Stories
The First Leap:
from Neosho to New York
David Rounds
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In 1959, working on my first novel, I became friends with Bill Mathes, a young university professor who, like me, was a paid singer in the Riverside Church choir in New York. Bill had been working summers as a Forest Service lookout in Idaho, but would not go back in 1960. Would I like to take the position? Yes, I said immediately, thinking of how Jack Kerouac had written his novels while working as a lookout. (Kerouac had been just before my time at the West End Bar near Columbia).
So it was that I crossed the country on a Greyhound bus, with my typewriter set up on the back seat to work on the novel as we traveled, and I arrived in Cascade, Idaho and checked in with the Forest Service. While waiting to start work, I lived in their warehouse in a sleeping bag and flirted with Sally, the daughter of the foreman at the lumber mill. Then I shipped out to a road crew in the mountains where, along with the smokejumpers and other lookouts, I cleared the brush left by the logging companies and lived with the lumberjacks and a road crew in trailors. Such breakfasts, I've never seen the like. Later I learned that the lumberjack uses more calories in a day than any other occupation.
Before the Fourth of July weekend and the beginning of fire season, Jack Chenoweth packed me up onto the mountain with horses and mules loaded with an entire summer's supply of food that I had purchased (Bill had bequeathed me his list). I would be on the mountain until Labor Day.
Jack and his brother owned cattle ranches in the valley and Jack loved to be on horseback. Over the years he had steadfastly refused advancement in the Forest Service because it would have required giving up his outdoor life and working behind a desk. He was a colorful guy and I suppose his wife must have been as well. He recalled a time when she saw firefighters using the backpack water sprayers against a forest fire and exclaimed, "I could piss out a fire better than that!"
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The peak in the background had no name so I wrote in "Chenoweth Mountain" on the charts
I loved the life on Rice Peak. So much so, that I came back in the summers of 1961 and 1964 (I went to Europe instead in 1962). It was so beautiful that I was inspired, for the one time in my life, to do watercolor painting. And it was there that I worked on my novels, Master of the House in 1960 and 1961 and By What Ways in 1964.
I was living among the mountains and the clouds. In every direction I could see from 40 to 100 miles. To the east, the jagged skyline of the the Sawtooth Range. To the northwest the Wallowa Whitman mountains. To the west, out into the eastern desert of Oregon. Just below me, a little beaver lake, and further on, Warm Lake with its lodges, 5,000 feet below in the valley. I watched the eagles circle the mountain - looking down on them from above - and hearing their flight by the warning sounds of the pikas and marmots as they dove for cover. I heard the terrible sound of a dying deer as the wolves at my spring brought it down, and the magnificent mating calls of the elk. And lacking a gun, I carried an iron bar in case the wolves were around when I descended the thousand feet to my spring for water.
And, of course, I spotted fires and called them in on the radio. I even prepared a detailed map for those who would come after me showing each ridge as seen from the lookout and where it was on the topographical map. I watched thunderstorms build over the mountains to the west and then march across the sky one after another. Sometimes the valleys were totally hidden in clouds and all I could see were the tops of mountains. Once, when we had a record number of thunderstorms and lighting-struck fires (over a hundred), I looked east into the black sky and saw three tall trees on ridges struck by lightning and flaring up into the blackness like three great candles. I got permission by radio and went down at night to put out one of them, an adventure in itself!
And then there were the rainbows, huge double rainbows that took up the entire sky. I was on a level with the rainbow, in the same domain! And sometimes when it rained in the valleys it snowed on the mountains, up to a foot at a time.
And then came the insects for their annual mating ritual at the top of the mountain. One week it was yellow butterflies and I was engulfed in a huge cloud of yellow, millions upon millions of swirling insects in their dance of life. Another week it was the flying ants. I tried to stuff all the cracks in my little house, yet they still found a way in coming down the chimney of my wood stove.
For company I tried to make pets of the mountains animals. I hand-fed a ground squirrel whom I called "Mama Grossi" and then her babies when they arrived. I captured a rock pika and kept it in my alidade until it cried so much I let it go back to its home in the rocks, but when I let it go, first it came back to touch and thank me for its freedom.
Sometimes, lonely, I would get permission to hike down the 15 miles and 5000 feet to Warm Lake during the night. At the lodge I would trade loaves of bread baked fresh in my wood oven, for a steak and salad. The trail was magnificent with cathedral-like Ponderosa pines pointing up to the stars. Deer grazed in the meadows above me, and once, when I went without a flashlight, the boulder I stepped on turned out to be a sleeping bear! Another time I was attacked by an owl as I came into the clearings near the top. Sometimes I hiked down to the base of the mountain and visited the trailer of a surveyor who played country western tunes on his fiddle for me.
Revisiting Warm Lake in 2004, I was told that the lookout had been closed and the function of fire-watching had been taken over by satellite surveillance.
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Stages
1986-1992
Fall of Soviet Empire
1992-1997
UNESCO Culture of Peace Programme