Lookout, June-September 2023
For summer 2023 I staffed a fire lookout 10 miles from Mt. Hood, it was also my tenth summer in a row returning to this part of Oregon. I alternated weeks staffing the tower with another fire lookout named Ken, who’d worked as a lookout in various towers around Oregon and Washington, first after graduating high school and again after his 30-year career as a pilot. Up in the tower, it didn’t rain for months, thick smokes swirled around from all directions and yielded to days you could see 80 miles. If sitting in one place will teach you anything, it taught me that the changing horizon never pauses.
