A Song for the River by Philip Connors.
Cinco Puntos Press, 2018.
A sequel to Fire Season, a chronicle of life as a fire lookout in New Mexico's Gila National Forest, this book is an elegaic memoir of a wilderness consumed by fire, friends who died tragically, and a way of life imperiled by human frailty and technological change. The Gila River, too, is endangered by a proposal to divert its waters and end its status as an undammed and free flowing river. "After so much pain and loss, I found that I wanted nothing so much as to be near moving water," Philip Connors writes. "So I went once more to the river... Amid its murmured profundities I heard answers to questions I had never thought to ask."