Solitude and Isolation

He would never exchange his solitude for anything.

Never again be forced to move to the rhythms of others.

Tillie Olsen

Tell Me a Riddle (1960)

Searching my childhood memories for material to put in this column, I have too few recollections of spending days of play with my siblings (four of the six of us were born in four-and-a-half years). Visiting with my sister, she said that she doesn't remember that I was around very much.

We got along as well as any large family can, and I wasn't a surly loner. I was doing other things at the ranch or in the hayfield with the crew. There were days I passed just poking around the many buildings on the property, imagining what life would be when I was old enough to use the tools and the saddles. Little did I know...

At about eight years old I began sleeping in an outbuilding during summers, and the year I graduated high school, I got a job on a fire lookout in the Helena National Forest.

It wasn't a typical lookout. Instead of there being a living area in the tower itself, there was a small cabin below a 60-foot metal tower with a 6x6 feet metal viewing area. The tower contained only a telephone and an azimuth ring. There was room for nothing else.

I was supposed to spend 20 minutes an hour up in the tower; the rest of the time was mine. The lookout was easily accessible to visitors, being just above Montana City, overlooking Clancy and up Lump Gulch to Colorado Peak, where there was another lookout.

Strawberry Lookout was different because it boasted a good road and a telephone. The other lookouts were truly isolated, with only radios for communication. I was practically in town, but still, it was a real lookout and I was being paid $1.93 an hour for doing almost nothing. And I was alone, not realizing at the time that the search for solitude might have been my primary motivator in taking the job. And it was a good summer – maybe the best I ever had. It was later that the innocence and optimism turned to angst and alcohol.

I found five fires that summer. None of them came to any size. The storms came west to east, over Colorado Mountain, down Lump Gulch, over Clancy, over me, and then on to Townsend.

They called Lump Gulch "Lightning Alley," which it is. During thunderstorms I stayed in the 60-foot tower and marked the direction from Strawberry to each strike with a grease pencil on my azimuth ring. One storm had over 250 strikes in less than an hour.

Every Thursday I ordered my groceries for the next week. I eventually ordered the same things every time, and if I remember correctly, they cost a total of $17.00 or so.

With the Rice-a-Roni, the pound of hamburger and the rest, I always got a six-pack of Lucky Lager beer. For a while, I drank only one can a day – every evening when it got dark and I was off duty. But it didn't take long before I came to consider the one, precious evening beer I had been drinking to be a waste of both the beer and my time.

Instead of rational, mature behavior, I showed a glimpse of my future approach to living. I saved the beer for a few days, and then drank the six cans in one sitting, going to bed teenage drunk and melancholy. I thought it was a great experience, and later in life turned the practice of drinking alone into an ugly art.

The Forest Service staff badgered me to take a couple of days off, but I never saw any reason to be someplace different, so I refused, and they didn't push. A visitor or two a week was enough human contact for me, even in those young years.

When the summer was over, I stepped from getting paid for doing nothing, with a free roof, cheap grub, and my own beer, to Nixon, the draft, the cold war and Kissinger, plus the other evil hounds of that day.

I spent two winters in the hills above Helmville, with just one other person each time. They were good winters – the best I remember.

Years later I joined the Peace Corps and they sent me to Brazil. In six years I came back to Montana for only three weeks. It was in Brazil where I realized that not being able to communicate with those around you is the true isolation.

That happens more than we realize.