The Horse in My Garage and Other Stories by Patrick F. McManus Read Free Book Online

facility is fifty yards off in the bushes, and the nearest source of water may be a mile or more down the mountain. During storms the higher towers have a tendency to sway sickeningly, lightning strikes with unmonotonous regularity a few feet from where the lookout is sitting (or kneeling), and balls of weird blue “fire” from time to time sizzle about the place like water on a hot skillet. The lookout is assaulted by insects, besieged by beasts, seared by the sun, chased by forest fires, and, perhaps worst of all, tortured incessantly by the monstrous silence. This is to say nothing of the work, but, as one lookout suggests, the work consists largely of being there.
    The experience of the Forest Service suggests that no particular kind of individual is ideally suited to life in a tower suite, and the recruits who show up for training early each summer prove to be a strangely mixed lot: prim lady schoolteachers, college professors, ministers’ wives, loggers, vacationing businessmen, farmers, grandmothers, coeds, honeymooners, old marrieds, beauty queens, students, female truck drivers, ex-marines, and cookie-baking housewives; in short, just about anyone who can shake off the fetters of routine life for three months.
    Newlyweds long ago discovered that lookout towers make private places for honeymoons, and each forest usually has at least one couple launching its marriage atop a peak. Rangers, reluctant marriage counselors that they are, generally avoid pointing out to couples that if a marriage can survive a summer in a lookout tower, it can survive almost anything. Their fervent hope is that the rocks the marriage may be headed for aren’t those at the foot of the tower. Familiarity may or may not breed contempt, but there is no doubt that the tiny cabins breed profuse amounts of familiarity. Paul Wilson, dispatcher for the Coeur d’Alene (Idaho) National Forest, recalls one couple that stopped speaking to each other fifteen minutes after being moved into their cabin. “Right then, I knew it was going to be a long, hard season,” says Paul. “And it was, for all concerned.”
    But whatever small apprehensions the honeymooners may create for the rangers, newlyweds almost always turn out to be highly competent and dedicated fire lookouts, not to mention a source of considerable humor. Visitors to one of those bridal towers listened in fascination recently as a blue-jeaned bride gave her impressions about honeymooning on a lookout platform. “One thing I’ve noticed is that the days seem so long and the nights so short!” Her stricken husband hastened to explain that this was because the tower was the highest point in the mountains and was, consequently, the first thing the sun’s rays touched in the morning and the last in the evening. The nights actually were shorter.
    The Forest Service likes to man its towers with married couples whenever possible. For one thing, the lookouts are not so lonely; they can break the monotony by making either love or war. For another, the government gets two pairs of eyes for the price of one. The husband is paid for the five weekdays and the wife for Saturday and Sunday. In practice, of course, the husband and wife are both in the tower most of the time. As one official points out, “There just isn’t that much else to do.”
    Sometimes the lookouts are single women. Last summer, twenty-three of the 233 stations in the Northern Region were operated by female fire spotters. The consensus among rangers is that they do an excellent job, frequently surpassing the men. “They are more observant,” says a ranger. “They hold their interest well in what can be a monotonous job, and they keep meticulous records. They also keep their quarters in much better condition.” One girl, a coed from Idaho State University, “who didn’t know a meadow bottom from a ridge top,” was assigned to an observation cab atop a