Smoke Report
Granite Butte Lookout
June 19
Dear Bec,
I made it! The mule packer left me at the trailhead on Sunday with two months of canned goods and a radio that weighs as much as you do, and I have been up here in the tower ever since, fourteen by fourteen feet of windows on top of a forty-foot stilt, and I can see three states and about a million trees. I wish you could see it. Sunrise comes up out of the Bitterroots like someone pouring it.
The job is simple. I look. All day, every day, I look, and when I see smoke I take a bearing on the Osborne firefinder, which is a big round brass map with a sighting bar on top, and I radio the bearing and a description to dispatch, and they send someone. Otherwise I read, and do the crossword, and talk to the ground squirrels. Twenty-three years in a cubicle, and I finally have the best office in the world.
Write me! Mail comes up with the packer every two weeks.
Love, Jo
June 30
Bec,
First smoke report today! Felt very professional. It was a lightning strike on a ridge to the southwest; the crew had it out by supper.
Funny thing, though. In the evening, just as the light was going, I saw another one. Little gray column, perfectly straight, coming up out of the bottom of Hollow Creek, which is the deep drainage due north. I took a bearing and called it in. Dispatch said there’d been no lightning in that drainage and there’s no road into it. They asked me to keep an eye on it.
It was gone by full dark. Probably just mist. You get a lot of mist in those deep valleys.
July 8
Dear Bec,
Thanks for the cookies, they survived the mule!
I keep seeing that column in Hollow Creek. Every evening, right at the end of the light, the same spot. I’ve called it in four times. Dispatch flew a spotter plane over on Friday and found nothing, not even a campfire ring, and the woman on the radio has started saying “Copy, Granite Butte” in that particular voice.
The thing that bothers me is the wind. Smoke goes with the wind. That’s the first thing they teach you. A smoke column always leans. On Tuesday we had a stiff westerly, the trees were whipping, and that column stood up out of Hollow Creek as straight as a flagpole.
July 21
Bec,
It’s moved.
It isn’t in the bottom of Hollow Creek anymore. It’s up on the near slope, on the Granite Butte side. It took me a while to be sure, but the bearing hasn’t changed and the firefinder doesn’t lie. It’s closer.
And I don’t think it’s smoke. I got the big binoculars on it on Saturday evening when the light was good. It’s gray, and it’s tall, and it doesn’t billow. It’s very thin at the base and wider up top. And it’s not rising. It’s standing.
I haven’t called in this one. I don’t know how I’d say it.
August 2
Bec,
I’m sorry about my last letter. You must think I’ve gone stir crazy up here, the lonely lady in the tower. I’m fine. I’m eating, I’m sleeping, more or less.
It’s halfway up the slope now. It only shows in the evening, but I think it’s there all day, and I just can’t pick it out against the trees until the light goes flat and gray, the same color it is. I sit with the binoculars from about eight. It doesn’t do anything. I’m not even sure it has anything you’d call a face. It’s just very tall, and gray, and narrow at the bottom like the trunk of a tree, and at the very top it sort of leans. Toward the tower. The way smoke leans toward the wind.
I wonder if that’s what I am to it. A wind.
August 11
Dear Bec,
Your letter said to come down. I can’t. You don’t just leave a lookout. And anyway, what would I tell them? It hasn’t done anything. It never does anything. That’s what’s so bad about it. Every night it’s a little nearer and it just stands where it’s got to, at the end of the light, and looks up.
It’s at the treeline below the tower now. Maybe a quarter mile. I can hear it at night. I hadn’t expected that. It makes a soft sound like a long breath let out, over and over, the way a big fire draws air.
The ground squirrels are gone. All of them. They used to come up on the catwalk for crusts.
August 19
Bec,
I took a bearing on it tonight, out of habit. I was trying to be brave, I think. Lay the sighting bar on it, read the degrees. Then I went to call it in, and I realized I didn’t need to: the bearing was the same as the bearing to the tower stairs.
It’s at the bottom of the stairs.
It’s taller than the tower. I didn’t understand that until tonight. In the last of the light the top of it was right at the windows, leaning in. It doesn’t have a face. It has a place where a face would go, and it held that place very near the glass, and I sat on the stool in the middle of the cab where they tell you to sit in a lightning storm, and I didn’t make a sound.
It only stayed until full dark. But it’s never gone backward, Bec. Not once, all summer.
If the packer comes up and I’m not here, please don’t let them send anyone up the stairs after dark. Please. I love you. Tell Mom I was happy. I really was, up until July.
Jo
Forest Service
Bitterroot Ranger District
September 2
Dear Ms. Calloway,
I am writing in regard to your sister, Josephine Calloway, who was employed as a seasonal fire lookout at Granite Butte. As you know from our phone call, Ms. Calloway failed to make her scheduled radio check on August 20, and a district crew reached the lookout the following afternoon. I’m deeply sorry to confirm that she was not found, and that the search has been suspended.
You asked that I tell you everything, so I will tell you the following. The cab was in good order. Her logbook was up to date. The final entry, dated August 20, records a smoke sighting with a bearing and a distance of zero miles.
The crew also reported that the windows on the north side of the cab had been broken from outside. The glass lay on the floor. The tower is forty feet high and there are no trees within a hundred yards of it.
We have found nothing in Hollow Creek. I have taken the liberty of enclosing several letters to you that were found in the cab, stamped and addressed, and the crew’s photograph of the Osborne firefinder as they found it, as you requested. You will see the sighting bar has been turned to the north. The crew left it as it was. None of them wanted to touch it.
With sincere condolences,
R. Haskins, District Ranger
P.S. Our new lookout reports nothing unusual. But in the evenings, she says, there is a column of smoke at the bottom of the next drainage over, standing very straight, and she has asked to be relieved before the end of the season.