Trina Moyles - Lookout: Love, Solitude, and Searching for Wildfire in the Boreal Forest

It was early May and the last of the northwestern Canadian winter had melted away. Sap flowed through the dry, flammable limbs of the leafless deciduous trees. Resin doused the spruce and pine needles with a kerosene-like substance. The boreal forest was a box of matchsticks, waiting to be struck.

Wind howled through the bones of the fire tower, a hundred-foot steel structure that rose up between forest and sky. My vantage point was from the cupola, a tiny, red-and-white octagonal dome that measured less than three metres in diameter. I surveyed the forest below, a patchwork mosaic of aspen and birch, black and white spruce, and pine, coloured in shades of olive, ochre, marigold, ginger, and rust. Twenty, forty, eighty kilometres into the blue-and-green expanse, I became overwhelmed by the vastness of the boreal wilderness and the distinct lack of human influence. No buildings, no roads, no power lines.

My new job as a Lookout Observer, on paper, seemed straightforward enough: climb the tower every day and spend long hours sitting up in the sky, scanning the horizon for the faintest curl of smoke. Lookouts are the first line of defence in wildfire detection in Alberta. A network of 127 fire towers is scattered across the province in the boreal, foothills, and Rocky Mountain areas. From May until the end of August, I would be responsible for detecting and reporting wildfires within a forty-kilometre radius of forest. There would be no days off, no relief, no leaving the fire tower for another 120 days. And, as Id soon learn from my seasoned neighbours, thats exactly the way lookouts wanted it. Few longed for days away from the watch. Most lookouts hoped for an early start in April and a late season extension into October. If they could, some hard-core types would probably work straight through the winter.

I had catapulted myself into a culture of vigilance that bordered on obsession. Though the backgrounds of lookouts variedformer lawyers, bankers, butchers, healthcare workers, teachers, trappers, and artists had come to the professionthere was a shared commitment to observation among them that ran deep, an expertise that was earned with the accumulation of days and seasons. Only days earlier, at my orientation, Id felt the experienced lookouts skepticism of me, a fledgling rookie, totally unaware of what lay ahead in her first season. I didnt blame them. I was skeptical too. The immense responsibility stretched out in the blue swell of distance. My heart flapped wildly like a hooked trout. It occurred to me that the fire tower might be one of the last places on the earths surface where one can experience the physical reality of being entirely isolated from other people, a sensation that felt both exhilarating and terrifying. Would I be capable of enduring the summer?

To my south, a single white shoelace danced and undulated above the treetops. I focused my binoculars on the floating ribbon and saw that it was a group, or a hedge, of trumpeter swans. The white-winged migrants were flying home to their breeding ponds in the boreal forests of northwestern Alberta, or as far north as the High Arctic.

Id come home too, to the place where I spent my childhood in the Peace River country, on Treaty 8 lands, traditional territories of the Beaver, Dene, Cree, and Mtis peoples. After years away, Id returned to find work and support my fiancs emigration from Uganda. The lookout job offered a stable, seasonal work opportunity. But the reasons for my return proved more complicated than love and financial security. It would take several years for me to understand what really brought me back to the North, what it means to be a lookout, and how life at the fire tower would change me irrevocably.