The Logbook Before Mine

There’s a beam near the door with a stamp on it, faint, you’d miss it if you weren’t looking, a date and a set of initials that match a Civilian Conservation Corps crew number according to the district historian who came through my second season doing an inventory of the older structures. Thirties built, this tower, like a lot of them in this range, put up by young men doing federal work in the Depression, and it’s strange some days to run my hand along that beam and think about how many people have stood in this exact fourteen by fourteen room since, doing more or less the version of my job that I’m doing now.

Under the bunk there’s a footlocker that came with the place, and inside it, stacked by year, going back further than any lookout currently working this district can account for firsthand, are the old logbooks. Not all of them, there are gaps, some years missing entirely, water damage on a few from before someone finally fixed the roof properly sometime in the eighties by my best guess from the entries. But enough survive that on a slow afternoon I’ve spent real time reading through them instead of my own book, which feels a little like eavesdropping on people who can’t object.

Most entries are exactly what mine are. Weather, visibility, wind direction, the bureaucratic shorthand of the job unchanged across decades. But one lookout, logging sometime in what I’d guess is the seventies from the handwriting and a couple of dated references, had a habit that stopped me cold the first time I found it. He named the storms. Not officially, nothing that made it into the actual weather notation, but in the margin, in a smaller hand like he knew it wasn’t quite proper for the log, there’d be a note next to a big one. Came through hard today. Calling this one Frank, third one this month with any real teeth to it. Another one a few weeks later. Frank’s cousin showed up around four, meaner than Frank was.

I don’t know anything else about this person. No name I could find, no way to look him up, nothing but a handwriting sample and a habit of naming weather like it was livestock he was keeping track of. But I think about him more than almost anyone else who’s had this job before me. Five seasons of my own storms and I’ve never once thought to name one, and now every time a big cell builds over the ridge I catch myself wondering what he would have called it, whether it would’ve earned a name at all or just gotten logged plain, wind speed and duration and nothing else. I’ve started to think the naming wasn’t really about the weather. It was something to do with the hours, the same instinct that had me counting knots in the paneling one bad June, just a different shape of it, older, maybe smarter than mine.

The footlocker’s still under the bunk. I add my own book to the stack every October before I hike out, and some winter, a lookout I’ll never meet is going to find mine in there with all the others, and I hope whatever I’ve written reads like it was worth keeping.