The Fifth Ranger on a Four-Person Crew

Fire season on the lookout is four people and a lot of sky. You get close; you count each other instinctively, the way you check your fingers after handling a saw. Four. I could draw you all four faces.

The counting problem started in week two and it started small: I'd set the table for five without deciding to, then laugh and put the plate back. Marisol did it too. Then Deng did it. We made a running joke of the 'fifth ranger' — blamed him for the missing biscuits, for the gate left open, for the radio being on the wrong channel.

Jokes are how you carry things you can't hold. Because it wasn't only the plates. Group photos — we took a lot, boredom and phone cameras — kept coming out with a counting wrongness: a shadow at the edge of frame with the density of a person, a smudge that your eye insisted on resolving into a figure just past whoever stood on the end. Never a face. Always the impression that the photo contained one more than had posed for it. At dusk, doing the verbal head-count before locking the tower — a real safety procedure — one of us would reach 'five' and stop, and we'd all go quiet, and then someone would say 'four, idiot' too fast.

The worst was benign, which is why it stayed with me. Nobody was ever afraid. The fifth ranger felt like a colleague. On the night of a genuine emergency — a spot fire in the north sector, all of us awake and working the radios and the maps — I distinctly heard a fifth voice on our little crew net confirm a coordinate. Calm. Helpful. Correct. Marisol heard it too; we established that later, carefully, without leading each other. The coordinate was right. It helped.

At season's end we came down the mountain and the counting stopped like a switch. Four in the truck. Four faces. I have the group photos still. In three of them there is a figure I cannot account for, at the edge, watching the four of us not quite notice him.

The lookout has been staffed for sixty years. We asked, later, whether anyone had died up there. A keeper, decades back, alone, in a season when they only sent one. They send teams now. But apparently they never stopped sending him.