Fire Season Quotes

“The game resembles the act of writing in that you can’t help but compete with yourself: no one is watching, but you still desire perfection, even if such a thing is unattainable. In fact, the toss of a Frisbee is a bit like the writing of a sentence. Each must move along a certain line to keep the game going forward. Each can go astray, spin out of control. At times what is called for is a long, unspooling line, a toss that slices and circles and hovers in the wind, feinting one way before turning back in another, just as a sentence can move in spirals around a central idea, curving ever closer to the center, the heart, the rock. Other times you need a direct approach. Straight and crisp. A shot from short range.”
― Philip Connors, Fire Season: Field Notes from a Wilderness Lookout

“That thing some people call boredom, in the correct if elusive dosage, can be a form of inoculation against itself. Once you struffle through that swamp of monotony where time bogs down in excruciating ticks from your wristwatch, it becomes possible to break through to a state of equilibrium, to reach a kind of waiting and watching that verges on what I can only call the holy.”
― Philip Connors, Fire Season: Field Notes from a Wilderness Lookout

“He [Aldo Leopold] recognized that industrial-age tools were incompatible with truly wild country - that roads eventually brought with them streams of tourists and settlers, hotels and gas stations, summer homes and cabins, and a diminishment of land health. He sort of invented the concept of wilderness as we now understand it in America: a stretch of country without roads, where all human movement must happen on foot or horseback. He understood that to keep a little remnant of our continent wild, we had no choice but to exercise restraint. I think it's one of the best ideas our culture ever had, not to mention our best hope for preserving the full diversity of nonhuman life in a few functioning ecosystems.”
― Philip Connors, Fire Season: Field Notes from a Wilderness Lookout

“catafalque.”
― Philip Connors, Fire Season: Field Notes from a Wilderness Lookout

“no one seems to have sensed this first principle because of a second principle inherent in the nature of man—namely, that generally a first principle can’t be seen until after it has been written up as a tragedy and become a second principle.”
― Philip Connors, Fire Season: Field Notes from a Wilderness Lookout

“Time shapes itself around me in that silence, shape-shifts from mistress to shade, caressing and haunting by turn. Days pass in which there is nothing but wind, bending the pines to postures of worship of an unseen god in the east.”
― Philip Connors, Fire Season: Field Notes from a Wilderness Lookout

“One indisputable charm of being a lookout is the sanction it offers to be shed of the social imperative of productivity, to slip away from the group hug of a digital culture enthralled with social networking, the hive mind, and efficiency defined as connectedness. I often think of a line from Aldo Leopold: “Nothing could be more salutary at this stage than a little healthy contempt for a plethora of material blessings.” I want to lengthen, not shorten, my attention span, and most of the material splendors of the twenty-first century bully me in the opposite direction. The”
― Philip Connors, Fire Season: Field Notes from a Wilderness Lookout

“We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas, but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.”
― Philip Connors, Fire Season: Field Notes from a Wilderness Lookout

“In an article that same year for Sunset magazine, he went so far as to note that in an arid climate such as the Southwest, any grazing at all, even of the most conservative kind, would likely produce erosion. For a high-ranking member of the Forest Service, this amounted to apostasy. To this day, stubborn advocates of public-lands ranching refuse to hear of it.”
― Philip Connors, Fire Season: Field Notes from a Wilderness Lookout

“Norman Maclean once wrote that “when you work outside of a town for a couple of months you get feeling a lot better than the town and very hostile toward it.”
― Philip Connors, Fire Season: Field Notes from a Wilderness Lookout

“I’d rather have drugs and liquor and divine visions than this empty barren fatalism on a mountaintop,” he wrote toward the end of his stint. These words are especially poignant when you consider that two years earlier he’d written to Allen Ginsberg: “I have crossed the ocean of suffering and found the path at last.” For Kerouac, the path of Buddhism proved too difficult, too alien to his temperament, and he eventually retreated into the mystical French Catholicism he’d known as a boy. Its fascination with the martyrdom of the Crucifixion jibed with his sense of himself as a doomed prophet destined for self-annihilation. The essential Buddhist ethic—do no violence to any living being—was a principle that tragically eluded him in his treatment of himself.”
― Philip Connors, Fire Season: Field Notes from a Wilderness Lookout

“By being virtually useless in the calculations of the culture at large I become useful, at last, to myself.”
― Philip Connors, Fire Season: Field Notes from a Wilderness Lookout