"In the spring of 2002, then a copy editor at The Wall Street Journal, Connors quit the canyons of Manhattan for the mountains of the Gila. Upon arriving, he ascended 10,000 feet above sea level to the summit of Apache Peak, then another several flights of stairs to the top of a Depression-era lookout tower. There, for the next five months, in a 7-by-7-foot 'steel and glass room immaculately designed to attract lightning,' he spent his days as 'a professional watcher of mountains,' 'a sensei of the sedentary,' 'an aristocrat of sky,' which is to say as a lookout in the employ of the United States Fire Service — the U.S. Fire Circus, he now prefers to call it. He has resumed the post every summer since." (from the
NYTimes review written by Donovan Hohn)
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| One of the views from Connors' tower. |
Connors, from
The Paris Review interview with Maud Newton:
"Once I signed the contract, I had romantic visions of feeding a giant roll of paper into my typewriter and cranking out a record of events as they happened that season in the lookout, writing it all down the way Kerouac wrote
On the Road. Foolishness! As I sat there that summer, the thought of immortalizing my experience between hard covers paralyzed me. I couldn’t get started. So I developed strategies to generate raw material I could draw on later. The most successful of these involved typing long letters to my editor, Matt Weiland, about everything I was seeing, everything that was happening, and just trying to stay unself-conscious about the writing. On my days off I’d hike down with the letters, make a quick photocopy for my files, and drop them in the mail to New York. Anything that moved him or intrigued him eventually led me down a fruitful path. Anything that left him cold I abandoned. This meant that I didn’t start writing the book until fire season was over and I was back in town. I needed time to sift through what of the experience was worth recounting and what was not. The goal became to write a book about watching mountains that left out the boring parts—easier said than done."
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| The Gila Wilderness |
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Connors will be at our Historic Lodo Store at 7:30 tonight to discuss and sign his book.
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