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This is Fronteras, A Changing America.

I'm Susan Morée.

Thank you for joining us.

Philip Connors is the author of three previous books all lyrically written memoirs set in the Gila National Forest.

His works often explore dark themes.

His second book, All the Wrong Places: A Life Lost and Found is a deeply touching memoir about his brother's death by suicide and how Connors recovered from his debilitating grief.

His third book, A Song for the River, is a beautiful and moving tribute to four friends, three of whom were teenagers, who died in the month of May in 2014 in Silver City and unrelated accidents.

His first book and the book, Connors is most known for, Fire Season: Field Notes from a Wilderness Lookout, received numerous awards and accolades, including the National Outdoor Book Award, the Sigurd Olson Nature Writing Award, the Reading the West Award for nonfiction, the Grand Prize from the Banff Mountain Book Competition.

Fire season was called by one reviewer a quote, fascinating pyro- charged reflection.

It was with this book that Connors began a journey of capturing the almost heartbreaking beauty of the Gila National Forest in the era of fast approaching climate change and recording for the rest of us what it's like to work for five months out of the year as one of the last remaining fire lookouts.

In addition to themes of grief and death and the beauty of the still biodiverse Gila, Connors also writes about hope and resilience.

His latest book, The Mountain Knows the Mountain: A Firewatch Diary, is a bit of a departure for Connors, and now he gets to add the title of poet to his list of talents and accolades.

Philip Connors joins me today to talk about his latest book, what inspires him and what it's like to live in the national forest in the middle of fire season.

Phil, thank you for joining us.

Thank you.

Phil you've had an amazing life life as a fire lookout on the Gila National Forest.

Tell us a little bit about what thats like.

Well, I, live on a mountaintop between April and August typically in the wilderness miles from the nearest road.

And I like to joke that I get paid to look out the window all day.

But it's only half a joke really because, yeah, I'm getting paid to keep watch and alert, dispatchers in Silver City if I see a wildfire start.

That's the essence of the job.

Fire detection as quickly as possible.

And then once crews are on a fire, I'll often communicate with them about weather changes, fire behavior changes, if there's lightning moving their way, they're going to want to know that if the wind switches directions they're going to want to know that.

So it's not that my job is done when I call in the fire it's kind of just beginning because we're very integrated into the whole fire management scheme of the Gila National into the whole fire management scheme of the Gila National Forest.

I feel like your books are often about recovery as much as they are about loss and grief.

Is that hard to write about?

It can be, but so much of what I'm able to write about it, I've learned by watching the forest itself because in my time there are 20 going on 24 years as a fire lookout, I've seen about a million and a half acres of the Gila burn.

And so I've been taught by the forest itself about, renewal, regeneration, scarring, followed by healing.

And so, you know, part of my, part of my mission as a writers and an artist is to delve into things that are hard to talk about maybe in day to day life.

But I've often felt artists exist for the purpose of going to the hard places.

So, I've tried never to be afraid to do that in my work.

There's a bit of vulnerability involved obviously you're putting yourself out there sometimes.

But I don't, I don't think you should be in the business of writing or artistry if you're not willing to do that.

I feel like you find solace in the Gila National Forest, and you talk about that in terms of the large, amazing landscapes.

But also, I think you write a lot about the dailyness of your existence there.

Can you talk about that?

Yeah.

Both are part of life there, I mean I can see mountains in three other states besides New Mexico.

So I'm looking at a vast, vast landscape.

But, you know, I don't want to get lost in the immensity of the landscape entirely.

I have my little rituals.

You know, in the, in the new book, I say at one point, you can't spell spiritual without ritual.

And I think there's something to that.

Every, philosophical or religious tradition understands that to some extent.

And so I have my rituals, setting out a teakettle in the sunlight to warm it with solar energy for then pouring it into a bucket to do my laundry in.

Putting my laundry out on the line, hauling water from my cistern, cutting wood to stay warm.

These are all very basic tasks.

Very using very simple tools, buckets and hand saws.

But there's something about the simplicity and the repetition that's comforting, especially when you're alone so much.

I feel like I learn something new every time I read your books.

For instance, when I first read A Fire Season, I learned about the inevitability of mega fires, which I wasn't aware of, that this was before, before, that became so common.

With this new book, The Mountain Knows a Mountain, I learned about haibun, can you talk about that?

Yeah.

Haibun is an interesting form that I didn't know about until a few years ago.

And it involves, keeping a diary and interspersing it with haiku poems.

It was a form developed and practiced by Japanese haiku poets, you know, starting many hundreds of years ago.

And I discovered them through first reading haiku and then branching out into their other works and discovering they weren't just poets, they were diarists, they wrote prose, and they practice this really cool form where they would keep a diary, often of a travel, and they would end each diary entry with a poem or three, and the poems would, sort of be in dialog with the prose entries.

Sometimes they'd be a counterpoint to the prose entries, sometimes they'd expand upon it.

And I just thought, what a cool, interesting hybrid form, and I wanted to try one myself.

So I kept a diary of a season at the fire tower and then attempted to write haiku, which is much harder than it looks.

So you'd think it's easy right.

17 syllables, 3 lines, It seems so simple.

But as with all things that look easy, you start trying to do them.

It's like, oh my goodness, this is this is really hard.

I'm going to have to try and try and try again.

And that was kind of fun.

To make myself a poet, mid-career, as a writer.

I didn't see that coming.

But I sort of embraced the opportunity.

One of the really interesting and unique things about this book, The Mountain Knows the Mountain, is that it also includes additional contributors.

Can you talk about who they are and why you incorporated their contributions?

Yeah.

So that, that's another element of, the Japanese tradition of haiku and haibun.

They often did these anthologies where they got together a bunch of friends and wrote a bunch of poems together, and then made a book out of them.

Sometimes they would, as part of their travelog they would meet up with a friend part way and walk together for 100 or 200 miles, and turn over part of the book that resulted from the travel to the friend, or at least include a few poems from the friend.

And I loved that collaborative aspect of their work.

So I wanted to find a way to bring that into my work.

And I was very fortunate in that, my wife Monica likes to spend time with me at the fire tower when she's free and able.

And she also keeps a journal.

So she had things that she wrote of her experience there.

And sometimes we even compare and contrast a day's, diary entries with each other just to see, like, how did you see today and versus how did you see today and what did you notice that I didn't notice?

In the process of doing that I recognize that sometimes her entries were just richer and better than mine.

So when that was the case, I just turned over part of the book to her and let her step in and write about that particular day.

And then I had a friend who was the publisher of my third book, friend named Bobby Byrd, from El Paso, who came to visit the mountain and stayed a couple of nights once.

And he wrote a lovely essay about that experience of coming to the mountain and visiting.

And so that became the, afterword to the book, because it was in its way in dialog with a lot of things that I had written.

He brought a friend's ashes to the mountain on that visit to, spread a little bit there and he had a pretty profound experience of the mountain his first time there at age 75.

So it was a really neat visit.

And his words just gave a new flavor, to a lot of what I had to say and just added a capstone element to the book.

New Mexico State University just announced earlier this month that they've acquired the literary archives of Bobby Byrd, who was both the poet and the publisher and co-founder of, sorry, Cinco Punto Press in El Paso.

He passed away in 2022 at the age of 80.

That must have been quite a loss for you.

Yeah.

I had come to know him as a colleague in the world of words and as a friend.

Someone whose porch I could sit on with him and talk about the poets we loved and the books we were reading.

So, it just so happened that he passed away fairly suddenly from a fast moving stomach cancer.

And I was in the middle of writing him a letter about my experience of one of those mega fires you mentioned in the Gila.

When he passed away, and I never actually got to send it to him.

So, I also included that in the book as a way of, I don't know, it was sort of a farewell in a way because it was the last thing I was ever going to write to him.

And even though I knew I would not get a response, I wanted to showcase a little bit of the flavor of of how we shared our viewpoints with each other both in person and in letters and on the page.

I have to say I love that you incorporated your partner Mónica Ortiz Uribe her writing in your book.

What is that literary partnership like?

Well it's very rich because we're each other's first readers of anything we write and share with the world.

And some things we dont.

Some things we just share between each other.

We talk about what we're reading, and we are often, keeping our, each of us our separate private journal of experiences that we're sharing together.

Which is really neat because then we can exchange notes on you know who noticed what and who thought what about that experience and you know, you can get into ways of seeing and habits of being by doing the same thing for a long time.

And I have been a fire lookout for a very long time.

And I found myself sometimes just getting lazy with my attempt to see the world fresh from my mountaintop.

And so to see her embrace that place and then write about it so eloquently gave me a new way of seeing a lot of what was there and a lot of my own experience in a fresh light.

And that all comes out of our mutual practice of journal keeping and writing and reading to each other and sharing poems we like with each other.

It's just part of the texture and the fabric of our lives together and it makes life together really rich.

You talk about ambition in your book, and I was really struck by the fact that you said that when you were a young man, you had all these great ambitions, but now your ambition is to dialog with the mountain to have a conversation with the mountain itself.

Can you talk about that?

I was really struck by that comment.

Yeah.

I mean, I think when I was young, I had the typical young person's ambitions.

I wanted to get somewhere and be somebody and feel validation from institutions and the attachment of my name to institutions.

I worked at the Wall Street Journal for several years and you know there was a kind of thrill about calling up my favorite jazz clubs in New York and saying hi this is Philip Connors from the Wall Street Journal, can I get a ticket to tonight's show?

And they would always say why yes of course Mr.

Connors right, and it wasn't about me it was about the attachment of my name to some other well known institution of American life.

So, that has its rewards.

But ultimately, I found them not sustaining enough to stick with that career that I had.

And when I abandoned that career in journalism and moved to southern New Mexico in 2002 and lucked into this job as a fire lookout, I kind of thought it was going to be a paid writing retreat, and I, you know write books and articles and essays and try to publish them in you know hot shot places.

But year by year that, I discovered, meant less and less to me than did my experience of solitude in a very wild and beautiful place.

And I just thought less and less about trying to project myself into the world and instead thought more and more about becoming a vessel through which this beautiful world flowed.

And that maybe my purpose in life was to be, yeah like I say in dialogue with a mountain.

And in some small way maybe the voice of a mountain as it tries to express itself to anybody who cares to listen.

And I never expected to feel that way when I first got there.

If you had told me when I was 30 that that's how I'd end up feeling, I would have probably thought, well that's some pretty woowoo stuff.

I don't know, I don't I don't know what would have happened to me to get me to that place in life.

But it is where I find myself.

And you know, it's just such a gift to get to live there.

I want to embrace every second of it, and all the rest of those ambitions just kind of drop away when I'm focused on listening to the mountain.

Your title The Mountain Knows the Mountain, feels like a little bit of a wink to Aldo Leopold, who is of course is famous for having said, thinking like a mountain.

Right.

Can you talk about his influence on your work and your relationship to him as a fellow writer who talks, who works and talks about the Gila National Forest.

Yeah I mean he's definitely a titan of both literature and ecology.

And, you know, I live and work part of the year in a forest that has a wilderness named after him.

The Gila wilderness, which is our first designated wilderness in the country, indeed the whole world.

A place where we said, okay, we're going to keep this off limits to new roads and anything motorized or mechanized.

You know that idea came from his thinking and observing the Gila landscape and the rest of the southwest.

So you can't help but be in dialogue with him and influenced by him if you care about ecology, if you care about natural history if you care about the Gila.

And yeah his book A Sand County Almanac is definitely probably one of the 10 or 12 most influential books on my thinking that I've ever read.

And you mentioned that famous quote of his where he talks about thinking like a mountain, which has always spoke to me.

But, I also think that there's there are things about a mountain that we can never know.

And the title also winks at a kind of zen circularity of things outside of human control that are beyond our understanding.

As much as we may attempt to understand them.

So Leopold, I think takes me a long way as an example of how to think about mountains and ecology.

But then there's a whole other tradition of particularly Japanese and Chinese writers who wink at this other world beyond our understanding.

So I wanted the title to gesture to both of those places.

I feel like another influence is Henry David Thoreau.

This book, in particular, The Mountain Knows a Mountain, reminded me a lot of Thoreau's famous book, Walden or A Life in the Woods.

Can you talk about that influence?

I'm sure I'm not the first person to compare you to Thoreau.

You mean cranky dudes who like solitude, and I like to write about it?

Yeah.

I mean of course he's, he's an influence.

Walden is among those 10 or 12 books for sure.

One interesting thing about being a cranky dude alone in the wilderness writing about your solitude is it gives you this kind of high horse vantage from which to be a social critic.

You're kind of literally in my case but also figuratively, looking down on the world and seeing how the world of humans has arranged itself.

And something about that vantage and that distance allows you to make criticisms and commentary on our shortcomings as a species or the shortcomings of our culture.

But also you know I feel a kinship with his desire to celebrate self sufficiency and individuality and not necessarily, thinking with the crowd.

It's easier to not think with the crowd when you're not with the crowd.

And I think his work showed me that.

And I've tried to, kind of trod that same path in my own work.

You've spent 20 plus years in the Gila.

You must have had so many amazing experiences in the forest.

Can you think of one that you can share with us?

I can think of many that I'd love to share, but since, this is a half- hour show, not an hour show, I'll give you probably my favorite being hanging out with bears.

When I first went to the mountain I would take these evening speed hikes and try to go as far as I could with the last of the light.

And slowly, over time, I recognized that I was startling bears in the same places over and over again.

So I got wiser and started moving slower and more quietly, and discovered that by doing that, I could actually spend time in the presence of bears.

Just observing them go about their, their, lives and their eating and their self grooming and whatever else they were doing.

And so I've had you know, these wonderful evenings where I'll see a bear back off or angle myself appropriately to the wind so they don't smell me and just hang out and observe a creature that's been there longer than me, that's, bigger than me, could eat me if it really cared to.

And the sense of awe and respect I feel from that experience is kind of beyond words.

Your books talk about loss, personal loss but also the loss of what we're losing because of climate change in the Gila.

How do you hold on to hope?

Well, there is a lot to be concerned about because, we're now a quarter century into the worst megadrought the southwest has seen in over a thousand years.

There's a tremendous amount of ecological stress being placed on everything that lives there.

And, you know, I see it just on my evening walks.

Trees that have been there for 2, 300 years, suddenly dying from drought or beetle infestation or fire.

On the other hand, life is always struggling for purchase there.

If something dies if a fire burns and blackens an area of forest, all it takes is the next rain and something green pops up out of the ashes.

So that I think gives me hope.

Seeing that regeneration and renewal.

Thank you Phil so much for joining us.

Thank you.

It's been a pleasure.

Thank you for watching Fronteras A Changing America here on KRWG Public Media.

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That's amazing.

That sounds so beautiful.

Yeah.

It's one of the great privileges of getting to spend so much time rooted in a particular place.

Are we sorry?

do I need to?

Should I ask one more question, or what do we do now?