If you live on a peak in fire-prone country, as I do every summer in the Black Range of New Mexico’s Gila National Forest, the big one will eventually come for you. This knowledge does not cushion the fact that if you’re a lookout evacuated by …

My chief occupation for the past six summers has been as a fire lookout in the Black Range District of the Gila National Forest in New Mexico. For ten of every fourteen days I sit and watch for smoke from a mountain ten-thousand feet high. From my tower I can see at least fifty miles in each direction—on clear days nearly a hundred.