The Fire Tower Russ Hanson
The
goldenrod is yellow;
The corn is
turning brown;
The trees in apple orchards;
The trees in apple orchards;
With fruit are bending down.
The gentian's bluest fringes;
The gentian's bluest fringes;
Are curling in the sun;
In dusty pods the milkweed;
In dusty pods the milkweed;
It's hidden silk has spun.
--From “September” by
Helen Hunt Jackson .
Every autumn in my memory Dad recited the old poem he learned in grade school 80 years ago. This same poem made Grandma Nettie sad. “The golden rod turning yellow reminded me I
soon would be back teaching school” she told us grandchildren recalling her
school teaching days of the early 1900s.
It was the end of September 1970. I was working for the DNR Fire Control out of
Grantsburg, towering at Sterling
from March to October. It had been a
quiet summer in the fire tower; a dry year but no smokes except the local
dumps.
Fire tower jobs use your eyesight more
than anything else. I sat 100 feet above
Fox Ridge just a few miles from the St Croix
in West Sterling and scanned from the river to
the hardwoods to the east for smoke.
Since no one in their right mind can sit all day and just look around at
the same scenery no matter how beautiful, I asked Uncle Maurice what he did
when he was in the tower in the 40s and 50s.
“Whittling” he said showing me some
intricately carved picture frames and a chain with a ball in a box at the
end. “I patched clothes, fixed things
and even tried to write a poem or two” he added. “You just have to be very sure
that you keep looking around carefully”
Whittling and poetry writing didn’t work
for me. So I brought a book to read—against
the rules. After each page I looked
around carefully. That kept me alert and
as I read fast, kept me looking around most of the time. I often stopped at the Sterling
town hall and picked up 1800s record books to study. I also watched the hawks or eagles swirl
around the tower; studied the badger who lived below; used binoculars to follow deer
crossing Maidment meadows to the north and watched the forest from the top
down.
The first week I climbed the ladder on
the side nervously hanging on tightly to each step and gingerly transferring to
the platform and final steps into the tower.
It soon became routine. The rare
visitors to my perch were too nervous to do more than say hi and go back down.
When a storm rolled in, always from the
west, we were required to stay in the tower until it rained hard enough to
drown any lightning set fires in Sterling
or Grantsburg. Watching the storm
approach with the lightning strikes coming nearer and the wind rocking the
tower was exciting. I wondered if
lightning struck the tower while I was climbing down I would let go and drop to
the ground.
My reports of smokes would be “black smoke
at 270 degrees estimated 7 miles away—probably the Wolf Creek Dump.” Each tower had a circular stand in the center
with the top having the 360 degrees of a circle marked on it – 0 degrees being
north. On a pin in the center was a
rotating alidade – like an open gun site.
When you saw a smoke you aimed at it and read the degrees from
north. The tower in Grantsburg would
then sight the smoke and with the two sightings the fire location could be
pinpointed on a map at the Ranger station crossing strings.
The tower was the third one to stand in Sterling . Forest fire
prevention got organized in the late 1920s in our area. In 1932 a tower was
built just north and west of the Sterling Townhall—look for the hill when you
are on Evergreen Av before dropping down to cross the River Road . This was replaced by one 85 feet tall at the
current location in the late 1930s and in 1954 the 100 foot tower was built.
The room at the top must have been about
5x5 feet with a 7 foot ceiling—a nice tiny room 100 feet up. The top half of the 4 walls were windows that
opened down to give you full air flow. It had a tiny wood stove and chimney for
early spring or late fall. It never
seemed hot that high up with the windows open.
There was a stool and a telephone to talk to the ranger station at
Grantsburg, but no electricity. We had
a tin can urinal to use and modestly dump out the window or could use the
outhouse at the tower base. Many times I
was tempted beyond resistance to do fluid physics experiments with variable
pressure water streams 100 feet in the air.
Sometimes I drove my Honda 55 with the
scrambler sprocket on it out to the tower from home. It went about 20 miles per hour and had a
tendency to overheat and melt a hole in the piston or otherwise break down, but
was small, narrow and good for driving though the woods on explorations. At that time there were only a handful of
people living west of the River
Road . I
asked Dad or Uncle Maurice or Lloyd about old places on the Barrens and then
tried to find something left of the farm or home. They had wintered on the St
Croix trapping and hunting during the 1930s and knew it well. The towering usually started at 10 am or noon when the dew had burned off, so mornings
when we were caught up with haying at home were a chance to explore the old
homesteads.
One September morning cycling down an old
road near the tower I saw a beautiful morning glory blue colored flower. There was only one bloom close to the
ground. It was small with a fringe
around the bloom. I picked the only
flower and put it in my pocket and on my way back home stopped at Uncle Maurice
and Aunt Myrtle’s to ask them what kind of flower it was.
Maurice and Myrtle were experts on local
nature—to the degree that some of the rest of the family thought they were a
little overboard in their enthusiasm for birds and flowers and prairie
grasses. They knew plants, flowers,
trees, birds and wildlife better than anyone I knew. They had lived on the edge of the Barrens for
decades and both had worked for the DNR during the 40s and after and in many
different roles including towering. Some
summers in the 40s they lived right at Sterling Tower
Uncle Maurice said it was a Fringed
Gentian. He told me it was rare on the
Barrens and made me proud when he said it was quite a find and most people had
never seen one all of their lives! He
then gently said “When Myrtle and I find a rare flower like this one we like to
leave it so someone else might see it and so it will go to seed and create more
flowers next year.” At that moment I
understood them a lot better and took their advice to heart. I have used my camera to pick rare flowers
ever since.
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| Uncle Maurice and Aunt Myrtle both worked in fire towers in the 1940s--Myrtle at Grantsburg and Maurice in Sterling. Maurice worked for the DNR many years. |
A recent tower person recorded a video at the tower. It is heavy on his toys and the equipment, but you would like to kick him in the rear and say point your camera out the window and look around!!
