Philip Connors has made not one career but two from “looking out.” Since 2002, Connors has spent five months of the year as a fire lookout in the Gila Wilderness, living in a 7 x 7 glass and steel cube fifty feet in the sky. In this occupation, his main task is to watch for the telltale string of smoke winding up the sky that signifies a forest fire. But his acute observations—his other “looking out”—have also powered his writing career. The possessor of an exquisite eye for detail, as well as a beautiful prose style, Connors has engaged and delighted readers with three memoirs that place Man firmly in the context of nature, history, and the—largely failed, in his view—human project.
In this fourth book, we learn, if we didn’t know already, that Connors is just as adept at looking inwards. The Mountain Knows the Mountain is a journey of the mind. Ostensibly a diary, with its five chapters named for the months of April to August, it weaves a path through both the wilderness and the author’s psyche. Connors reflects on love and friendship, longing and loss, the natural and the modern worlds, and how all of these intersect.
But if this book has a motif, it is minimalism. Some years ago, wracked with pain following double hip surgery, Connors lost the ability to read extended prose. A thoughtful friend gave him a book of haiku, and he became hooked. He studied the masters of the form—Bashō, Issa, Buson—and began writing his own. (Serendipitously, he notes, the 5-7-5 syllable count of a haiku is his area code.) He playfully rejected the cliché “think outside the box” and found freedom in thinking “inside the box” of the haiku form – an apt metaphor for someone cooped up in a 7 x 7 cube.
In The Mountain Knows the Mountain, Connors intersperses prose with haikus and line drawings. The latter two are wonderfully amateur. The drawings reflect a childlike, Neruda-esque love of everyday objects, while the haikus are sometimes a little “off” in a way that his prose never is. (The longer poems included here are stronger; his best writing requires the type of bounding rhythm that you can’t get in a haiku.) In fact, his prose is more poetic than his poetry. Here he is, unexpectedly face to face with a fox: “We froze and stared at each other, my headlamp glowing a glacial blue in its eyes. After a slight cock of its head that made my soul feel seen, the fox turned and ran, its bushy tail swaying like a tiny dancer as it picked its way over the edge of the mountain and into the night.” (p. 36)
In line with his use of haiku, Connors embraces minimalism as an aesthetic. The whole book can be read in a couple of sittings. The chapters are short and the design contains copious white space. Sections are demarcated with three hand-drawn horizontal lines – perhaps the visual echo of a haiku or a symbol of sound waves or the Holy Trinity. Simplicity is his goal and his method – a deliberate reduction of everything, consistent with life on the mountain, where he knows he is both transient and insignificant.
While there, he busies himself with some repairs and other menial tasks, but his days are largely spent experiencing all that is around him and letting his mind wander. He eats, sleeps, and watches. At one point, he likens his life to that of the hero of the 1993 film Groundhog Day, who keeps reliving the same twenty-four hours. That hero, played by Bill Murray, was called Phil Connors. (A meteorologist, the fictional Connors was another sky-watcher.)
Why does the author Philip Connors keep coming back to the mountain? It isn’t the salary; he averages $10,862 per annum over thirteen years. The answer is found in this book, a paean to nature. He simply loves the landscape and the creatures who inhabit it. He “bears witness as the wild world goes about its cycles of rejuvenation and renewal.” (p.18)
While exalting the wild world, inevitably Connors ends up skewering our man-made, screen-based, fame-obsessed world. A self-confessed curmudgeon, he critiques our modern habits and excesses. Some of this is funny. He tells us his anti-Zuckerbergian motto: “move slowly, and try not to break anything.” Sometimes, the critique feels unnecessary; his target readers are probably not big users of Shapchat and Instagram. Occasionally, the diatribes feel unfair: people with much-maligned office jobs can still revere and spend time in nature; the two aren’t mutually exclusive.
A New York editor once told Connors he’d written his lookout book (Fire Season) and was only entitled to one. And it’s true that The Mountain Knows the Mountain doesn’t cover much new ground, literally or metaphorically. Connors has no major epiphanies here that we haven’t seen in his earlier work. But what it does have, despite the author suggesting he prefers places to people, is testimony to a powerful human connection. The most moving parts of the book are about two visitors to his mountain hideout: Mónica, Connors’s wife, and the late Bobby Byrd, Connors’s publisher, friend, and fellow writer. The book features sections written by, about, and to them and is all the richer for it. Against all odds, The Mountain Knows the Mountain turns out to be a love story.
