On the Mountain Without a Fire

                                                Published in The Christian Science Monitor

            For four years, from mid spring through summer and early autumn, except for short breaks, when I returned to civilization for supplies and to visit friends and family, I lived outdoors, in mountain forests. I worked blister rust control. I walked through the areas I had contracted with the Forest Service to work. With hand tools, I uprooted ribes bushes in an effort to stop the spread of blister rust, which blew from ribes bushes and infected and killed sugar pine trees.

            I camped near good water, close to where I worked. I moved camp often, from finished work to new work, in the Sierras of northern California. I cooked my meals with fires of small dead wood I gathered from the ground of the forest around me. When summer dryness proscribed open fires, I cooked and heated water for washing dishes and for washing me on a portable propane burner, outside, no roof. I sat on a log or a round of wood or a rock, or on the ground, or I stood, and I ate what I had cooked.

            The longer I worked in the forest, the less I built fires. It didn’t take much propane to cook and to heat water. If I burned a campfire to keep me company, to mark my camp, to cook my food, I looked into the flames, and I didn’t see much of the stars and moving clouds above me.

            When I kindled no fire to blind me to the forest night around me, I saw a great horned owl, quiet as a dark shadow, swoop across the sky south of me, hunting the ravine I stood above. I saw a nocturnal flying squirrel launch from one tall pine tree and glide to another, silhouetted against the starlight-washed sky.

            I slept in a sleeping bag on a pad on the ground, no tent. I liked to wake during the night and watch stars scattered bright across black mountain sky or watch the moon for a while in its rapid journey across the sky or watch moving clouds backlighted by moon and stars. I put a tarp over me if it rained. When outdoors turned too cold and rainy, I unloaded supplies, covered them with the tarp, and moved into the back of my carryall, plenty of room for my bed and quite dry.

            Most days, mountain sun shone intensely. Every morning, I got up, cooked my breakfast and packed my lunch, then roamed the forest searching for and digging out ribes bushes. Parts of some contracts, my day of work became mostly walking, digging out an occasional bush, looking sharp to see I didn’t leave a stray bush. I paid out light cotton string to mark where I’d been.

            A red-tailed hawk soared above me. I watched a bald eagle hunt the mountain. I watched a least weasel watch me. I greeted a grouchy badger, who asked from some distance if I was trying to steal its rightful path through the forest and along the edge of the meadow. I assured the growly, peering, sniffing beast I merely passed through, trying in a very small way to improve the forest for both of us. I detoured off the trail into open meadow and gave the badger plenty of room to continue its journey.

            Geese in V formation flew above forest and meadows and talked loudly to each other under mountain blue sky. Small birds of dozens of species sang, flew, harvested, and nested as I worked through their territory.

            I woke one morning, barely daylight, when my dog spoke unfamiliar sounds of distress. I told him to shut up and stay close, and he was glad to obey. A big, old, black bear walked around Cub Spring and up the mountain, not impressed enough by our close presence to either speed up to escape or slow down to investigate.

            I finished a contract in Lassen National Forest, packed camp, drove north on the mountain highway in the Sierras, sunshine, forest, people all around, summer on the mountain, small towns. I drove off the highway onto a gravel road, twenty-one miles into the forest. Most of the afternoon, I explored to decide, will I camp along one wild, clean stream, perhaps at the foot of the ridge, on the edge of lush, flower-blooming meadow, or eight miles away, along another stream that begins where water surges forcefully from the ground, wells up more than two feet high in a broad pool, then rushes through deeply eroded black stone, down the mountain, in a hurry to see the sea.

            Early the next morning, I cooked breakfast, cleaned up my camp, and marked the boundaries of the first lot in that contract. I saw a bobcat ahead of me down an old, growing-over logging road, very briefly, because the cat knew I approached. It faded into brush. I detoured around a rattlesnake enjoying the summer sun, and I climbed a bluff of dark basalt and looked all sides of upthrust stone to see what grew there.

            After those four years of working, eating, and sleeping outside in the mountains, I left blister rust control behind, but mountains called to me any time I walked lowlands too long. I shaped my life toward mountains. Wild forest, wild animals, myriad wild plants, clean water running wild, mountain winds, anchored me to the earth. I felt at home in the mountains. I chose that feeling of home, one with the earth, over more outstanding material success. All these years later, I’m still pleased with what I chose.