SOLITARY MAN

A man quits his editor position at the Wall Street Journal but doesn’t take another desk job at sea level. Instead he lands a job at 10,000 feet above sea level. He’s a fire lookout in the Gila National Forest in southwestern New Mexico.

The man in question is Silver City resident Philip Connors.

Connors had read Norman Maclean’s writings on being a lookout and Edward Abbey’s “Desert Solitaire,” but there were other reasons for Connors’ radical change in occupation and environment.

One was leaving behind “the madness” that is Manhattan. The other was the firsthand observations of a friend who was a Gila lookout.

“I was immediately falling in love with the idea. And I didn’t waste any time. I talked myself into the job, mainly,” Connors said in a phone interview.

He’s been a lookout since 2002, and he’ll do it as long as he can maintain the health of his marriage because they’re separated for large parts of the year. Connors called it “a delicate negotiation.”

His wife is a nurse in Silver City. His schedule is 10 days as a lookout and four days off; a relief worker fills in.

Connors’ book “Fire Season,” written in a narrative style, is about his solitary work.

“I’ve had very few, if any, misgivings about the job,” he said. “In particular it’s the opportunity to experience solitude in a culture that makes it difficult to do that while also getting paid to do it. I also just became very intrigued how fire was managed in the Gila. The Gila is really on the cutting edge of trying to restore the … ecosystems.”

The forest experiences thousands of lightning strikes a year and hundreds of lightning-caused fires, Connors said. Most fires are suppressed, some are prescribed.

Connors watches for smoke and fire from his glass-enclosed forest aerie. There’s no electricity. That means no laptop, no telephone, no television. He does have a portable typewriter. “I do it the old-fashioned way. I do keep notebooks of much of what I see and experience,” Connors said.

He meets smoke jumpers and hikers, observes bears and elk. He writes about forester-ecologist Aldo Leopold and his ideas linking cattle grazing and soil erosion, about the relationship between fire and the presence of engraver, mountain pine and bark beetles.

With his dog, Alice, Connors is normally in the lookout from early May until the rains come, which is usually late July to mid-August, he said. This year he’s going out later because of his national book tour.

Connors, raised on a Minnesota farm, also has worked as a baker, a janitor, a house painter and a bartender.

Philip Connors discusses, signs “Fire Season” at 7 p.m. Tuesday, April 26, at Bookworks, 4022 Rio Grande NW; at 6 p.m. Thursday, April 28, at Otowi Station Bookstore, 1350 Central Ave., Los Alamos; at 5 p.m. Friday, April 29, at Garcia Street Books, 376 Garcia St., Santa Fe; and at 2 p.m. Saturday, April 30, at Moby Dickens Bookshop, 124A Bent St., Taos.