A Song for the River

by Philip Connors

From one of the last working fire lookouts comes this sequel to the award-winning Fire Season―a story of calamity and resilience in the world's first Wilderness.

A dozen years into his dream job keeping watch over the Gila National Forest of New Mexico, Philip Connors bore witness to the blaze he had always feared: a megafire that forced him off his mountain by helicopter, and forever changed the forest and watershed he loved. It was one of many transformations that arrived in quick succession, not just fire and flood, but the death of a fellow lookout in a freak accident and a tragic plane crash that rocked the community he called home.

Beginning as an elegy for a friend he cherished like a brother, A Song for the River opens into a chorus of voices singing in celebration of a landscape redolent with meaning―and the river that runs through it, whose waters are threatened by a potential dam.

The ways of water and the ways of fire, the lines tragedy carves on a life, the persistent renewal of green shoots sprouting from ash: these are the subjects of A Song for the River. Its argument on behalf of things wild and free could not be more timely; the goal is nothing less than permanent protection for that rarest of things in the American West, a free-flowing river―the sinuous and gorgeous Gila.

Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction, Nature, Audiobook, Biography, Adventure, Ecology

246 pages, Paperback

Published August 28, 2018

About the author

Philip Connors is the author of Fire Season, which won the Banff Mountain Book Competition Grand Prize, the National Outdoor Book Award, the Sigurd F. Olson Nature Writing Award, and the Reading the West Book Award. Connors's writing has also appeared in Harper's, n+1, the Paris Review, and elsewhere. He lives in New Mexico.

Reviews

[Debbie Zapata · Rating 3 out of 5]

July 12, 1015am ~~ Review asap.

215pm ~~ This third book by Philip Connors revisits his usual themes: loss (of both people and places), the environment (in this case the issue of a possible dam on the Gila River), and intimate details of his private life. Very intimate details. The kind of thing that leaves me wondering how in the world I could ever look the man in the eye if by some weird chance I was to meet him in person.

Maybe it is just me, but didn't there used to be a polite limit on what was shared? Especially to a group of who knows how many random readers of a book? I mean, mention topics if necessary, but don't make us all cringe with the gory details. Even in this day and age there must surely be some things better left unsaid, or am I just aging faster than I thought?

Other reviewers have mentioned that this book seems patched together. That is because parts of it were published in other places before being collated into this volume. So no, it does not read like a book intended to be a book. It reads like a collection of essays stitched together to make the author's point. There is repetition here that might not have been as obvious to me if I had not read his first two books in the days before turning to this one.

The main idea here is the Gila River in New Mexico and the plan to build a dam near the headwaters. Connors shows his journalism powers while relating the details about this plan; he makes a complex issue fairly easy to understand.

But the book is also about a friend and fellow fire lookout who dies. It is also about three high school students and a pilot who all die. And it is about the forest which dies for a time after a huge fire in which Connors had to abandon his lookout tower and evacuate. And as usual the book is also about the author's self-absorption and his intense focus on all those other topics.

He can't help it, that is his major personality trait. But it does become exhausting, especially after somewhat foolishly reading three Connors titles in a row.

I would love to know what is going on in the Gila Wilderness now, four years after publication date, but I will ty to find out on my own. I don't think I could handle reading anything else by this talented but tortured soul.

[Stephen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mixed feelings on this book but I think overall its strongest passages are so strong to make it worth reading. It's a dark and grim book ultimately about death, both human and environmental, and entropy. It does not have some final passage of unbridled hope of regrowth or the like and I greatly appreciated that. For myself, at its best, this book reflected how I feel on a day to day basis as our society hurtles toward the avoidable climate apocalypse, a vaguely dismal recognition countered by the necessity of putting one foot in front of the other.

Connors' writing can be genuinely breathtaking when he leans heaviest of his skills as a journalist, and this book differs from his first by splitting the difference by using those skills on humans and nature. His observations vaccilate between spare and metaphorical as the situation demands. His nature writing remains second to none, and his human writing resonated here in a way they did not in his last book, in particular the plane crash and search for meaning afterward.

While his reflections on his own life and the death of a lookout friend are undoubtedly brave and relatively unflinching, I found parts of the book did descend into the excess obsession (especially with death) that characterized his last book. At times, his personal mission to understand why creates chapters and passages that spiral almost in circles and, to my mind, don't really illuminate anything. There are parts of the book that are brooding in a way that I didn't respond to. Connors can be dogged about trying to extract meaning where there appears to be none, just cruel randomness from a blind watchmaker.

Anyway, I do think this is a return to form and worth a read. I also found the details around the human side of the lifestyle revealed a lot around lingering questions I had after Fire Season, which I consider a masterpiece. It's easy to read that book as a celebration of dropping out and cutting loose from society. This book around its edges reveals that that lifestyle choice means making meaningful social and material sacrifices *or* being independently wealthy, as it is revealed some of the lookouts and outdoor solitude seekers are.

[༺Kiki༻ · Rating 4 out of 5]

You might also enjoy:

✱ Fire Season: Field Notes from a Wilderness Lookout
✱ The Fire Line: The Story of the Granite Mountain Hotshots and One of the Deadliest Days in American Firefighting
✱ Fire on the Mountain: The South Canyon Fire
✱ Smokejumper: A Memoir by One of America's Airborne Firefighters
✱ Smoke Jumping on the Western Fire Line
✱ The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America
✱ Under a Flaming Sky: The Great Hinckley Firestorm of 1894
✱ The Great Peshtigo Fire: An Eyewitness Account
✱ Kings of the Yukon: One Summer Paddling Across the Far North
✱ The Hour of Land: A Personal Topography of America's National Parks
✱ Where the Water Goes: Life and Death Along the Colorado River

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

Both a mourning and a celebration of life: human, forest, and river. Immediately from reading the dedications the reader knows he or she is in for a heavy dose of melancholy. We meet three young teenagers whose lives were tragically ended in a plane crash after doing a flyover of a fire area in the Gila Wilderness. We meet an eccentric lookout who died with his horse in a fall. We meet the forest primeval which is burned summer after summer in increasing amounts of acreage. We meet one of the last unspoiled, untamed rivers of America that is being targeted for a dam. This at a time when dams are being destroyed in the American West.

So I guess it’s only natural that the author starts to die a little when confronted by all this loss. His marriage collapses. His hips fail. He gets prostatitis. But he soldiers on and produces this thoughtful and soulful commentary on man and nature and mortality. No stranger to loss having lost his brother to suicide( see his second book) Connors candidly chronicles his surrender to gloom and doom and his resurrection thanks to a new companion.

Connors is a survivor, a fighter, and an eloquent advocate for the Gila River. To dam that river would be a sacrilege. We need more people to sing a song for the river.

[Cera · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have been savoring this book for the past few months. This book was a balm for my heart as it reflects on the humanness that is grief. As a hospice chaplain facing death both personally and professionally on a daily basis this book was just what I needed. Also being a southern New Mexican and having a deep love for the Gila Wilderness made this book feel like “going home” which the Gila has become to me. Philip Connors is real, raw, human, and a true light. Thankful for A Song for the River and excited to explore his other books!

[Karen Murphy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Actually I gave 4.5 stars to this book. It was powerful, poignant and beautifully written. It was made more meaningful as I live in the area that Connors described. I'm grateful that he discussed the water issues that surround us.

[Joe Huennekens · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not as tight and focused as his other books

[Rick B. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gorgeously written. A book that melts your heart while also breaking it is quite something.

[Zora · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lovely writing, but a bit meandering. A series of essays attached to the themes of death and loss, of friends, of youth, of wilderness.

[Gary · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am a sucker for a variety of kinds of books. One of them is when they are about fire lookouts. Philip Connors book Fire Season captured me. I was hoping that A Song for the River would be a return to the them. Connors does use fire lookouts as a back drop for what he wants to write up, but this is not a story particularly about lookouts. His theme is loss.

He lays that out right from the start: After illness and divorce did a number on my body and soul, after wildfires burned the mountains and an airplane fell from the sky, after a horse collapsed on my friend and two hip surgeries laid me up for the better part of a year--loss piled on loss, pain layered over pain--I found I wanted nothing so much as to be near moving water. Connors works through his losses, some with the aide of being alone in a fire lookout, some with being on or around the Gila River, some with the aide of his future wife, and others times with friends or friends of friends.

At the end, he has the Catechism for a Fire Lookout, which is a series of quotes on solitude. But he quotes Linda Hogan, saying: Some people see scars, and it is wounding they remember. To me, they are proof of the fact that there is healing. This is appropriate as the way he heals.

This is a book which is similarly written as Fire Season, but different. If you are expecting the same, you may be disappointed. Still it is well written and worth the read. If you are a fire lookout, you will probably resonant the most with the second chapter.

For more of my thoughts and notes on this book, please see my book blog.

[Robyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 stars // "A Song for the River" by Philip Connors (2018) touches upon death, life, love, fire and water. Lyrical and vulnerable. Highly recommended.

Connors works as a fire lookout in the Gila Wilderness of New Mexico. His previous Fire Season: Field Notes from a Wilderness Lookout was worthwhile. But this new book, a sequel of sorts, shows growth both as a writer and as a human.

page 30:
“…I vowed to finish the story of the fires in the mountains and the ashes in the watershed, braiding it together with stories of the river and the dead — their beauty and their grace, their passion and their purpose — and I would make an offering of the story in the hope it would touch others as they had touched me.”

page 36:
“Our brief acquaintance had revealed that her tolerance for macho bluster was the inverse of her capacity for solitude, and her capacity for solitude was as large as any I knew.”

page 94:
“For some forms of life, of course, wildfire signaled the end of the dance. For others it represented the first notes of a new song.”

page 101:
“Having more than once been called a tree hugger, I had chosen to ignore the derision implicit in the label and instead accept it as a thoughtful suggestion.”

page 151:
“Something will grow from this, even though the landscape looks bleak. Something, even now, is being triggered to flower from the ruins."

[Stephanie · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is like the gusty sigh when you finally sit down to stare at nothing. It is in the same train of writing as seeking nature to help heal ills of the world. It tends to circle back on things quite a bit. The whole thing bleeds melancholy (for darn good reason). My favorite bits were the occasional puncture of hope found in renewal/new beginnings/moving forward. TW for death, lots of suicide mentions and ... medical procedures.

[Erin Colvin · Rating 4 out of 5]

(This book is more like 4.5 stars) While I wouldn’t exactly call this a “sequel to Fire Season” this is still a great book!

I did expect Phil Collins to spend a little more time talking about the Silver Fire, as the blurb makes it seem like a central point. In the book, I feel like it was mentioned pretty briefly and then the topic shifted.

My favorite parts of the book were the times he spent with John. He seemed like such an amazing person, and his personality is very well captured in this writing.

While he doesn’t spend a lot of time on his lookout in this book, he makes up for it by beautiful chronicling the lives of three students who tragically lost their lives in a helicopter accident. The students have a very strong connection to the Gila and it’s river. I found there lives and families very interesting and of course very tragic. This book really makes you think about death a lot and how humans react to tragedy.

My main reason this book is not 5 stars is because it can be a bit repetitive at times. Because this is a collection of essays that have been brought together, he ends up making many points over and over again since readers in the newspapers may have not read his previous essays, or been familiar with his writing, which is completely understandable. But when it comes to the book, I’m not sure why he or an editor didn’t remove those points, as it seems pretty obvious to the reader. But this is also something you can look over pretty easily.

Overall, I think this is a beautiful tribute to the students, John, and the river.

[Jeff Garrison · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was in my to-be-read pile for some time. When it showed up as a freebee for Audible subscribers, I jumped on it and enjoyed the book. Conners spent thirteen years as a fire lookout in the Gila Wilderness area in Southern New Mexico. I didn’t even know that there were still fire lookouts into the 21st century! The book weaves together several tragedies: his own brother’s suicide, his divorce, the death of his friend John who was also a fire lookout, and the death of three students from Silver City who were killed in a plane crash, along with his own medical issues. Weaving into these deaths and his divorce are stories of fire in the oldest wilderness area in the United States (As a young forester, Aldo Leopold, author of A Sand County Almanac, had been instrumental in saving this land).

Conner also experiences danger as a lookout. One fire sweep through the high country. Conner is saved by a helicopter sent in to rescue him. Throughout the book, we learn of larger and larger fires, that burn hotter and at higher altitudes from global warming. In addition to the danger of fire, Conner talks about risky river trips he makes in this part of the world. Toward the end of the book, we learn that Conner remarries. While I enjoyed the book, I felt it was a bit disjointed. That said, I do plan to read his other books.

[Daniel · Rating 4 out of 5]

I feel this book wasn't meant for us. It seems mostly for Connors to understand the loss in his life and therefore is for his own or for the people directly referenced in the book. We are just there to know the facts and have a sense at the feelings. Without being connected to the victims or their families we can only imagine the distress caused in the crash that plays out in the pages.

Connors is a beautiful writer and he makes us feel the emotions, though his chop and change between various dates and events stops us from getting too involved in the facts.

I came to the book having thoroughly enjoyed Fire Season and had no idea how borderline morbid this would be. It's truly a sad piece of writing that connects with Connors and the land and his and others thoughts. But it's a good read that makes you think and experience loss and beauty in both humans and the land. I won't be in a hurry to read it again any time soon, but having read it just once I'm happy enough to take something away from it.

[Elaine Webster · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a recent transplant from Northern California to Southern New Mexico, I've been exploring my new digs. I've also discovered the innovative local publishing house, Cinco Puntos Press in El Paso, Texas where unique and talented voices have a home. Beyond these personal discoveries, I have found author Philip Connors who has crafted a deep and meaningful account of what it means to spend time in the Gila Wilderness, as a fire lookout, resident, and community member. This book is more than an adventure guide--it addresses the pain and loss of a community that mourns the death of family and friends whose spiritual and actual remains are scattered in the mountains and streams. We learn what it's like to raft the Gila--one of the last truly wild rivers of the American West. There is so much love, loss, appreciation and raw courage in this book. Loved it!

[Kasey Lawson · Rating 2 out of 5]

“To watch a mountain you love murmur and chirp and howl and green up from rain and bloom with flowers, then see it succumb to flame and be blackened by heat only to live once more from the ashes, was to absorb an object lesson in transience and renewal. From my perch above the shaggy pines and stately firs, I looked down on a world burning itself up, most of us burning ourselves up in work and striving and the peculiar game of consumption and accumulation without end—the whole world on fire from our appetites and their cost—and I sometimes thought it would not be a terrible fate to lie down for the last time in ashes, preferably on a mountain.”

[Mary Beth · Rating 4 out of 5]

As always, Connors' work was raw and vulnerable in a down-to-earth style with enough whimsy to keep you going. This book will undoubtedly give you the feels with an even mixture of poetic prose and serious contemplation of loss (both of a friend and of the stability of the places that we love). At times, the focus felt a bit too gloomy - as if the writer seeks out grief; however, it's absolutely worth the read. The silver lining is seeing writers, such as Connors, speak up about environmental issues that effect us all, and it is especially refreshing to witness the passion of one who has persistently come to love a place.

[Kelly · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book meanders much like a stream in much the irregular paths a natural stream will take. I enjoyed the descriptions of places unfamiliar to me, the people who watch it and live there, and their connection. I admired the ability to clearly and earnestly write on connections to people and place; reflections on the events that shape ones life; feelings of grief, calm, pain, and admiration; and calming and regenerating effects of nature. Unfortunately, more often the book was frustrating with a strange transition or lack of transition between storylines, unfounded statements or lines of thought, and being unfocused.

[Maineguide · Rating 4 out of 5]

Philip Connor is a beautiful writer—eloquent, heartfelt, and honest. He writes of the tasks and landscapes of being a fire tower lookout as well as those who came before him, like Gary Snyder, Jack Kerouac, and Edward Abbey. My only complaint with the book is that it bounced around somewhat. Half the book was really a eulogy to friends lost to him through tragic circumstances and the other half was essays on everything from forest fires to his personal prostrate issues. Still, the book does “hang together” and their are moments of brilliance. That said, if I were reading him for the first time, I would read his “Fire Seasons.”

[J.J. Amaworo · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the aftermath of tragedy, Connors has written a beautiful meditation on life and death, and a paean to the natural world that sustains us. In prose as tight and clean as a drumbeat he mourns and celebrates friends loved and now gone. This is a tremendous follow-up to his seminal first book, Fire Season.

[Brenda · Rating 4 out of 5]

June 2020 --After 5 years, $16 million dollars, and missing a key deadline, the Gila River Diversion proposal is now effectively dead. The Interstate Stream Commission voted 7-2 Thursday against supplying funding needed to complete an environmental impact statement required for the project.

May All included in Connors' book, dance, sing, play and love in the waters of the Gila!

[Steven Sandberg · Rating 2 out of 5]

In the acknowledgements, Connors lists the various publications that parts of the book appeared in in essay form, and it finally made sense why the book felt so disjointed and meandering. While Connors has beautiful prose, this book doesn't have the focus of Fire Season, and the result feels like a book he wrote for himself instead of for the reader.

[Linda Spear · Rating 2 out of 5]

If this title had not been chosen for Book Group, I'd probably never have given it a second look. I found it rambling, disjointed, and difficult to follow. After reading so many glowing reviews, I decided that I am just not the person for this book or vice versa. It happens. I shall move on.

Oh, but not before I hear what my fellow Book Groupers thought. Tomorrow won't come soon enough!

[Jace Stansbury · Rating 4 out of 5]

The follow up to Connors book "Fire Season".

[Trecia Ehrlich · Rating 3 out of 5]

Absolutely beautiful prose. Fantastic writer, really enjoyed. VERY heavy on the melancholy. Sometimes a bit slow. Worth a read.

[Art Giff · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wonderful prose. Articulates the emotional, spiritual impact of loss and gain of friends, lovers and forest. A very satisfying read.

[Robin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Just beautiful. Inspiring, tragic.

[Ben · Rating 4 out of 5]

Masterful and moving. A powerful follow up to Fire Season.

[Dlmrose · Rating 3 out of 5]

3+