The Week I Counted the Logs

The job assumes visibility. Everything about it, the fire finder, the hourly circuit, the whole reason for a person to sit in a glass room on top of a mountain, runs on being able to see something. Nine days into my first season, mid June, a low system parked itself over the district and I couldn’t see past maybe two hundred feet in any direction. Not fog exactly, cloud, sitting right on the ridge, so thick some mornings I couldn’t make out the trees I knew were there thirty yards off the catwalk.

There’s nothing to watch for in that. You still do the checks, you still report conditions, but the conditions are the same unhelpful nothing every single time, and dispatch knows it as well as you do, so even the radio calls get short. Zero visibility, no change, over. I had books, I wasn’t out of things to read yet that early in the season, but I found I couldn’t actually concentrate on a page for more than a few minutes at a stretch, some low hum of restlessness underneath everything that reading wasn’t touching. I think it was the not being able to do the actual job. Reading felt like avoiding it even though there was nothing to do instead.

By day four of that stretch I’d started pacing the room, which in fourteen by fourteen feet doesn’t get you far, six steps one way and back. By day six I was counting things. I counted the knots in the wood paneling on the north wall, came up with thirty one, recounted the next day and got twenty nine, which bothered me more than it should have, and I spent probably forty minutes trying to figure out which count was wrong before deciding it didn’t matter and starting over a third time to settle it. Thirty one. I don’t know what happened the day I got twenty nine. I’ve decided not to think about it since.

By day eight I’d moved on to counting growth rings on the exposed beam near the stove, which is a genuinely absurd way to spend an afternoon, squinting at a piece of lumber trying to work out how old the tree had been before somebody cut it into a beam and hauled it up here decades before I was born. I got to around eighty rings before I lost the count in a section where they’d gone too tight to separate with the naked eye, and I never did finish it, though I’ve thought about going back to that beam some slow afternoon since, just to see if I still care.

The cloud broke on day nine, midmorning, lifted off the ridge in maybe twenty minutes like it had somewhere else to be, and the relief of it was almost embarrassing, standing at the window watching my actual job become possible again after over a week of not being able to do it. I’ve had slow stretches since, plenty of them, but nothing that’s matched that particular flavor of restlessness, the specific kind that comes from a job with nothing to look at rather than a job with nothing to do. Those aren’t the same thing, and I didn’t understand the difference until that June.