the tales is as important as first hearing them. The words root us in the land and bind us to each other.
