What the Day Actually Looks Like

People ask what I do all day and I’ve stopped trying to make it sound more interesting than it is, because the honest answer is that I look at the same eleven ridgelines over and over and most days nothing changes on any of them.

It starts before the sun’s actually up over the ridge, more gray than light. First thing is a walk around the catwalk, full circle, no instrument, just eyes, because the fire finder can wait but a column of smoke that built overnight won’t announce itself twice. Coffee after that, not before. I learned that one the hard way in my second season, tried to caffeinate before I’d looked and missed twenty minutes of good light doing it.

The morning radio check is somewhere around seven, depending on who’s on dispatch and how busy the traffic is ahead of me in the queue. I give my status, conditions, visibility, and dispatch logs it and moves to the next lookout down the line. Takes maybe ninety seconds most days. Then the actual watching starts, which is a full circuit with the fire finder every hour on the hour, cross-referencing the map ring against anything that looks like it wasn’t there the last pass. Most hours that means confirming a cloud is a cloud.

Midday is the part nobody pictures right. The tower gets hot, glass on four sides and no real airflow until I prop the windows, and that’s also when thermals build and every ridge starts throwing up little dust devils and heat shimmer that look like smoke for about four seconds before your eye sorts them out. I’ve called in false positives twice in five seasons, both midday, both this exact trick of the light. Dispatch was gracious about it both times. I wasn’t gracious about it either time.

Afternoon is reading, or a game if my hands want something to do while my eyes are still on the windows, which is most of why patchwork ended up living on the shelf instead of the truck. Fifteen, twenty minutes fits a lull between checks without pulling my attention off the glass for longer than that.

Evening check is around six or seven, same format as morning, and this is usually the one with more to report, since afternoon thunderheads have had all day to build and either produce or not. Then a last full circuit at dusk while there’s still light to see color in, because a fire that started in the last hour of daylight and doesn’t get spotted until dark has had a much better head start than one caught at two in the afternoon.

After dark there’s not much left to watch except stars and the glow of Missoula, faint, off to the northwest on a clear night, and whatever lightning is doing if there’s a storm working its way through. I log the day, weather, visibility, anything logged during the checks, and that’s it. Lights out early because there’s nothing left to do once it’s dark and the batteries would rather I didn’t run the lamp past nine anyway.

It’s not much of a story told this way. Most days it isn’t much of a story lived, either. That’s sort of the job.