It’s not necessarily a difficult job to be a fire lookout, but there is a certain amount of pressure to it. Fires are hard to contain and honestly by the time I’ve reported one, I already feel a little useless. This thought occurred to me as the latest storm cell roamed in and I pulled up a chair to watch. Lightning is our biggest cause of fires and if I see a lightning strike I watch to see if it’s resulted in a fire. I even have a little checklist to report back on. Nothing makes me feel more stupid than that little checklist. I’m safe in my watch house reporting on the color of smoke while somewhere below me it rages out of control. Is it white smoke? Gray smoke? Black smoke? Doesn’t matter to me safe up in the clouds. I rolled my eyes and sat back to continue to watch.
The storm raged on outside my windows and, as bored as I was, I continued looking on. I admit that maybe I got too comfortable. Yes, it’s isolated out here, but a helicopter is just a phone call away if I need to get out. There was a cushion to being out here alone among the clouds and the trees. The thing that I didn’t consider was that a helicopter takes time to get to me and it had never occurred to me before that maybe time was something I was a little too short on.
There was a knock on my door, barely discernable above the howling wind outside.
I cannot emphasize enough how little company you get as a fire lookout. There are food drops and things like that, but nobody, and I mean nobody is knocking on your door. A hike up here would be near impossible and there is no civilization anywhere close by. It is statistically impossible that anyone would be knocking on my door.
I looked up from my window and looked at the door. As if it knew I had chosen that moment to look, the knock rang out again. Lightning chose that moment to strike much closer and the resulting flash lit up my room. The person outside my door, regardless of if they were supposed to be there, must be scared out of their mind.
So, I opened the door. Yes, I know it was incredibly stupid in hindsight, but I still had some semblance of a human heart at this point.
A small figure shrouded in a black rain slicker stood on my doorstep. I didn’t offer a greeting, still dumbfounded at its presence and it didn’t offer a greeting either. It simply just stepped into the room without a word.
“Hey man, are you okay?” I finally asked. “How did you even get up here?”
“There’s a fire,” it answered, its back to me. “Out there. A big one. I came to warn you.”
I glanced out the window and saw the same smoke I had noted in my report earlier. We waited until the storm cell passed through before calling it in—just procedure.
“Yeah, I saw that one. Are you okay? Did you get caught in it?” I asked, still nervous that it had yet to face me.
“What are you going to do about it? There are people down there.” Its voice answered me, angrier now. “Isn’t this what you’re here for? Isn’t this the point of you being out here?”
It stung. He was right, in a way. What was the point of making reports and logging location and duration if I couldn’t actually do anything about it? It was stupid. It was useless, honestly.
“Come with me,” he whispered. “We need help and you’re here to help us.”
It felt like the beginning of my own superhero sequence. I would run into the woods, the screaming wind surrounding me, and bring these hapless hikers to safety. They would write articles about me. Maybe even babies would be named after me. I’d be more than a watcher. I’d be a savior.
Then lightning illuminated the room once more.
I gagged, inadvertently dropping the hiking boots I’d just grabbed. The figure had turned to face me at some point when I was pondering my heroism. The black slicker covered most of its body, but the lightning had lit up its disfigured face, charred pieces of it falling like ash and seemingly disappearing at its feet.
“Holy shit dude,” I yelped, jumping back.
I immediately felt ashamed. They had trained us on burn victims and I was acting like a civilian who had never seen a burn before.
“I’m calling someone right now,” I immediately corrected “Don’t worry. It’ll be okay.”
It snarled at me, moving closer.
“It won’t be okay,” it growled. “You have to come with me. You have to help.”
I don’t know why my training kicked in at this moment, but suddenly all of the protocols they’d drilled into me kicked in at once. It occurred to me how uniquely stupid it would be to run into a burning forest with a severely injured person with me. Looking at the degree of his burns, it was a miracle he’d even made it out alive. After what felt like hours, but was surely only seconds, my office picked up the phone.
“I’ve got someone out here,” I said breathlessly.
“You have someone out there?” the dispatcher repeated incredulously.
“Yes, he’s been burned. It’s bad. He said there’s more down the mountain. We need help.”
“Listen to me,” the dispatcher said, his voice lower now. “Do not leave. No matter what. Do not talk to him. Do not look at him. Pretend he is not there. Do you understand me?”
“I… what?”
“That is not a man.”
Then the door slammed shut and I was alone.
I raced outside to see if I could bring him back. Surely he was too injured to get far, I figured. It was near impossible to see anything through the storm but I caught a glimpse of movement at the treeline. Five figures, slowly burning. They only stood there. White smoke came off of them and they stood unmoving as their fingers, hands, arms, legs - everything turned to ash.
They sent a helicopter out for me the next day. Apparently, I was still screaming when they arrived.
My office explained that it wasn’t personal, but they deemed me not a good fit for the job and let me go with a generous severance package. To be honest, I wasn’t that upset about being let go. No one had bothered to explain to me anything about what happened out there on the mountain and quite frankly I’m not sure I wanted to know. That’s why I was surprised when I felt myself asking them at the end of our meeting about my so-called retirement, “why?”
The man in front of me shook his head sadly and shuffled a couple of papers.
“We need people who won’t answer the call of the mountain,” he offered weakly and stood to escort me out.