Q&A with Philip Connors

 

 

Philip Connors is the author of the new book The Mountain Knows the Mountain: A Fire Watch Diary. His other books include Fire Season. He lives in southern New Mexico. 

 

Q: What inspired you to write The Mountain Knows the Mountain?

 

A: I had worked 14 straight fire seasons as a Forest Service lookout when I was forced to miss a year. I underwent two hip surgeries, and I was awhile in recovering. But a year passed, and I felt better. I was able to resume the job, which involves a hike of several miles to reach the mountain.

 

Returning to a place I loved and had missed, I decided I wanted to keep as meticulous a diary of that season as I could, hoping to see everything with fresh eyes and an open heart. The book is the result of that vow.

 

Q: How was the book’s title chosen, and what does it signify for you?

 

A: The title comes from one line of haiku in the book:

 

what do mountains know

the mountain knows the mountain

who are we to ask

 

I like it because it has a circular, Zen-like quality. I think of it as an acknowledgment that, although I have now spent more than two decades of my life working there, I may never really know the mountain.

 

It’s a mysterious place, crawling with creatures of all kinds, prone to burn, always changing, harsh and lovely in equal measure. I will seek to know all I can about it.

 

But a part of what I love about it resides in its indifference to me. It has its own mind, its own patterns, its own knowledge. It remains wild. It knows itself. That is sufficient.

 

Q: You’ve been a fire watcher in the Gila Wilderness for 23 years--how has that experience changed you?

 

A: It has deepened my comfort with solitude, certainly. It’s made me more sensitive to natural beauty, less enamored of manufactured human dramas, more aware of the fragility of all forms of life, and less optimistic about how we’ll cope with climate change.

 

The Earth will endure, of course, in some shape or form, but human civilization already shows signs of fraying at the seams.

 

Q: Why did you incorporate haibun into the book?

 

A: During my recovery from the two hip surgeries, I found that I’d struggled through chronic pain for so long that I’d lost the ability to read. I could no longer concentrate.

 

I mentioned this to a friend, the writer Nina MacLaughlin. She promptly responded by sending me an anthology of haiku: The Essential Haiku, edited by Robert Hass.

 

The idea was this: if you can’t read a book, try beginning with something small, three lines of poetry. Well, that book saved me. It marked the beginning of my path back to sustained attention. Three lines of poetry, then three more.

 

The poems became addictive reading, they were so lovely, so surprising, so humorous, and so penetrating in their snapshots of reality. I loved them so much I started writing haiku myself, and they naturally fed into the diary I kept the summer I returned to the mountain.

 

It is a venerable form, haibun: usually a prose diary interspersed with haiku that act as either expansion of, or counterpoint to, the diary entries. I found it perfect for noticing and commemorating little moments of life on the mountain.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: I’m working on an old adobe house in a little town in New Mexico. It was unoccupied for five years before my wife and I bought it. It needed love, and bit by bit I’m learning how to give it some.

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: The book completes what I think of as a trilogy centered on the first landscape in the United States to be designated as a roadless wilderness. The other books are Fire Season and A Song for the River.

 

The trilogy explores fire and water, life and death, and what it means to love a wilderness in a time of rapid change to forested landscapes. I didn’t plan to write a trilogy. Events conspired so that it just played out that way. But I’m pleased with the accidental result.

 

I’ll be talking about the book in Santa Fe at Collected Works Bookstore on Sept. 25 and Albuquerque at Bookworks on Oct. 21. You can check in at www.philipconnors.com to learn more.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Philip Connors.