Up In Smoke

When serendipity came knocking, Philip Connors answered the door. Disenchanted with new editorial duties assigned to him at The Wall Street Journal, Connors made a surprising and and abrupt decision to become a fire lookout in the Aldo Leopold Wilderness of New Mexico for the United States Forest Service, thinking that the job would be the perfect setting from which to write. For The Baffler, Connors recounts ditching his cubicle to get paid “to look out the window all day.”

I couldn’t believe my good fortune. I had been working on a book about my life in the shadow of my brother’s suicide, writing for an hour or so every morning before I boarded the subway for the long commute from Queens to Lower Manhattan, and at the pace I was going—I am a very slow writer—I would require a decade or more to finish the book. I could sense that I needed all the mental elbow room I could gather around myself to go deep on the saddest story I would ever tell. And here was a job that felt like a paid writing retreat with good views and ample solitude, the kind of situation a writer dreams of. If I couldn’t make it as a writer with this sort of setup, I couldn’t make it as a writer. As side hustles went, being a fire lookout seemed to be about as good as it got.