Fire Season by Philip Connors Page A

desert, road walking, and a land of dangerously scarce water. By heading straight north from Columbus, New Mexico, site of Pancho Villa’s 1916 raid across the border, the thru-hikers save perhaps forty miles—two days of walking—and can reach the true divide within a day of seeing me. There’s no such thing as a day off in their lexicon, only what they call a “zero day.” For these people walking is joy, not work, yet daily mileage remains an axiom of progress. Their resupply points have all been planned in advance. Falling off the pace can mean going hungry. Sometimes friends or family back home will mail them boxes of good trail food, which await at rural post offices spaced between seven and ten days of walking apart. Others take side trips or hitch rides into little towns near the divide, restocking on gas-station food: Doritos, beef jerky.
    I find these folks unfailingly gracious and cheerful, with their lightweight equipment, their hard legs and big smiles. They’re a self-selected bunch, at ease in the out-of-doors, but for people who’ve been walking close to a marathon every day they appear almost goofily invigorated. Within moments of their arrival they shed their packs and ask to climb the tower. They’re a week into their five-month journey and want to see where they’ve been and where they’re headed. I’m always happy to show them what I can: a couple-hundred-mile stretch of their walk, from the Mexican border to the country up beyond the Middle Fork of the Gila River. It’s a land of stark vistas and rough country they’ve traversed—dry, wind-scoured, humming with ancient mystery, dotted with hidden petroglyphs.
    With most CDT hikers I find a sort of mutual envy. I admire their courage and stamina and sheer gumption, their tolerance for every sort of backwoods discomfort. They admire my solitude, my view, the countercultural weirdness of my job. Each of us has a taste for wild country. I sit above it, letting it come to me in color and shadow and light. They pass through it on calloused feet, stopping to make camp each night in a strange new slice of the world. Their challenges are profoundly physical: rattlesnakes, biting flies, blisters, screaming Achilles tendons, thunderstorms, extremes of heat and cold, all the pleasures and pitfalls of life outdoors on the move. Mine are existential: time, space, the sweep of geologic epochs written on the view out my windows, which remind me I’m but a mote in the grand saga of Earth’s history.
    When they leave, I often wish I could go a little ways with them.
    The CDT is one of the three long north–south walks in America—the others being the Appalachian Trail and the Pacific Crest Trail—and by far the most difficult. For those who undertake these cross-country treks, nicknames are virtually obligatory. The first to greet me this year are a pair who go by the names Reno and Slouch. Reno is a slim woman, dark-eyed and olive-skinned; Slouch is a tall, pale, sunburned Brit with a growth of bright red beard. They are amiable visitors, grateful for fresh water, happy to step inside the cabin and drink a cup of coffee from my French press. I offer a snack of crackers and grapes. Reno reciprocates with some hand-rolled cigarettes. Slouch says he’s from Southampton, in the south of England, and because he has a bookish look I offer him a recent copy of the London Review of Books , for which he seems both shyly grateful and a little bit stunned. “If you had told me, before I began this queer odyssey, that I’d meet someone in the middle of the woods of New Mexico with a subscription to the LRB , I’d have told you you were stark raving mad,” he says.
    Having seen no one in days, they are eager to tell me the story of how they were shadowed by a Border Patrol agent on the very first day of their walk. He came crawling out of the brush in the desert behind them, just as two guys in a Border Patrol vehicle pulled up ahead, all of them armed with